and carefulness; if there is one class of the community against which he hurled his thunderbolts without mercy and predicted woes, it was the scribes, Pharisees, scholars, and priests of the temples.  He told them in so many words, “The publican and the harlot will enter the kingdom of God before you.”  The worst dissipation in this world is the dry-rot of morality, and of the so-called piety that separates men of prosperity and of power from the poor and ignoble.  They are our wards....

I am not a socialist.  I do not preach riot.  I do not preach the destruction of property.  I regard property as one of the sacred things.  The real property established by a man’s own intelligence and labor is the crystallized man himself.  It is the fruit of what his life-work has done; and not in vain, society makes crime against it amongst the most punishable.  But nevertheless, I warn these men in a country like ours, where every man votes, whether he came from Hungary, or from Russia, or from Germany, or from France or Italy, or Spain or Portugal, or from the Orient,—­from Japan and China, because they too are going to vote!  On the Niagara River, logs come floating down and strike an island, and there they lodge and accumulate for a little while, and won’t go over.  But the rains come, the snows melt, the river rises, and the logs are lifted up and down, and they go swinging over the falls.  The stream of suffrage of free men, having all the privileges of the State, is this great stream.  The figure is defective in this, that the log goes over the Niagara Falls, but that is not the way the country is going or will go....  There is a certain river of political life, and everything has to go into it first or last; and if, in days to come, a man separates himself from his fellows without sympathy, if his wealth and power make poverty feel itself more poor and men’s misery more miserable, and set against him the whole stream of popular feeling, that man is in danger.  He may not know who dynamites him, but there is danger; and let him take heed who is in peril.  There is nothing easier in the world than for rich men to ingratiate themselves with the whole community in which they live, and so secure themselves.  It is not selfishness that will do it; it is not by increasing the load of misfortune, it is not by wasting substance in riotous living upon appetites and passions.  It is by recognizing that every man is a brother.  It is by recognizing the essential spirit of the gospel, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”  It is by using some of their vast power and riches so as to diffuse joy in every section of the community.