“Not at all. I know the type. A thoughtful young girl, healthy, cultivated and, by the modern miracle, taught how to think. She studies vice conditions in Chicago at first hand and what she sees turns her into a crusader. This girl has spirit. Brought face to face with a great evil, moved by the appeal of helpless womanhood, she throws aside her veneer of false education.”
“Unsexed!”
“Yes, if you would say that the crisis in her life unsexed Portia. Or the crisis in France’s history unsexed Charlotte Corday.”
“You’re fond of historical allusions,” chided the practical man. “Always the literary man, always the dreamer. This girl is a disturber. She’ll unsettle business.”
“Ah, there you are. ‘Unsettles business.’ Did it ever strike you business men that you take yourselves too damn seriously? Any movement, any agitation that ‘unsettles business’ is ipse facto wrong. You business men have had a hand in the martyring of most of the saints and all of the reformers since time began. And, invariably, you are wrong. Why, you’re wrong even about yourselves. You firmly believe that the foundations of the country rest upon you. As a matter of fact, not one per cent of you are producers. You’re middlemen, profit shavers, parasites.”
“My dear fellow,” asked his friend, “where would you be if business men—publishers—didn’t buy your wares?”
“Ha,” answered the writer, “and where would the publishers be if I and others didn’t produce the wares to market? It won’t do. The reason the newspapers and magazines of this country are so bad is because most of the publishers are not newspaper men and magazine writers, but merely business men.”
“Well, I suppose your Joan of Arc will have to have her fling. Then life will swing back to its same old channels and we’ll forget her.”
“Yes, she will have her fling and perhaps we’ll forget her, but life will not swing back to the same old channel. She’ll make a new channel, forgotten though she may be, and it will be a better channel.”