orship. The devil can quote Scripture,
and law, and morality and reason and practicality. The devil can use the
public conscience of his time. He does in wars, in racial and religious
persecutions; he did in the Spain of the Inquisition; he does in the
American lynching.

For there is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral. Conquerors
have gone forth with the blessing of popes; a nation invokes its God
before beginning a campaign of murder, rape and pillage. The ruthless
exploitation of India becomes the civilizing fulfilment of the "white
man's burden"; not infrequently the missionary, drummer, and prospector
are embodied in one man. In the nineteenth century church, press and
university devoted no inconsiderable part of their time to proving the
high moral and scientific justice of child labor and human sweating. It
is a matter of record that chattel slavery in this country was deduced
from Biblical injunction, that the universities furnished brains for its
defense. Surely Bernard Shaw was not describing the Englishman alone when
he said in "The Man of Destiny" that "... you will never find an
Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you
on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles...."

Liberty, equality, fraternity--what a grotesque career those words have
had. Almost every attempt to mitigate the hardships of industrialism has
had to deal with the bogey of liberty. Labor organization, factory laws,
health regulations are still fought as infringements of liberty. And in
the name of equality what fantasies of taxation have we not woven? what
travesties of justice set up? "The law in its majestic equality," writes
Anatole France, "forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep in the
streets and to steal bread." Fraternity becomes the hypocritical slogan
by which we refuse to enact what is called "class legislation"--a policy
which in theory denies the existence of classes, in practice legislates
in favor of the rich. The laws which go unchallenged are laws friendly to
business; class legislation means working-class legislation.

You have to go among lawyers to see this idolatrous process in its most
perfect form. When a judge sets out to "interpret" the Constitution, what
is it that he does? He takes a sentence written by a group of men more
than a hundred years ago. That sentence expressed their policy about
certain conditions which they had to deal with. In it was su