If you think yourself immune to such queries, make study of the ever-tightening grip of the proletariat on the use that has been made of them. Start with the French Revolution and come on down to glean the why of it that workers mean to be served, as well as serving, in the future.
It is true that hosts of toilers swallow hook, line and sinker of the crooked gamesters cast, and do it day in and day out: fatefully, to the end that 95% of them are but six months removed from the poor-house at the age of 65, in so far as their own financial resources are concerned. But they now have the fists of their minds doubled to batter those who would build and operate, from within a drawn circle, the like of the baronial toll gate. Unlock such as interlocking thievery, say they, come out into the open and do business with us man to make like men.
Next, let us hope, in order of the wrath of the honest toiler, will be the meticulously groomed and brushed parasite; next, whether he plys deft fingers backed by unbeatable odds, or a glib tongue to get a heap for nothing.
First of all to feel the hand of the worker should be the blood-spilling, pug-parasite; him who suggests war between brothers, dulls the finer sensibilities, lowers both the mental and moral tonus of mankind, and cheats even women into believing that he can, by any possibility, be of any basic use in the big scheme of life.
Many good people think differently; many who will not trouble to think as it is necessary to think, in order to classify men and motives. They are therefore plastic clay for the clan parasite, inclusive of clever criminals.
Crime? Why, only on criminals by legal edict are the keys of the turnkey turned. Myriads of humans who never face a presiding judge, plan and execute moral crime that is much more far-reaching than the average even of capital crime.
Hence, by-choice felons flit sneeringly to and from prison, where they have to be practically force-fed with moral precepts; that, very largely, because they know millions of free men meaner than they, are immune to legal force-feeding for the meanness.
So long as such conditions obtain in America, so long will recidivistic criminals mount there in numbers; and so long will they justify themselves to themselves, and to all who will listen to their half-baked contentions.
“I see and approve the good—I follow the bad,” says a far-famed poet, whose bold declaration of spineless principle leaves him spokesman for thousands of moral weaklings who are always on the fence, undecisive as to which way to jump. It also leaves him open to the charge of angling for a cheap, dirt-distributing notoriety.
Another, ostensibly an editor of a New England newspaper—shades of the Pilgrims stand by—flares at men of the cloth who denounce such as the late bestial scandal enacted at Jersey City. He is “convinced” that Catholic and Protestant ministers are “impugning motives here and blackening character there, because they have lost their tempers at the disinclination of the people to follow them.”