To tale off a summary of associated influences would crowd a bulking volume. Also, it would yield what mostly wasted effort yields, since Americans have been fully cognizant of the constantly widening cracks in the national structure, as well as of the manner in which those openings have been effected.
He knows that neither added nor rescinded statutes can eliminate bad lines of blood, established mainly by an immigration policy framed and executed as if to establish those lines of blood. Hundreds of thousands of those of the “lines” are daily plying disruptive wares; wares which they will continue to ply, more or less, unto at least the fifth generation ahead. A country cannot sit up of a sudden and determine to serve overnight antidote for the slow poison of its people.
He knows class legislation is deadly to democracy; yet he sits supinely tight while organized labor successfully clubs with votes for special privileges, successively the more indefensible.
He knows the avaricious brute is at the bottom of all of war, and he knows blood-letting within such as the sixteen-foot prize ring is the cruelest of war in miniature. Nevertheless, he piles his own dollars on the pyramid of dollars pulled down annually by the pug-ugly fraternity, the while winking the nether eye as his own kiddies are imbued, through suggestion and example, with the spirit of the fistic parasite.
Nor must women be denied her meed of praise. She, too, is getting the punching habit of mind. Hundreds of the bejeweled of her wait breathlessly at the ringside for the benignant “K. O.” Her voice, raised for the making a national pet of the parasitic pug, is recorded: “I am not especially fond of seeing the blood flow; but I just dote on ‘draws.’”
When the femme de ring shall have wormed herself a bit further into the mysteries of the roped arena, she will be bally-well fed up with “draws,” the majority of which are “crooked” in order to coin “easy money.” Also, she will likely transmit to her brood the instinct to shunt productive work and tear things.
He knows fattened money-hogs shoulder to bar the way to the money-trough, where they pile fat on fat.
He knows of the cheap flings of the charlatan; of the ruthlessly lawless reach of the radical labor leader; of the rotten bases from which the bebadged are frequently forced to work; of the political chicanery by which the sting is drawn on the one hand from the edicts of upright judges: and on the other hand—if much less frequently yet frequently enough—written into the edicts of legal agents whom the ermine but drapes.
He knows all, and more, and sundry; yet he will not so much as step to the primary and register his vote against the nefarious combination.
Shall the load be fastened to his back, he will have none but himself to blame. Hundreds of voices have for long years dinged into his ears the danger ahead.