turn into straight
paths feet used to crooked ones. And when a business man, born to all
good things and owning a name known as the synonyme of the best the
Republic offers to-day, states calmly, "There is no such thing as
business without lying," what room remains for honor or justice or
humanity among men whose theory is the same, and who can gild it with no
advantage of birth or training? It is a wonderful century, and we are
civilizing with a speed that takes away the breath and dims the vision,
but there are dark corners still, and in the shadow Greed and Corruption
and Shame hold high carnival, with nameless shapes, before which even
civilization cowers. Their trace is found at every turn, but we deal
with only one to-day, helpless, even when face to face, to say what
method will most surely mean destruction.

We settle so easily into the certainty that nothing can be as bad as it
seems, that moments of despair come to all who would rouse men to
action. Not one generation nor many can answer the call sounding forever
in the ears of every son of man; but he who has heeded has at least made
heeding more possible for those that follow; and the time comes at last
when the way must be plain for all. To make it plainer many a popular
conviction must be laid aside, and among them the one that follows.

It is a deeply rooted belief that the poor understand and feel for the
poor beyond any possibility in those who have never known cold and
hunger and rags save as uncomfortable terms used too freely by
injudicious agitators. Like many another popular belief the groundwork
is in the believer's own mind, and has its most tangible existence in
story-books. There are isolated cases always of self-sacrifice and
compassion and all gentle virtues, but long experience goes to show that
if too great comfort is deadening, too little is brutalizing, and that
pity dies in the soul of man or woman to whom no pity has been shown. It
is easy to see, then, how the woman who has found injustice and
oppression the law of life, deals in the same fashion when her own time
comes, and tyrannizes with the comfortable conviction that she is by
this means getting even with the world. She knows every sore spot, and
how best to make the galled jade wince, and lightens her own task by the
methods practised in the past upon herself. This is one species to be
dealt with, and a far less dangerous one than the craftier and less
outspokenly brutal order,