bullfight
having for its main amusement the spectacle of horses gored and
disembowelled by the bull, after which, when the bull is so exhausted
as to be no longer dangerous, he is killed by a cautious matador. But
the ironic contrast between the bullfight and the sacrament of marriage
does not move anyone. Another contrast--that between the splendor, the
happiness, the atmosphere of kindly admiration surrounding the young
couple, and the price paid for it under our abominable social
arrangements in the misery, squalor and degradation of millions of
other young couples--is drawn at the same moment by a novelist, Mr
Upton Sinclair, who chips a corner of the veneering from the huge meat
packing industries of Chicago, and shows it to us as a sample of what
is going on all over the world underneath the top layer of prosperous
plutocracy. One man is sufficiently moved by that contrast to pay his
own life as the price of one terrible blow at the responsible parties.
Unhappily his poverty leaves him also ignorant enough to be duped by
the pretence that the innocent young bride and bridegroom, put forth
and crowned by plutocracy as the heads of a State in which they have
less personal power than any policeman, and less influence than any
chairman of a trust, are responsible. At them accordingly he launches
his sixpennorth of fulminate, missing his mark, but scattering the
bowels of as many horses as any bull in the arena, and slaying
twenty-three persons, besides wounding ninety-nine. And of all these,
the horses alone are innocent of the guilt he is avenging: had he blown
all Madrid to atoms with every adult person in it, not one could have
escaped the charge of being an accessory, before, at, and after the
fact, to poverty and prostitution, to such wholesale massacre of
infants as Herod never dreamt of, to plague, pestilence and famine,
battle, murder and lingering death--perhaps not one who had not helped,
through example, precept, connivance, and even clamor, to teach the
dynamiter his well-learnt gospel of hatred and vengeance, by approving
every day of sentences of years of imprisonment so infernal in its
unnatural stupidity and panic-stricken cruelty, that their advocates
can disavow neither the dagger nor the bomb without stripping the mask
of justice and humanity from themselves also. Be it noted that at this
very moment there appears the biography of one of our dukes, who, being
Scotch, could argue about politics, and