y of a half-starved child of six that made
it work twelve hours every night in a Southern cotton mill, these sisters
of Judy O'Grady attacked my private life and called me an "agitator"--as
though that, forsooth, settled the argument.

Nor did I fare better with the masters themselves. I had expected to
find men who were clean, noble, and alive, whose ideals were clean,
noble, and alive. I went about amongst the men who sat in the high
places--the preachers, the politicians, the business men, the professors,
and the editors. I ate meat with them, drank wine with them, automobiled
with them, and studied them. It is true, I found many that were clean
and noble; but with rare exceptions, they were not _alive_. I do verily
believe I could count the exceptions on the fingers of my two hands.
Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, there
were merely the unburied dead--clean and noble, like well-preserved
mummies, but not alive. In this connection I may especially mention the
professors I met, the men who live up to that decadent university ideal,
"the passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence."

I met men who invoked the name of the Prince of Peace in their diatribes
against war, and who put rifles in the hands of Pinkertons with which to
shoot down strikers in their own factories. I met men incoherent with
indignation at the brutality of prize-fighting, and who, at the same
time, were parties to the adulteration of food that killed each year more
babies than even red-handed Herod had killed.

I talked in hotels and clubs and homes and Pullmans, and steamer-chairs
with captains of industry, and marvelled at how little travelled they
were in the realm of intellect. On the other hand, I discovered that
their intellect, in the business sense, was abnormally developed. Also,
I discovered that their morality, where business was concerned, was nil.

This delicate, aristocratic-featured gentleman, was a dummy director and
a tool of corporations that secretly robbed widows and orphans. This
gentleman, who collected fine editions and was an especial patron of
literature, paid blackmail to a heavy-jowled, black-browed boss of a
municipal machine. This editor, who published patent medicine
advertisements and did not dare print the truth in his paper about said
patent medicines for fear of losing the advertising, called me a
scoundrelly demagogue because I told him that his political economy