h one who lives with hands unbound is as guilty as any. It were better
to die alone, fighting the whole world single-handed, refusing to share
the sin or to tolerate it or to live while it was, than with halting
speech to protest and with supple conscience to compromise. He is a
coward who lets a baby die or a woman sink to shame or a fellow-man be
humbled, alone and unassisted and unrighted. She is false to the divinity
of womanhood who does not feel the tigress in her when a little one who
might be her little one is tossed, stifled by unholy conditions, into its
grave. But where are the men, now, who will strike a blow for the babies?
Where are the women who will put their white teeth into the murderous
hands of the Society that throttles the little ones and robs the weak and
simple and cloaks itself with a 'law and order' which outrages the
Supreme Law of that Humanity evolving in us?

"Surely we are all tainted and corrupted, even the best of us, by the
scrofulous cowardice, the fearsome selfishness, of a decaying
civilisation! Surely we are only fit to be less than human, to be slave
to conditions that we ourselves might govern if we would, to be criminal
accomplices in the sins of social castes, to be sad victims of inhuman
laws or still sadder defenders of inhumanity! Oh, for the days when our
race was young, when its women slew themselves rather than be shamed rid
when its men, trampling a rotten empire down, feared neither God nor man
and held each other brothers and hated, each one, the tyrant as the
common foe of all! Better the days when from the forests and the steppes
our forefathers burst, half-naked and free, communists and conquerors, a
fierce avalanche of daring men and lusty women who beat and battered Rome
down like Odin's hammer that they were! Alas, for the heathen virtues and
the wild pagan fury for freedom and for the passion and purity that Frega
taught to the daughters of the barbarian! And alas, for the sword that
swung then, unscabbarded, by each man's side and for the knee that never
bent to any and for the fearless eyes that watched unblenched while the
gods lamed each other with their lightnings in the thunder-shaken storm!
Gone forever seemed the days when the land was for all, and the cattle
and the fruits of the field, and when, unruled by kings, untrammelled by
priests, untyrannised by pretence of 'law,' our fathers drank in from
Nature's breast the strength and vigour that gave it even