the blood of child labour, and sweated labour, and of prostitution itself.  When I mentioned such facts, expecting in my innocence that these sisters of Judy O’Grady would at once strip off their blood-dyed silks and jewels, they became excited and angry, and read me preachments about the lack of thrift, the drink, and the innate depravity that caused all the misery in society’s cellar.  When I mentioned that I couldn’t quite see that it was the lack of thrift, the intemperance, and the depravity of a half-starved child of six that made it work twelve hours every night in a Southern cotton mill, these sisters of Judy O’Grady attacked my private life and called me an “agitator”—­as though that, forsooth, settled the argument.

Nor did I fare better with the masters themselves.  I had expected to find men who were clean, noble, and alive, whose ideals were clean, noble, and alive.  I went about amongst the men who sat in the high places—­the preachers, the politicians, the business men, the professors, and the editors.  I ate meat with them, drank wine with them, automobiled with them, and studied them.  It is true, I found many that were clean and noble; but with rare exceptions, they were not alive.  I do verily believe I could count the exceptions on the fingers of my two hands.  Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, there were merely the unburied dead—­clean and noble, like well-preserved mummies, but not alive.  In this connection I may especially mention the professors I met, the men who live up to that decadent university ideal, “the passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence.”

I met men who invoked the name of the Prince of Peace in their diatribes against war, and who put rifles in the hands of Pinkertons with which to shoot down strikers in their own factories.  I met men incoherent with indignation at the brutality of prize-fighting, and who, at the same time, were parties to the adulteration of food that killed each year more babies than even red-handed Herod had killed.

I talked in hotels and clubs and homes and Pullmans, and steamer-chairs with captains of industry, and marvelled at how little travelled they were in the realm of intellect.  On the other hand, I discovered that their intellect, in the business sense, was abnormally developed.  Also, I discovered that their morality, where business was concerned, was nil.

This delicate, aristocratic-featured gentleman, was a dummy director and a tool of corporations that secretly robbed widows and orphans.  This gentleman, who collected fine editions and was an especial patron of literature, paid blackmail to a heavy-jowled, black-browed boss of a municipal machine.  This editor, who published patent medicine advertisements and did not dare print the truth in his paper about said patent medicines for fear of losing the advertising, called me a scoundrelly demagogue because I told him that his political economy was antiquated and that his biology was contemporaneous with Pliny.