ot to be supposed that men slipped
deliberately into paganism; the human mind is not so sinister as it
is stupid nor so cruel as it is unimaginative nor so brutal as it
is complacent. For the most part we do not really understand, in
our daily lives, what we are about. Hence society degenerated, as
it always does, in the confident and stubborn belief that it was
improving the time and doing God's service. But He that sitteth in the
heavens must have laughed, He must have had us in derision!

For upon what law, natural, human, divine, has this new empire been
founded? That it has produced great humanists is gratefully
conceded; that real spiritual progress has issued from its incidental
cosmopolitanism is manifest; but which way has it fronted, what have
been its characteristic emphases and its controlling tendencies?
Let its own works testify. It has created a world of new and extreme
inequality, both in the distribution of material, of intellectual
and of spiritual goods. Here is a small group who own the land, the
houses, the factories, machinery and the tools. Here is a very large
group, without houses, without tools, without land or goods. At this
moment only 7 per cent of our 110,000,000 of American people have an
income of $3,000 or more; only 11/4 per cent have an income of $5,000
or more! What law produced and justifies such a society? The unwritten
law of heaven? No. The law of humanism, of Confucius and Buddha and
Epictetus and Aurelius? No. The law of naked individualism; of might;
force; cunning? Yes.

Here in our American cities are the overwealthy and the insolently
worldly people. They have their palatial town house, their broad
inland acres; some of them have their seaside homes, their fish and
game preserves as well. Here in our American cities are the alien, the
ignorant, the helpless, crowded into unclean and indecent tenements,
sometimes 1,000 human beings to the acre. What justifies a
pseudo-civilization which permits such tragic inequality of fortune?
Inequality of endowment? No. First, because there is no natural
inequality so extreme as that; secondly, because no one would dare
assert that these cleavages in the industrial state even remotely
parallel the corresponding cleavages in the distribution of ability
among mankind. What justifies it, then? The unwritten law of heaven?
No. The law of humanism? No. The law of the jungle? Yes.

Now for our second question. By what law, admitting many exc