ckly recruit
a majority of them for a holy war upon capital, and that they have the
political power to make such a holy war devastating.

The amateur of popular psychology may wonder why it is that the mob, in
the face of the repressions constantly practised in the United States,
does not occasionally rise in revolt, and so get back its right to be
wooed and ravished by all sorts of mountebanks. Theoretically it has
that right, and what is more, it has the means of regaining it; nothing
could resist it if it made absolute free speech an issue in a national
campaign and voted for the candidate advocating it. But something is
overlooked here, and that is the fact that the mob has no liking for
free speech _per se_. Some of the grounds of its animosity we have
rehearsed. Others are not far to seek. One of them lies in the mob's
chronic suspicion of all advocates of ideas, born of its distaste for
ideas themselves. The mob-man cannot imagine himself throwing up his job
and deserting his home, his lodge and his speakeasy to carry a new
gospel to his fellows, and so he is inclined to examine the motives of
any other man who does so. The one motive that is intelligible to him is
the desire for profit, and he commonly concludes at once that this is
what moves the propagandist before him. His reasoning is defective, but
his conclusion is usually not far from wrong. In point of fact, idealism
is not a passion in America, but a trade; all the salient idealists make
a living at it, and some of them, for example, Dr. Bryan and the Rev.
Dr. Sunday, are commonly believed to have amassed large fortunes. For an
American to advocate a cause without any hope of private usufruct is
almost unheard of; it would be difficult to find such a man who was not
plainly insane. The most eloquent and impassioned of American idealists
are candidates for public office; on the lower levels idealism is no
more than a hand-maiden of business, like advertising or belonging to
the Men and Religion Forward Movement.

Another and very important cause of the proletarian's failure to whoop
for free speech is to be found in his barbarous delight in persecution,
regardless of the merits of the cause. The spectacle of a man exercising
the right of free speech yields, intrinsically, no joy, for there is
seldom anything dramatic about it. But the spectacle of a man being
mobbed, jailed, beaten and perhaps murdered for trying to exercise it is
a good show like any o