502 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



zens" or distinguished philanthropists. The assumption that 

 they are an unfailing depository of virtue to be graciously and 

 mysteriously diffused among the poor and ignorant, so generally 

 regarded as the greatest peril of modern democracy, is another 

 astonishing delusion. To expose it, I shall not appeal to the lives 

 of fighting ecclesiastics that led armies to slaughter, thus violat- 

 ing the gospel of peace, and practiced in private and pubjic the 

 current morals, nor to the lives of the philosophers and states- 

 men that befogged the interests of the people with sophistry and 

 falsehood and gave themselves up to vice and crime. I can not 

 hope to deepen the significance of the pleas of apologists that they 

 were simply the creatures of their age, obedient only to its code 

 of ethics. I call attention rather to history more recent and 

 impressive to the history of the day, which discloses a diver- 

 gence quite as profound between preaching and practice. It 

 shows that, as the morals of every class are molded by the same 

 forces, they are very much alike. Inspect, for example, those of 

 the wreckers of banks and railroads, and of the promoters of 

 fraudulent enterprises. Are they better than those of the burglar 

 or thief ? Inspect, also, those of the " influential citizens " that 

 intrigue and bribe for municipal contracts and privileges.* Do 

 they differ from those of the ward heelers that conspire for 

 places they are not fitted to fill, or of the public officials that 

 peddle protection to gamblers and harlots ? Inspect, again, those 

 of the illiterate and impoverished "gang" that flock to a State 

 Legislature to become the chartered pilferers of some metrop- 

 olis. Are they worse than those of the more intelligent and 

 prosperous "gang" that besiege the national Legislature for a 

 similar purpose on a greater scale ? Inspect, finally, those of the 

 people that revel in books on a Corsican barbarian, in series of 

 articles hideous with the atrocities of war, and in newspapers 

 reeking with vulgarity and crime ; that hear without a shudder 

 of the annual slaughter of victims more numerous than the 

 Greeks of the Anabasis ; \ that preach rancor and revenge toward 



* " Is it your men in the common walks of life," said Mayor Swift, of Chicago, quoted 

 in the Arena, April, 1897, p. 716, " that demand bribes and who receive bribes at the hands 

 of legislative bodies or of the Common Council ? No, it is your representative citizens, your 

 capitalists, your business men." I venture to add that the mayors of most American cities 

 could duplicate the same experience. 



f Dr. Andrew D. White has put the number at ten thousand and five hundred. He 

 shows that it has been increasing with frightful rapidity of late years. How shocking has 

 become the disregard of human life among people not belonging to the criminal class, may 

 be gathered from the mobbing and murder of Chinese in the West, and from the practice of 

 lynching, which has extended from the South to the North. Equally significant is the state- 

 ment of the leader of the Florida House early last May, on the Governor's message relative 

 to lynching, that the Southerner would always summarily punish any person guilty of crimi- 

 nal assault. Referring to " the unwritten but binding law of the land " which allows " a 



