“I think I can safely say that I have many times been in just such a condition, and I have always tried to be a Christian under all conditions.  I don’t know as I have always asked this question, ’What would Jesus do?’ when I have been out of work, but I do know I have tried to be His disciple at all times.  Yes,” the man went on, with a sad smile that was more pathetic to the Bishop and Mr. Maxwell than the younger man’s grim despair; “yes, I have begged, and I have been to charity institutions, and I have done everything when out of a job except steal and lie in order to get food and fuel.  I don’t know as Jesus would have done some of the things I have been obliged to do for a living, but I know I have never knowingly done wrong when out of work.  Sometimes I think maybe He would have starved sooner than beg.  I don’t know.”

The old man’s voice trembled and he looked around the room timidly.  A silence followed, broken by a fierce voice from a large, black-haired, heavily-bearded man who sat three seats from the Bishop.  The minute he spoke nearly every man in the hall leaned forward eagerly.  The man who had asked the question, “What would Jesus do in my case?” slowly sat down and whispered to the man next to him:  “Who’s that?”

“That’s Carlsen, the Socialist leader.  Now you’ll hear something.”

“This is all bosh, to my mind,” began Carlsen, while his great bristling beard shook with the deep inward anger of the man.  “The whole of our system is at fault.  What we call civilization is rotten to the core.  There is no use trying to hide it or cover it up.  We live in an age of trusts and combines and capitalistic greed that means simply death to thousands of innocent men, women and children.  I thank God, if there is a God—­which I very much doubt—­that I, for one, have never dared to marry and make a home.  Home!  Talk of hell!  Is there any bigger one than this man and his three children has on his hands right this minute?  And he’s only one out of thousands.  And yet this city, and every other big city in this country, has its thousands of professed Christians who have all the luxuries and comforts, and who go to church Sundays and sing their hymns about giving all to Jesus and bearing the cross and following Him all the way and being saved!  I don’t say that there aren’t good men and women among them, but let the minister who has spoken to us here tonight go into any one of a dozen aristocratic churches I could name and propose to the members to take any such pledge as the one he’s mentioned here tonight, and see how quick the people would laugh at him for a fool or a crank or a fanatic.  Oh, no!  That’s not the remedy.  That can’t ever amount to anything.  We’ve got to have a new start in the way of government.  The whole thing needs reconstructing.  I don’t look for any reform worth anything to come out of the churches.  They are not with the people.  They are with the aristocrats, with the men of money.  The trusts and monopolies have their greatest men in the churches.  The ministers as a class are their slaves.  What we need is a system that shall start from the common basis of socialism, founded on the rights of the common people—­”