Satan is smart, and that is a very dreadful thing to be, I never like to hear the Yankee called smart, it is a term of reproach.  I don’t like to think of a Smart Set.  And my refuge is in the knowledge that there is just one thing that destroys smartness and that is, to put it in a very high-sounding word, Nobility.  There is the test we can all put to ourselves—­and it really is conscience and ethics and religion all in one—­is the idea smart or is it noble?  I’d take my chances of going to Heaven on the conformity of conduct to that criterion.

But all this seems a far way from Parlor Bolshevism—­yet it is not so far.  For it all comes down to this.  The Lord he prompts us to think and to advance, and the Devil he urges us to be smart, to switch our thinkings, our very right thinkings, our progressive impulses, to side tracks that will serve his ends.

And that is just what is happening to a lot of the finest minds.  Men and women who see clearly that things are wrong, who have enough insight and knowledge to get a glimpse into the unnecessary suffering of the world and who mentally come down with a slap-bang declaration that this must stop, are allowing themselves to be called by a name that history will execrate, and to smooth over and palliate and defend things that are bad, out of which good will not come.

You have no love for Czarism any more than you have for Kaiserism.  You do not care to make the world righteous by dictatorship, because you know that it is not growth or the basis of growth, but the foundation of hate.  Now the very cornerstone of Bolshevism is smartness—­the get-even spirit.  Because the Czars and the Dukes have oppressed the poor, because when this land was divided among the serfs the division was not what it pretended to be, and because the German business managers of Russian industry made wages and conditions that were brutal and brutalizing, the peasants and workmen have said, “Let us have done with the whole crew, and take all land and industry into our own hands, killing those who were our masters under the old economic system.  Let us turn the whole world topsy-turvy in a night, and bring all down to where we are.  In our aspiration for Beauty, let us kill what has been created.  In our hunt for Justice, let us disregard fair dealing.  In our purpose to level down, let us do it with the knife ruthlessly and logically,” Thus disregarding the teachings of time, that men are not the creatures of logic, of passionless or passionate theses, but are the expression of an unfaltering Spirit.  Whenever men have been the victims of logicalness they have been wrong.  For instance, read the story of the Inquisition.  They saw what they wanted clearly, those old Fathers of the Church.  They knew their objective, which was to save men’s souls.  And they thought they knew the way.  Logic told them that those who preached heresies were bringing men’s eternal souls to everlasting hell fire.  And they set about to stop the preaching.  Had I believed as they did, I doubtless would have done as they did.  But to be infallibly right is to be hopelessly smart.  Thus it is with all who take a paper system and apply it to that strange thing called Life.