"No,
I believe I am right, and I will die for it," and I suppose we owe what
little progress we have made to a few men in all ages of the world who
really stood by their convictions. The men who stood by the truth and
the men who stood by a fact, they are the men that have helped raise
this world, and in every age there has been some sublime and tender
soul who was true to his convictions, and who really lived to make men
better. In every age some men carried the torch of progress and handed
it to some other, and it has been carried through all the dark ages of
barbarism, and had it not been for such men we would have been naked
and uncivilized tonight, with pictures of wild beasts tattooed on our
skins, dancing around some dried snake fetish.

When a man would not recant, these men, in the name of the love of the
Lord, screwed them down to the last thread of agony and threw them into
some dungeon, where, in the throbbing silence of darkness, they
suffered the pangs of the fabled damned; and this was done in the name
of civilization, love and order, and in the name of the most merciful
Christ. There are no thumbscrews now; they are rusting away; but every
man in this town who is not willing that another shall do his own
thinking and will try to prevent it, has in him the same hellish spirit
that made and used that very instrument of torture, and the only reason
he does not use it today is because he cannot. The reason that I speak
here tonight is because they cannot help it.

I saw at the same time a beautiful little instrument for the
propagation of kindness, called "The Scavenger's Daughter." (The
lecturer here described and illustrated construction of the
instrument.) The victim would be thrown upon that instrument and the
strain upon the muscles was such that insanity would sometimes come to
his relief. See what we owe to the civilizing influence of the
gentlemen who have made a certain idea in metaphysics necessary to
salvation--see what we owe to them.

I saw a collar of torture which they put about the neck of their
victim, and inside of that there were a hundred points; so that the
victim could not stir without the skin being punctured with these
points, and after a little while the throat would swell and suffocation
would end the agony, and they would have that done in the presence of
his wife and weeping children. That was all done so that finally
everybody would love everybody else as his brother.