y and mentally developed by
leisure, and proud and jealous of its leisure. This class is always
class-conscious; its groups, however antagonistic, always stand together
against the class of toil. Its combination of leisure and wealth is
conditioned on the power of taking tribute from the labor of many. In
order to do this with safety, it must control political power, the
military outfit, the power of making, interpreting and executing the laws,
and the forces forming public opinion.

Before the advent of industrialism and political democracy, it secured its
income by controlling the land and the government of nations; and the
effects of its control can be read in the condition of the rural
population of Russia, Austria, Eastern Germany, Italy, France before the
Revolution, England, and especially Ireland. The development of industry
has changed the problem of economic and political control; but the
essentials remain, as we can see in the condition of industrial
communities and the history of labor legislation.

The fundamental sin of all dominant classes has been the taking of
unearned incomes. Political oppression has always been a corollary of
economic parasitism, a means to an end. The combination of the two
constitutes the largest and most continuous form of organized evil in
human history.

Jesus used the illustration of pegs maliciously driven into the path to
make men stumble and fall. It would require some illustration drawn from
modern machinery to express the wholesale prostration of bodies and souls
where covetousness has secured continuous power and has been able to get
in its full work. Anyone who has ever looked with human understanding at
the undersized and stupid peasants of countries ruled by their landlord
class, or at the sordid homes and pleasures of miners or industrial
workers where some corporation feared neither God nor the law, ought to
get a comprehension of the power of evil that has rested like an iron yoke
on humanity.

We think most readily of the children of the poor as a product of
exploitation; underfed and overstimulated, cut off from the clean
pleasures of nature, often tainted with vice before knowledge has come,
and urged along by the appetites and cruel selfishness of older persons,
they are a standing accusation against society itself.(5) Jesus would have
felt that the children of the rich are an even worse product of
exploitation than the poor. When "society" plays, it burns u