at least.  Why, they would mortgage their souls, they would trade their Maker, for a hundred dollars!  The crime is not theirs, but the shallow creatures who once ruled the world, and permitted them to be brought to this state.  And where else can you turn?  Is it to the newspapers?  They are a thousand times more dishonest than the workingmen.  Is it to the halls of legislation?  There corruption riots and rots until the stench fills the earth.  The only ones who could reform the world are the rich and powerful:  but they see nothing to reform.  Life is all sunshine for them; civilization is a success for them; they need no better heaven than they enjoy.  They have so long held mankind in subjection that they laugh at the idea of the great, dark, writhing masses, rising up to overthrow them.  Government is, to them, an exquisitely adjusted piece of mechanism whose object is to keep the few happy and the many miserable.”

“But,” said I, “if an appeal were made to them; if they were assured of the dangers that really threatened them; if their better and kindlier natures were appealed to, do you not think they might undertake the task of remedying the evils endured by the multitude?  They cannot all be as abandoned and utterly vicious as Prince Cabano and his Council.”

“No,” he replied; “have you not already made the test?  The best of them would probably hang you for your pains.  Do you think they would be willing to relinquish one-tenth of their pleasures, or their possessions, to relieve the distresses of their fellows?  If you do, you have but a slight conception of the callousness of their hearts.  You were right in what you said was the vital principle of Christianity—­brotherly love, not alone of the rich for the rich, but of the poor and rich for each other.  But that spirit has passed away from the breasts of the upper classes.  Science has increased their knowledge one hundred per cent. and their vanity one thousand per cent.  The more they know of the material world the less they can perceive the spiritual world around and within it.  The acquisition of a few facts about nature has closed their eyes to the existence of a God.”

“Ah,” said I, “that is a dreadful thought!  It seems to me that the man who possesses his eyesight must behold a thousand evidences of a Creator denied to a blind man; and in the same way the man who knows most of the material world should see the most conclusive evidences of design and a Designer.  The humblest blade of grass preaches an incontrovertible sermon.  What force is it that brings it up, green and beautiful, out of the black, dead earth?  Who made it succulent and filled it full of the substances that will make flesh and blood and bone for millions of gentle, grazing animals?  What a gap would it have been in nature if there had been no such growth, or if, being such, it had been poisonous or inedible?  Whose persistent purpose is it—­whose everlasting will—­that year after year, and age after age, stirs the tender