* Originally, they were private detectives; but they quickly
     became hired fighting men of the capitalists, and ultimately
     developed into the Mercenaries of the Oligarchy.

“This delicate, aristocratic-featured gentleman was a dummy director and a tool of corporations that secretly robbed widows and orphans.  This gentleman, who collected fine editions and was a patron of literature, paid blackmail to a heavy-jowled, black-browed boss of a municipal machine.  This editor, who published patent medicine advertisements, called me a scoundrelly demagogue because I dared him to print in his paper the truth about patent medicines.* This man, talking soberly and earnestly about the beauties of idealism and the goodness of God, had just betrayed his comrades in a business deal.  This man, a pillar of the church and heavy contributor to foreign missions, worked his shop girls ten hours a day on a starvation wage and thereby directly encouraged prostitution.  This man, who endowed chairs in universities and erected magnificent chapels, perjured himself in courts of law over dollars and cents.  This railroad magnate broke his word as a citizen, as a gentleman, and as a Christian, when he granted a secret rebate, and he granted many secret rebates.  This senator was the tool and the slave, the little puppet, of a brutal uneducated machine boss;** so was this governor and this supreme court judge; and all three rode on railroad passes; and, also, this sleek capitalist owned the machine, the machine boss, and the railroads that issued the passes.

* Patent medicines were patent lies, but, like the charms and indulgences of the Middle Ages, they deceived the people.  The only difference lay in that the patent medicines were more harmful and more costly.

** Even as late as 1912, A.D., the great mass of the people still persisted in the belief that they ruled the country by virtue of their ballots.  In reality, the country was ruled by what were called political machines.  At first the machine bosses charged the master capitalists extortionate tolls for legislation; but in a short time the master capitalists found it cheaper to own the political machines themselves and to hire the machine bosses.

“And so it was, instead of in paradise, that I found myself in the arid desert of commercialism.  I found nothing but stupidity, except for business.  I found none clean, noble, and alive, though I found many who were alive—­with rottenness.  What I did find was monstrous selfishness and heartlessness, and a gross, gluttonous, practised, and practical materialism.”

Much more Ernest told them of themselves and of his disillusionment.  Intellectually they had bored him; morally and spiritually they had sickened him; so that he was glad to go back to his revolutionists, who were clean, noble, and alive, and all that the capitalists were not.