best, forgetting utterly any mean individual comparisons and all
anti-social self-consciousness, in what he has enthusiastically accepted
as the greater common good.

He goes to bat at a critical juncture in the game. The score is close.
He as much as anyone would like to have runs to his credit. But for the
sake of the team his chief concern must be to advance the base runner.
So he plays carefully rather than spectacularly, and makes a bunt or a
sacrifice hit, with the practical certainty that he will be put out at
first base, but with a good probability that he will thus have advanced
his fellow one base and so have contributed to the team's success.

The religious value of the principle here involved receives no little
attention in sermon and Sunday-school class, but how tame and formal is
its verbal presentation as compared with its registration in the very
will and muscles of a boy at play! Wherever a state has become great or
a cause victorious, wherever a hero--a Socrates or a Christ--has
appeared among men, there has been the willingness, when necessary, to
make the "sacrifice hit." The loyalty that has held itself ready so to
serve on moral demand has to its credit all the higher attainments of
humanity.

In the great American experiment of democracy, where the welfare of the
people is so often bartered for gold, and where public office is
frequently prostituted to private gain, there is a proportionately great
need of teaching in every possible way this fundamental virtue of
loyalty. Our future will be secure only in the degree in which
intelligent and strong men are devoted to the welfare of city and state
after the fashion of the boy to his team. It is because war, with all
its horrors, has stimulated and exhibited this virtue that its glory