d capitalistic greed that
means simply death to thousands of innocent men, women and children.
I thank God, if there is a God--which I very much doubt--that I, for
one, have never dared to marry and make a home. Home! Talk of hell!
Is there any bigger one than this man and his three children has on
his hands right this minute? And he's only one out of thousands. And
yet this city, and every other big city in this country, has its
thousands of professed Christians who have all the luxuries and
comforts, and who go to church Sundays and sing their hymns about
giving all to Jesus and bearing the cross and following Him all the
way and being saved! I don't say that there aren't good men and
women among them, but let the minister who has spoken to us here
tonight go into any one of a dozen aristocratic churches I could
name and propose to the members to take any such pledge as the one
he's mentioned here tonight, and see how quick the people would
laugh at him for a fool or a crank or a fanatic. Oh, no! That's not
the remedy. That can't ever amount to anything. We've got to have a
new start in the way of government. The whole thing needs
reconstructing. I don't look for any reform worth anything to come
out of the churches. They are not with the people. They are with the
aristocrats, with the men of money. The trusts and monopolies have
their greatest men in the churches. The ministers as a class are
their slaves. What we need is a system that shall start from the
common basis of socialism, founded on the rights of the common
people--"

Carlsen had evidently forgotten all about the three-minutes rule and
was launching himself into a regular oration that meant, in his
usual surroundings before his usual audience, an hour at least, when
the man just behind him pulled him down unceremoniously and arose.
Carlsen was angry at first and threatened a little disturbance, but
the Bishop reminded him of the rule, and he subsided with several
mutterings in his beard, while the next speaker began with a very
strong eulogy on the value of the single tax as a genuine remedy for
all the social ills. He was followed by a man who made a bitter
attack on the churches and ministers, and declared that the two
great obstacles in the way of all true reform were the courts and
the ecclesiastical machines.

When he sat down a man who bore every mark of being a street laborer
sprang to his feet and poured a perfect torrent of abuse against the
c