his is the dictum of the man who walks in
his sleep. He prates about it, and writes to the papers about it, and
worries the legislators about it. There is nothing of the brute about
_him_. He is a sublimated soul that treads the heights and breathes
refined ether--in self-comparison with the prize-fighter. The man who
walks in his sleep ignores the flesh and all its wonderful play of
muscle, joint, and nerve. He feels that there is something godlike in
the mysterious deeps of his being, denies his relationship with the
brute, and proceeds to go forth into the world and express by deeds that
something godlike within him.

He sits at a desk and chases dollars through the weeks and months and
years of his life. To him the life godlike resolves into a problem
something like this: _Since the great mass of men toil at producing
wealth_, _how best can he get between the great mass of men and the
wealth they produce_, _and get a slice for himself_? With tremendous
exercise of craft, deceit, and guile, he devotes his life godlike to this
purpose. As he succeeds, his somnambulism grows profound. He bribes
legislatures, buys judges, "controls" primaries, and then goes and hires
other men to tell him that it is all glorious and right. And the
funniest thing about it is that this arch-deceiver believes all that they
tell him. He reads only the newspapers and magazines that tell him what
he wants to be told, listens only to the biologists who tell him that he
is the finest product of the struggle for existence, and herds only with
his own kind, where, like the monkey-folk, they teeter up and down and
tell one another how great they are.

In the course of his life godlike he ignores the flesh--until he gets to
table. He raises his hands in horror at the thought of the brutish
prize-fighter, and then sits down and gorges himself on roast beef, rare
and red, running blood under every sawing thrust of the implement called
a knife. He has a piece of cloth which he calls a napkin, with which he
wipes from his lips, and from the hair on his lips, the greasy juices of
the meat.

He is fastidiously nauseated at the thought of two prize-fighters
bruising each other with their fists; and at the same time, because it
will cost him some money, he will refuse to protect the machines in his
factory, though he is aware that the lack of such protection every year
mangles, batters, and destroys out of all humanness thousands of
working