For upon what law, natural, human, divine, has this new empire been founded?  That it has produced great humanists is gratefully conceded; that real spiritual progress has issued from its incidental cosmopolitanism is manifest; but which way has it fronted, what have been its characteristic emphases and its controlling tendencies?  Let its own works testify.  It has created a world of new and extreme inequality, both in the distribution of material, of intellectual and of spiritual goods.  Here is a small group who own the land, the houses, the factories, machinery and the tools.  Here is a very large group, without houses, without tools, without land or goods.  At this moment only 7 per cent of our 110,000,000 of American people have an income of $3,000 or more; only 11/4 per cent have an income of $5,000 or more!  What law produced and justifies such a society?  The unwritten law of heaven?  No.  The law of humanism, of Confucius and Buddha and Epictetus and Aurelius?  No.  The law of naked individualism; of might; force; cunning?  Yes.

Here in our American cities are the overwealthy and the insolently worldly people.  They have their palatial town house, their broad inland acres; some of them have their seaside homes, their fish and game preserves as well.  Here in our American cities are the alien, the ignorant, the helpless, crowded into unclean and indecent tenements, sometimes 1,000 human beings to the acre.  What justifies a pseudo-civilization which permits such tragic inequality of fortune?  Inequality of endowment?  No.  First, because there is no natural inequality so extreme as that; secondly, because no one would dare assert that these cleavages in the industrial state even remotely parallel the corresponding cleavages in the distribution of ability among mankind.  What justifies it, then?  The unwritten law of heaven?  No.  The law of humanism?  No.  The law of the jungle?  Yes.

Now for our second question.  By what law, admitting many exceptions, are men on the whole trying to change this situation at once indecent and impious?  This is a yet more important query.  Our world has obviously awakened to the rottenness in Denmark.  But where are we turning for our remedy?  Is it to the penitence and confession, the public-mindedness, the identification of the fate of the individual with the fate of the whole group which is the religious impulse?  Is it to a disinterested and even-handed justice, the high legalism of the Golden Rule, which would be the humanist’s way?  Or is it to the old law of aggression and might transferring the gain thereof from the present exploiters to the recently exploited?