iven idea produces that form of inhibition called
conservatism, and to this vice people of so-called culture are
especially prone. It takes recklessness to be a social experimentalist
or really to get in touch with humanity. Our careful humanitarians, our
charitable ones, never do, for they stick to their conservatism. How we
do fashion our own fetters, from chains to corsets, and from gods to
governments. Oh, how I wish I were a fine lean satirist!--with a great
black-snake whip of sarcasm to scourge the smug and genial ones, the
self-righteous, charitable, and respectable ones! How I would lay the
lash on corpulent content and fat faith with folds in its belly; chin
and hands[3]; those who try to beat their breast-bone through layers of
fat! Oh, this rotund reverence of morality! 'Meagre minds,' mutters
George Moore, and my gorge rises in stuttering rage to get action on
them. Verily such morality as your ordinary conservative person
professes has an organic basis: it has its seat in those vestiges of
muscles that would still wag our abortive tails, and often do wag our
abortive tongues.

"To arouse such fat ones to any onward flight it may take the tremendous
impact of a revolution. It may take many upheavals of the seismic soul
of man before the hobgoblins of authority are finally laid in the
valley.

"How many free spirits have been caught and hampered in the quagmire of
conservatism. Yet they have the homing instinct of all winged things:
they return to the soul and seek to throw off the fat and heavy flesh of
social stupidity. Many great free spirits there have been who possess
this orientation of the race and have brought us tidings of the
promised land. How many thundering spirits have commanded us to march by
the tongued and livid lightning of their prophetic souls, but how few of
us have done so! Why, to me, this world is a halting hell of
hitching-posts and of truculent troughs for belching swineherds. The
universe has no goal that we know of unless Eternity be the aim; let us
then have the modesty of the Cosmos, and no other modesty, and be
content to know our course, and be sure to run it.

"I have tried for freedom, indeed, everywhere, but I find the 'good
ones' always in my way. How well I know the cost of my attempt! My heavy
heart and my parched and choking throat, they know! I may indeed beat my
breast alone in the darkness in a silent prayer for freedom and hear no
response from the haunting hollo