Page:About people (IA aboutpeople00well).pdf/169

or the Irish picnic, — then will men feel that they are challenged to a loftier standard of action as requisition for friendship or marriage. We talk a great deal about the power of society, but are loath to exercise it. Society does already forbid innuendo of speech and open violation of conduct; but it does not forbid Platonic intimacies, and marriages in which there is little love and upon which lie the weight of prior claims.

Much is now said about the importance of teaching morality in the public schools. Advisable as such instruction may there be, and though indirectly it may largely conduce to rectitude, it cannot include every phase of morals. The education that is given through the pulpit and the press must also be indirect; but in the home, where the listeners and the pupils are one's own, the education should begin, and be so perfect that it needs never to be supplemented. It is in the home that it is so very largely neglected, — in homes, too, where all the