e community
should form itself into a mob and take revenge. This does harm,
not good. The time will come when the world will no more think of
sending men to the penitentiary for stealing, as a punishment, that
it will for sending a man to the penitentiary because he has
consumption. When that time comes, the object will be to reform
men; to prevent crime instead of punishing it, and the object then
will be to make the conditions such that honest people will be the
result, but as long as hundreds of thousands of human beings live
in tenements, as long as babes are raised in gutters, as long as
competition is so sharp that hundreds of thousands must of necessity
be failures, just so long as society gets down on its knees before
the great and successful thieves, before the millionaire thieves,
just so long will it have to fill the jails and prisons with the
little thieves. When the "good time" comes, men will not be judged
by the money they have accumulated, but by the uses they make of
it. So men will be judged, not according to their intelligence,
but by what they are endeavoring to accomplish with their intelligence.
In other words, the time will come when character will rise above
all. There is a great line in Shakespeare that I have often quoted,
and that cannot be quoted too often: "There is no darkness but
ignorance." Let the world set itself to work to dissipate this
darkness; let us flood the world with intellectual light. This
cannot be accomplished by mobs or lynchers. It must be done by
the noblest, by the greatest, and by the best.

[The conversation shifting around to the Sunday question; the
opening of the World's Fair on Sunday, the attacks of the pulpit
upon the Sunday newspapers, the opening of parks and museums and
libraries on Sunday, Colonel Ingersoll waxed eloquent, and in answer
to many questions uttered these paragraphs: ]

Of course, people will think that I have some prejudice against
the parsons, but really I think the newspaper press is of far more
importance in the world than the pulpit. If I should admit in a
kind of burst of generosity, and simply for the sake of making a
point, that the pulpit can do some good, how much can it do without
the aid of the press? Here is a parson preaching to a few ladies
and enough men, it may be, to pass the contribution box, and all
he says dies within the four walls of that church. How many
ministers would it take to reform the world, provid