For more than a century the guide-post had stood at the parting of the ways, pointing its slow, unmoving finger toward iron works that had ceased to exist. A hundred years is a long time, and the boards must have been renewed many times, but always with the same misinformation.

Now that a radical change has been made and the "I. W." has been dropped, the same conservative tendency is seen on the other arm of the guide-post, that points northward. I read the familiar information "Piper House 5 miles." Now of my own knowledge I can testify that the Piper House changed hands a dozen years ago and the new proprietor gave it a new name. The traveler going five miles will see no sign of the Piper House. That name is one with Nineveh and Tyre. But doubtless it will remain on the guide-post for the next quarter of a century.

In Harvard Square in Cambridge there is an old milestone that declares that it is "8 miles to Boston." No one has disturbed it, though any one who walks to Boston Common would not need to travel half the distance that is alleged. When the stone was placed in position a century and a half ago, the traveler had to go around

through Roxbury. That more direct access has long since been given to the city makes no difference to the milestone.

The conservatism of guide-boards may be confusing to strangers and irritating to persons of a logical mind, but after all it is consistent with a great deal of real progressiveness. We must distinguish between four elements the road, the guide-board, the people who customarily use the road, and the people who pay any serious attention to the guide-board.

So far as the road is concerned, it has made very little difference what the guide-board has said. It has gone on its stubborn way up hill and down as becomes a New Hampshire highway. And the people who have customarily used it for the last century have never been misled by the guide-post, for they have paid little attention to it. They knew where they were going and that was sufficient. It was only the occasional stranger who was ever confused, for he was the only one who ever paid serious attention to the words of direction.

I think that this accounts for those anomalies which are found in all long-established institutions. They remain because the people who be

long to the institution are not seriously inconvenienced by them. An organization starts out to do one thing and gradually comes to do another. It changes its purpose, but not its statement of purpose. Everybody who belongs to it knows what it is doing and judges it accordingly. It is like a railroad system which has expanded till what was once the main line is only a branch.

No church which was considering only those who were brought up within its own fold would think it necessary to revise its formularies. It would be much easier to reinterpret them. By retaining the old words and giving them new meanings, progress goes on without a jolt. There may be many articles which are treated like silent letters in a familiar word. We do not sound them, but there would be something queer in the look of the page if they were not there.

The call for revision comes when the appeal is made to strangers, who have no associations with the words and therefore take them literally. What, they ask, does this institution really stand for to-day? In the attempt to answer the aims, purposes, and beliefs have to be restated in the language of to-day.

No political party would revise its platform if

it were not thinking of the new voters and how to win them. It would much prefer to reaffirm loyalty to the platform of four years ago, and to point proudly to the fact that not a syllable had been changed.

Whenever an institution is seriously engaged in revising its familiar formulas in the interest of greater clearness, we may be sure that it is alive. It is desirous of making converts and to that end it must make itself understood.

THE LABORATORY METHOD

IN MORALS

SOCRATES has so long been received in good society that it is hard to do justice to the Athenians of his day who looked upon him as a dangerous character. We forget the verdict against him that he was a corrupter of youth. Had he confined his conversation to his coevals, and sat down with elderly gentlemen to discuss the nature of virtue, no objection could have been made because no harm could be done to their well-seasoned intelligences.

But Socrates sought out young men and put questions to them. And then he didn't furnish them with any ready-made answers, but incited them to ask more questions. Moreover, they were questions of the most practical kind which had to do with conduct. Soon everything was unsettled. Young Athens, instead of listening gravely to its elders, was asking, Why? The guardians of order were alarmed. Surely there were some things that ought to be taken for granted at least by the young. Socrates