“What are we coming to?” he cried. “What’s going to be the end? A social and industrial system such as ours, which leaves the masses to starve and consume with disease under intolerable burdens, that a handful may rot in idleness and luxury, marks us in this latest century as hopelessly insane!”
“Well, Ned, whence came the idea, think you, that it is divine justice for a majority of the people on earth to be poor in order that a few may be rich? And how are we going to get that perverted idea out of the minds of men? Will legislation do it?”
“Humph!” grunted Haynerd. “Legislation arouses no faith in me! We are suffering here because, in our immensely selfish thought of ourselves only, we have permitted the growth of such men as Ames, and allowed them to monopolize the country’s resources. Heavens! Future generations will laugh themselves 217 sick over us! Why, what sane excuse is there for permitting the commonest necessities of life to be juggled with by gamblers and unmoral men of wealth? How can we ask to be considered rational when we, with open eyes, allow ‘corners’ on foodstuffs, and permit ‘wheat kings’ to amass millions by corralling the supply of grain and then raising the price to the point where the poor washerwoman starves? Lord! We are a nation gone mad! The existence of poverty in a country like America is not only proof positive that our social system is rotten to the core, but that our religion is equally so! As a people we deserve to be incarcerated in asylums!”
“A considerable peroration, Ned,” smiled Hitt. “And yet, one that I can not refute. The only hope I see is in a radical change in the mental attitude of the so-called enlightened class––and yet they are the very worst offenders!”
“Sure! Doesn’t the militia exist for men like Ames? To-day’s work at Avon proves it, I think!”
“Apparently so, Ned,” returned Hitt sadly. “And the only possibility of a change in enlightened people is through a better understanding of what is really good and worth while. That means real, practical Christianity. And of that Ames knows nothing.”
“Seems to me, Hitt, that it ought to stagger our preachers to realize that nineteen centuries of their brand of Christianity have scarcely even begun to cleanse society. What do you suppose Borwell thinks, anyway?”
“Ned, they still cling to human law as necessarily a compelling influence in the shaping of mankind’s moral nature.”
“And go right on accepting the blood-stained money of criminal business men who have had the misfortune to amass a million dollars! And, more, they actually hold such men up as patterns for the youth to emulate! As if the chief end of endeavor were to achieve the glorious manhood of an Ames! And he a man who is deader than the corpses he made at Avon to-day!”
“The world’s ideal, my friend, has long been the man who succeeds in everything except that which is worth while,” replied Hitt. “But we have been bidden to come out from the world, and be separate. Is it not so?”