was
antiquated and that his biology was contemporaneous with Pliny.

This senator was the tool and the slave, the little puppet of a gross,
uneducated machine boss; so was this governor and this supreme court
judge; and all three rode on railroad passes. This man, talking soberly
and earnestly about the beauties of idealism and the goodness of God, had
just betrayed his comrades in a business deal. This man, a pillar of the
church and heavy contributor to foreign missions, worked his shop girls
ten hours a day on a starvation wage and thereby directly encouraged
prostitution. This man, who endowed chairs in universities, perjured
himself in courts of law over a matter of dollars and cents. And this
railroad magnate broke his word as a gentleman and a Christian when he
granted a secret rebate to one of two captains of industry locked
together in a struggle to the death.

It was the same everywhere, crime and betrayal, betrayal and crime--men
who were alive, but who were neither clean nor noble, men who were clean
and noble, but who were not alive. Then there was a great, hopeless
mass, neither noble nor alive, but merely clean. It did not sin
positively nor deliberately; but it did sin passively and ignorantly by
acquiescing in the current immorality and profiting by it. Had it been
noble and alive it would not have been ignorant, and it would have
refused to share in the profits of betrayal and crime.

I discovered that I did not like to live on the parlour floor of society.
Intellectually I was as bored. Morally and spiritually I was sickened.
I remembered my intellectuals and idealists, my unfrocked preachers,
broken professors, and clean-minded, class-conscious working-men. I
remembered my days and nights of sunshine and starshine, where life was
all a wild sweet wonder, a spiritual paradise of unselfish adventure and
ethical romance. And I saw before me, ever blazing and burning, the Holy
Grail.

So I went back to the working-class, in which I had been born and where I
belonged. I care no longer to climb. The imposing edifice of society
above my head holds no delights for me. It is the foundation of the
edifice that interests me. There I am content to labour, crowbar in
hand, shoulder to shoulder with intellectuals, idealists, and
class-conscious working-men, getting a solid pry now and again and
setting the whole edifice rocking. Some day, when we get a few more
hands and crowbars to work, we'll