"Glad you showed up," he said; "but I am rather afraid. Do be lenient. I cannot defend nor explain everything."
"Well," I began, leniently, "according to this harangue of yours, we would have to change our conception of goodness and morality, and—"
"No, we don't have to," he answered impatiently; "but we can't help it; it is always, always changing. The good man of one age is the dead man of another. Between vice and virtue there is often no more than a change of mind. Goodness is only a point of view, and morality ceases to be moral after awhile. What's a good thing to do to-day will, in all probability, be the best thing to avoid to-morrow. It's all a question of time; no standard stands forever. Why, the coat of tar and feathers is going out of fashion, and even in New England, it's no longer a crime to be happy. Morality is but an arbitrary agreement, subject to change. It is a catalogue of certain accepted virtues, which should be edited, revised, and reprinted, from time to time; for many of the articles in this booklet go out of fashion, and otherwise become stale, obsolete, and even obnoxious. At best, the goods are not what they are represented to be by the drummers, that is, the preachers, when it comes to their delivery—when it comes down or up to real life. What do you think of virtues that consist either of doing nothing, or of doing things for no other reason than that they have bored other people to death. The catalogue is full of them, and just now we have come to a time when our current conventional morality is a kind of mortality—dead and deadening. It holds us down to outworn, oppressive systems, customs, regulations, and the uniformity of things is stifling.
"It prevents growth, it impedes progress. We cannot live as free, untrammelled individuals. We must be citizens, members of society; we must be what other people call respectable.
"Everybody owns everybody else. Everybody follows, no one leads his own life. No one has any initiative. Everybody examines your moral conduct, and dictates the term of your existence. How can one have a religion, if he must live up to the faith of everybody else? How can we live if we must follow the dull and noble examples of those who are dead and never knew any better? Everybody listens to what the people say, and no one hears his own voice. This is an age of machinery. There are no more individuals; there are automatic walking and working machines which have been wound up by public opinion to run so many hours according to a well-approved system of regulations. 'What's the use of common-sense?' says a character in one of Jacob Gordin's plays. 'What's the use of common-sense when we have a Constitution?' Thousands of fools are kneeling before the fetish of public opinion. 'What will the people say?' they all ask. Nothing, I say, nothing. The people never say anything. They only talk. Individuals say it all. Those who depend upon others, who see strength in union are weaklings. United we fall, divided we stand. Those who dare to tread in the path of freedom, who dare to do things and say things, who own their bodies and never raise any mortgages on their souls, who make their own morality—they are the people who advance the world's progress and help to civilize our civilization. They have nearly always been called bad by their contemptible contemporaries—yet they represented all the goodness worth having. God give us the men who have virtue enough to do as they please, and courage enough to shock their neighbors.
"But it's all system and monotony and imitation with the majorities, and a lot of slavish, knavish, puny and pious little beings, afraid of their own voices and not daring to draw their breath any more often than their neighbors do, and with whom morality and sanity is a matter of majority rule—beings like these are called the good people.
"This idea must be reversed. We must come to realize the utter badness of the conventional, crawling, yours-truly-for-a-consideration, good people. Also we must come to realize the supreme goodness of so-called bad people—people who are too religious to go to church—to whom tyranny of any kind is the height of immorality, and slavery the depth of it. We must have more bad people to save this wicked world. And heaven save us from most of the good people of to-day.
"It is one of those 'dumb-driven cattle' that I tried to pay my respects to in my paper—one of those cattle that here in democratic America become leaders of men. They do not know that the progress of the world has been built upon discarded customs and broken laws—but let us go down the street. I must have a drink of something before I can solve the problem to your satisfaction—or even convince myself that I am right."