Ethical Addresses - Series Four (Still) - 1898

W. Sanford Evans

Series Four of Ethical Addresses, published in 1898, starts out with a problem.  That is, my source for these volumes, the Internet Archive, has all 21 volumes of the series, "Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from Microsoft Corporation."  This particular volume skips directly from the table of contents to page 2 of the text, omitting the first page of William M. Salter's platform:  "The Cause of Ethics."  A better scan of the volume is needed.  (No doubt this statement will be repeated at we progress through the Bibliography.)

Several new authors appear in the Fourth Series:  S. Burns Weston, W. Sanford Evans, F. W. Foerster,  and Morris Jastrow, Jr.  I have already written a bit about the "adventures" of tracking down information about Foerster and the bibliographic rabbit trails that I followed in learning more about him.  The adventures continue.

• S. Burns Weston (1855 - 1936) appears in the Bibliography as the publisher of Ethical Addresses through the eleventh volume.  Weston helped found the Philadelphia Ethical Society in 1885 and served there as clergy leader.  He edited the International Journal of Ethics from its founding in 1890 until 1914.  An editorial in Ethics, the successor to IJE, sets the founding date in 1888 and actually identifies Ethical Addresses as the source of the later versions of the journal. [Singer, M. G. “Editorial: The History of Ethics.” Ethics 98, no. 3 (1988): 441–44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2380959.]  Ethics is, according to Singer, "the oldest continuously published philosophical journal in the English language"--and it all started with Adler, Weston, and the "Ethical Union."
• W. Sanford Evans (1869 - 1949) was later known as a conservative politician in Canada.  According to Bradley J. Milne, Sandford's "early years were marked by success as a philanthropist, journalist, platform performer and lecturer for the Society of Ethical Culture in New York." (U Manitoba MA History Thesis, 1997).  His youthful platform on "Moral and Spiritual Education of Children" was a theme that he repeated in his later political career, i.e., that public schools should also teach ethics.
• Morris Jastrow, Jr. (1861 - 1921) was a noted scholar of "Oriental religions."  An assistant lecturer at Rodef Sholem Synagogue (Philadelphia), he resigned both from his position there and from Judaism in December 1886.  When he spoke at the Philadelphia Ethical Society in April, 1897, he was a librarian at the University of Pennsylvania and soon to become known as the author of numerous works on ancient and modern religions of the Middle East and other subjects.

In order to account for the historical perspective now gained from seeking more information about these contributors to Ethical Addresses, I have begun adding the appropriate source references to the Bibliography.  While my main focus (for now) remains on completing the catalog of the twenty one volumes of Ethical Addresses, I can already see a wealth of new (to me) resources coming to the fore.