ll take food
from the mouths of your dear babes--if you are afraid you cannot clothe
your wife and children, go along with them to church, say amen in as
near the right place as you can, if you happen to be awake, and I will
do your talking for you.

I will say my say, and the time will come when every man in the country
will be astonished that there ever was a time that everybody had not
the right to speak his honest thoughts. If there is a man here or in
this town, preacher or otherwise, who is not willing that I should
think and speak, he is just so much nearer a barbarian than I am.
Civilization is liberty, slavery is barbarism; civilization is
intelligence, slavery is ignorance; and if we are any nearer free than
were our fathers, it is because we have got better heads and more
brains in them--that is the reason. Every man who has invented
anything for the use and convenience of man has helped raise his
fellow-man, and all we have found out of the laws and forces of nature
so that we are finally enabled to bring these forces of nature into
subjection, to give us better houses, better food, better
clothes--these are the real civilizers of our race; and the men who
stand up as prophets and predict hell to their fellow-man, they are not
the civilizers of our race; the men who cut each other's throats
because they fell out about baptism--they are not the civilizers of my
race; the men who built the inquisitions and put into dungeons all the
grand and honest men they could find--they are not the civilizers of my
race.

The men who have corrupted the imaginations and hearts of men by their
infamous dogma of hell--they are not the civilizers of my race. The
men who have been predicting good for mankind, the men who have found
some way to get us better homes and better houses and better education,
the men who have allowed us to make slaves of the blind forces of
nature--they have made this world fit to live in.

I want to prove to you if I can that this is all a question of
intellectual development, a question of sense, and the more a man knows
the more liberal he is; the less a man knows the more bigoted he is.
The less a man knows the more certain he is that he knows it, and the
more a man knows the better satisfied he is that he is entirely
ignorant. Great knowledge is philosophic, and little, narrow,
contemptible knowledge is bigoted and hateful. I want to prove it to
you. I saw a little while ago models of n