f 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 and erected
magnificent chapels, perjured himself in courts of law over dollars
and cents. This railroad magnate broke his word as a citizen, as a
gentleman, and as a Christian, when he granted a secret rebate, and he
granted many secret rebates. This senator was the tool and the slave,
the little puppet, of a brutal uneducated machine boss;** so was this
governor and this supreme court judge; and all three rode on railroad
passes; and, also, this sleek capitalist owned the machine, the machine
boss, and the railroads that issued the passes.

* PATENT MEDICINES were patent lies, but, like the charms
and indulgences of the Middle Ages, they deceived the
people. The only difference lay in that the patent
medicines were more harmful and more costly.

** Even as late as 1912, A.D., the great mass of the people
still persisted in the belief that they ruled the country by
virtue of their ballots. In reality, the country was ruled
by what were called POLITICAL MACHINES. At first the
machine bosses charged the master capitalists extortionate
tolls for legislation; but in a short time the master
capitalists found it cheaper to own the political machines
themselves and to hire the machine bosses.

"And so it was, instead of in paradise, that I found myself in the
arid desert of commercialism. I found nothing but stupidity, except for
business. I found none clean, noble, and alive, though I found many who
were alive--with rottenness. What I did find was monstrous selfishness
and heartlessness, and a gross, gluttonous, practised, and practical
materialism."

Much more Ernest told them of themselves and of his disillusionment.
Intellectually they had bored him; morally and spiritually they had
sickened him; so that he was glad to go back to his revolutionists, who
were clean, noble, and alive, and all that the capitalists were not.

"And now," he said, "let me tell you about that revolution."

But first I must say that his terrible diatribe had not touched them. I
looked about me at their faces and saw that they remained complacently
superior to what he had charged. And I remembered what he had told me:
that no indictment of their morality could shake them. Howe