Corporations buy consciences by the gross.  They are hung over the door of every street car.  Consciences are worked by pulling a strap.  Liverymen have cyclometres to help customers to tell the truth, and the Australian ballot is invented to help men to be manly enough to vote the way they think.  And when, in the course of human events, we came to the essentially moral and spiritual reform of a woman’s right to dress in good taste—­that is, appropriately for what she is doing, what did we proceed to do to bring it about?  Conventions were held year after year, and over and over, to get women to dress as they wanted to; dress reform associations were founded, syndicates of courage were established all over the land—­all in vain; and finally,—­Heaven help us!—­how was this great moral and spiritual reform accomplished?  By an invention of two wheels, one in front of the other.  It was brought about by the Pope Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut in two short years.

Everything is brought about by manufacturing companies.  It is the socialist spirit; the idea that, if we can only find it, there is some machine that can surely be invented that will take the place of men:  not only of hands and feet, but of all the old-fashioned and lumbering virtues, courage, patience, vision, common sense, and religion itself, out of which they are made.

But we depend upon machinery not only for the things that we want, but for the brains with which we decide what we want.  If a man wants to know what he thinks, he starts a club; and if he wants to be very sure, he calls a convention.  From the National Undertakers’ Association and the Launderers’ League to the Christian Endeavour Tournament and the World’s Congress—­the Midway Pleasance of Piety—­the Convention strides the world with vociferousness.  The silence that descends from the hills is filled with its ceaseless din.  The smallest hamlet in the land has learned to listen reverent from afar to the vast insistent roar of It, as the Voice of the Spirit of the Times.

Every idea we have is run into a constitution.  We cannot think without a chairman.  Our whims have secretaries; our fads have by-laws.  Literature is a club.  Philosophy is a society.  Our reforms are mass meetings.  Our culture is a summer school.  We cannot mourn our mighty dead without Carnegie hall and forty vice-presidents.  We remember our poets with trustees, and the immortality of a genius is watched by a standing committee.  Charity is an Association.  Theology is a set of resolutions.  Religion is an endeavour to be numerous and communicative.  We awe the impenitent with crowds, convert the world with boards, and save the lost with delegates; and how Jesus of Nazareth could have done so great a work without being on a committee is beyond our ken.  What Socrates and Solomon would have come to if they had only had the advantage of conventions it would be hard to say; but in these days, when the excursion train is applied to wisdom; when, having little enough, we try to make it more by pulling it about; when secretaries urge us, treasurers dun us, programs unfold out of every mail—­where is the man who, guileless-eyed, can look in his brother’s face; can declare upon his honour that he has never been a delegate, never belonged to anything, never been nominated, elected, imposed on, in his life?