"The world belongs to those who take things for granted. He will not take anything for granted and that's why he has to take more hard knocks than anybody else. He impiously questions, doubts, examines, investigates everything on the face of the earth and—God save us—even the things that be in heaven. He is a living interrogation point, ever questioning the wisdom of this world and the promises of the one to come. Nothing is so sacred as to be above his scrutiny; he has little reverence for any of our glorious institutions. He says they are the handiwork of men and often as crude and as useless as men could make them. Whatever has been erected can be corrected, he says. He thinks lightly of our laws; thinks they are at best but a necessary evil and that in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish all evil.
"He is a bad man. He does not even recognize the sacred authority of tradition, and has no decent regard for precedent. Precedent, he argues, only proves that some people lived before us and did things in a certain way. He does not even—well, think of a man who doubts the holy right of the majority! He does not believe that the majority is always right; in fact, he contends that it is always wrong. By the time the majority discovers a truth it becomes a falsehood, he avers. The majority only thinks it is always right. The majority is but another word for mediocrity. He does not heed what the people say. The monster called majority, in spite of his many heads, does very little thinking. What the people say seldom amounts to a meaning. Morality, he argues, is that which is conducive to one's happiness, without interfering with or injuring his fellow-men. To be moral is to live fully, freely, completely. Morality has nothing to do with the abnormal stifling, starving, thwarting of instincts and feelings.
"A truth, he told me, is a truth, and a principle is a principle, whether it is held by many or by one. Numbers no more make right than might does.
"'The strongest man on earth,' he says, 'is he who stands alone,' and he always quotes a man named Ibsen. He is a bad case. 'Customs and conventionalities be hanged,' he says, 'I have my own life to live and mean to manage it in my own way. I have laws of my own and must obey them.' I heard him say it myself, and I wonder what he means by these things. There are always those who know better than you what is good for you, but you don't want to mind them, he told me. The most advisable thing in the world is never to take any advice. There may be those, he once remarked, who have lived longer than you have, but they have not lived your life.
"He has a mania for principles. I think that is a chronic disease with him. He imagines it is all one needs in life. There is not a material advantage in the world but he would forfeit it for a moral principle, as he calls it. 'Ideals are very well,' I once said, 'but one must live.' 'Not necessarily,' he answered. 'One must die, if one cannot live honestly.'
"Always he talks about the so-called social problem of the age. I do not know just what that is; but if there is such a thing as a social problem it is how to abolish social reformers. This man is a social reformer, and he has some scheme of his own how to reconstruct society on a basis of what he terms justice and truth. In the promulgation of this scheme of his he foolishly spends much of his spare time and not a little of his money—and Heaven knows he has not any too much. But he says he does it all for his pleasure; that it is out of sheer selfishness that he would uplift the fallen and elevate the lowly. He is a bad man. It is no disgrace to be poor, of course; but it is criminal of the poor not to know their place. I half told him so, but he answered in his usual contradictory way that the poor have no place at all.
"He travels through life very much by his own crooked road, with his own conception of morality, justice and truth. Out of justice to the dead, he argues, we ought to abolish most of the institutions they have left behind. Otherwise they are being disgraced every day by the clumsy workings of the things they have established. If our honored ancestors desired to perpetuate their taboos, fetishes and inquisitions they had no business to die; they should have stayed here. By going to either of the places beyond they have forfeited their right to manage things here below. The dead should give the living absolute home rule.
"He is a bad man. He hardly ever gives any charity. He does not believe in charity; says it creates more misery than it relieves, and perpetuates poverty—the crime of mankind. Charity, he claims, curses both the giver and the receiver. It makes the former haughty and proud and the latter dependent and servile. What he wants is justice and the rights of all to earn the means of subsistence. And there is no use in quoting the Bible, when he talks of poverty. The Bible, he says, is a great book which could be immensely improved by a good editor with a long blue pencil. All the immoral problem-plays pale into pitiful insignificance beside some of the stories told in the Bible—and they are not anywhere half so well told. Did you ever hear such blasphemy? He is an infidel. He does not even believe the newspapers; has little faith in the great power of the press. Most of the newspapers, he told me, are published by the advertisers and edited by the readers. Journalists ever follow public opinion, and they are never sure of what they believe in because it is hard to find out what the people approve. Weather Bureau predictions are often Gospel truths beside editorial convictions. The best papers are yet to be printed. He has such rank disregard of the past and the present that he seems to think that all things really great are yet to come.
"He puzzles and vexes me. I don't know just what he is in politics. I doubt whether he is either a Republican or a Democrat. I suspect he votes for the Anarchist party. What an absurdity! They will never elect a President, and this foolish man has not the ghost of a chance to get an office. He is not at all consistent. He changes his mind very often. No matter how zealous or ardent he is about his ideas he is ever ready to reject them to-morrow and accept other views. He does not believe in the newspapers, in things visible and present, yet he has the utmost faith in far-away fictions, intangible Utopias and the realization of iridescent dreams.