rough this kind of intellectual fraud. If a doctor should appear who
offered a cure for tuberculosis on the ground that it was justified by
the Bible and that it conformed to the opinions of that great mass of the
American people who believe that fresh air is the devil, we should
promptly lock up that doctor as a dangerous quack. When the negroes of
Kansas were said to be taking pink pills to guard themselves against
Halley's Comet, they were doing something which appeared to them as
eminently practical and entirely reasonable. Not long ago we read of the
savage way in which a leper was treated out West; his leprosy was not
regarded as a disease, but as the curse of God, and, if I remember
correctly, the Bible was quoted in court as an authority on leprosy. The
treatment seemed entirely moral and squared very well with the conscience
of that community.

I have heard reputable physicians condemn a certain method of
psychotherapy because it was "immoral." A woman once told me that she had
let her son grow up ignorant of his sexual life because "a mother should
never mention anything 'embarrassing' to her child." Many of us are still
blushing for the way America treated Gorki when it found that Russian
morals did not square with the public conscience of America. And the time
is not yet passed when we punish the offspring of illicit love, and visit
vengeance unto the third and fourth generations. One reads in the report
of the Vice Commission that many public hospitals in Chicago refuse to
care for venereal diseases. The examples are endless. They run from the
absurd to the monstrous. But always the source is the same. Idols are set
up to which all the living must bow; we decide beforehand that things
must fit a few preconceived ideas. And when they don't, which is most of
the time, we deny truth, falsify facts, and prefer the coddling of our
theory to any deeper understanding of the real problem before us.

It seems as if a theory were never so active as when the reality behind
it has disappeared. The empty name, the ghostly phrase, exercise an
authority that is appalling. When you think of the blood that has been
shed in the name of Jesus, when you think of the Holy Roman Empire,
"neither holy nor Roman nor imperial," of the constitutional phrases that
cloak all sorts of thievery, of the common law precedents that tyrannize
over us, history begins to look almost like the struggle of man to
emancipate himself from phrase-w