s one way of looking at it," said I.

"It's horse sense," said he.

And I have no doubt that to the average citizen, leading a small, quiet
life and dealing with affairs in corner-grocery retail, the stupendous
facts of accumulations of wealth and wholesale, far-and-wide purchases
of the politicians, the vast system of bribery, with bribes adapted to
every taste and conscience, seem impossibilities, romancings of
partizanship and envy and sensationalism. Nor can he understand the way
superior men play the great games, the heartlessness of ambition, the
cynicism of political and commercial prostitution, the sense of
superiority to the legal and moral codes which comes to most men with
success.

Your average citizen is a hero-worshiper too. He knows his own and his
neighbor's weaknesses, but he gapes up at the great with glamoured eyes,
and listens to their smooth plausibilities as to the reading of the
Gospel from the pulpit. He belongs to the large mass of those who
believe, not to the small class of those who question. But for the
rivalries and jealousies of superior men which have kept them always
divided into two parties, the ins and the outs, I imagine the masses
would have remained for ever sunk in the most hopeless, if the most
delightful, slavery--that in which the slave accepts his lowliness as a
divine ordinance and looks up to his oppressors and plunderers as
hero-leaders. And no doubt, so long as the exuberant riches of our
country enable the triumphant class to "take care of" all the hungry who
have intellect enough to make themselves dangerous, we shall have no
change--except occasional spasms whenever a large number of unplaced
intelligent hungry are forcing the full and fat to make room for them.
How long will this be?

If our education did not merely feed prejudices instead of removing
them, I should say not long. As it is, I expect to "leave the world as
wicked and as foolish as I found it." At any rate, until the millenium,
I shall continue to play the game under the rules of human
nature--instead of under the rules of human ideals, as does my esteemed
friend Scarborough. And I claim that we practical men are as true and
useful servants of our country and of our fellow men as he. If men like
him are the light, men like us are the lantern that shields it from the
alternating winds of rapacity and resentment.

But, in running on about myself, I have got away from my point, which
was how slight and