campaigns, they were conducted on lines of Sunday-school morality; the people worked themselves up into a sort of revivalist frenzy, an emotional state which, if the truth were told, was thoroughly immoral, unreasonable and hypocritical:  like all frenzies, as a matter of course it died down after the campaign was over.  Moreover, the American people had shown that they were unwilling to make any sacrifices for the permanent betterment of conditions, and as soon as their incomes began to fall off they turned again to the bosses and capitalists like an abject flock of sheep.

He went on to explain that he wasn’t referring now to that part of the electorate known as the labour element, the men who worked with their hands in mills, factories, etc.  They had their faults, yet they possessed at least the virtue of solidarity, a willingness to undergo sacrifices in order to advance the standard of conditions; they too had a tenacity of purpose and a plan, such as it was, which the small business men, the clerks lacked....

We must wake up to the fact that we shouldn’t get Utopia by turning out Mr. Jason and the highly efficient gentlemen who hired and financed him.  It wasn’t so simple as that.  Utopia was not an achievement after all, but an undertaking, a state of mind, the continued overcoming of resistance by a progressive education and effort.  And all this talk of political and financial “wickedness” was rubbish; the wickedness they complained of did not reside merely in individuals it was a social disorder, or rather an order that no longer suited social conditions.  If the so-called good citizens would take the trouble to educate themselves, to think instead of allowing their thinking to be done for them they would see that the “evils” which had been published broadcast were merely the symptoms of that disease which had come upon the social body through their collective neglect and indifference.  They held up their hands in horror at the spectacle of a commercial, licensed prostitution, they shunned the prostitute and the criminal; but there was none of us, if honest, who would not exclaim when he saw them, “there, but for the Grace of God, go I!” What we still called “sin” was largely the result of lack of opportunity, and the active principle of society as at present organized tended more and more to restrict opportunity.  Lack of opportunity, lack of proper nutrition,—­these made sinners by the wholesale; made, too, nine-tenths of the inefficient of whom we self-righteously complained.  We had a national philosophy that measured prosperity in dollars and cents, included in this measurement the profits of liquor dealers who were responsible for most of our idiots.  So long as we set our hearts on that kind of prosperity, so long as we failed to grasp the simple and practical fact that the greatest assets of a nation are healthy and sane and educated, clear-thinking human beings, just so long was prostitution logical, Riverside Franchises, traction deals, Judd Jasons, and the respectable gentlemen who continued to fill their coffers out of the public purse inevitable.