eless souls at an
average cost of less than ten dollars a head."

Of the larger cities of the land, only Zenith had hesitated to submit
its vices to Mike Monday and his expert reclamation corps. The more
enterprising organizations of the city had voted to invite him--Mr.
George F. Babbitt had once praised him in a speech at the Boosters'
Club. But there was opposition from certain Episcopalian and
Congregationalist ministers, those renegades whom Mr. Monday so finely
called "a bunch of gospel-pushers with dish-water instead of blood, a
gang of squealers that need more dust on the knees of their pants and
more hair on their skinny old chests." This opposition had been
crushed when the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce had reported to a
committee of manufacturers that in every city where he had appeared, Mr.
Monday had turned the minds of workmen from wages and hours to higher
things, and thus averted strikes. He was immediately invited.

An expense fund of forty thousand dollars had been underwritten; out on
the County Fair Grounds a Mike Monday Tabernacle had been erected,
to seat fifteen thousand people. In it the prophet was at this moment
concluding his message:

"There's a lot of smart college professors and tea-guzzling slobs in
this burg that say I'm a roughneck and a never-wuzzer and my knowledge
of history is not-yet. Oh, there's a gang of woolly-whiskered book-lice
that think they know more than Almighty God, and prefer a lot of Hun
science and smutty German criticism to the straight and simple Word
of God. Oh, there's a swell bunch of Lizzie boys and lemon-suckers and
pie-faces and infidels and beer-bloated scribblers that love to fire off
their filthy mouths and yip that Mike Monday is vulgar and full of mush.
Those pups are saying now that I hog the gospel-show, that I'm in it
for the coin. Well, now listen, folks! I'm going to give those birds a
chance! They can stand right up here and tell me to my face that I'm a
galoot and a liar and a hick! Only if they do--if they do!--don't faint
with surprise if some of those rum-dumm liars get one good swift poke
from Mike, with all the kick of God's Flaming Righteousness behind the
wallop! Well, come on, folks! Who says it? Who says Mike Monday is a
fourflush and a yahoo? Huh? Don't I see anybody standing up? Well, there
you are! Now I guess the folks in this man's town will quit listening to
all this kyoodling from behind the fence; I guess you'll quit listen