amelioration or regeneration. Vast populations grew
frenzied over such phrases as "an honest dollar" and "a full
dinner pail." The coinage of such phrases was considered
strokes of genius.

Ernest went on to his rise in society, till at last he came in touch
with members of the upper classes, and rubbed shoulders with the men
who sat in the high places. Then came his disillusionment, and this
disillusionment he described in terms that did not flatter his audience.
He was surprised at the commonness of the clay. Life proved not to be
fine and gracious. He was appalled by the selfishness he encountered,
and what had surprised him even more than that was the absence of
intellectual life. Fresh from his revolutionists, he was shocked by the
intellectual stupidity of the master class. And then, in spite of their
magnificent churches and well-paid preachers, he had found the masters,
men and women, grossly material. It was true that they prattled sweet
little ideals and dear little moralities, but in spite of their prattle
the dominant key of the life they lived was materialistic. And they were
without real morality--for instance, that which Christ had preached but
which was no longer preached.

"I met men," he said, "who invoked the name of the Prince of Peace
in their diatribes against war, and who put rifles in the hands of
Pinkertons* with which to shoot down strikers in their own factories. I
met men incoherent with indignation at the brutality of prize-fighting,
and who, at the same time, were parties to the adulteration of food that
killed each year more babes than even red-handed Herod had killed.

* Originally, they were private detectives; but they quickly
became hired fighting men of the capitalists, and ultimately
developed into the Mercenaries of the Oligarchy.

"This delicate, aristocratic-featured gentleman was a dummy director
and a tool of corporations that secretly robbed widows and orphans. This
gentleman, who collected fine editions and was a patron of literature,
paid blackmail to a heavy-jowled, black-browed boss of a municipal
machine. This editor, who published patent medicine advertisements,
called me a scoundrelly demagogue because I dared him to print in his
paper the truth about patent medicines.* 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 o