-men, women, and children. He will chatter about things refined
and spiritual and godlike like himself, and he and the men who herd with
him will calmly adulterate the commodities they put upon the market and
which annually kill tens of thousands of babies and young children.

He will recoil at the suggestion of the horrid spectacle of two men
confronting each other with gloved hands in the roped arena, and at the
same time he will clamour for larger armies and larger navies, for more
destructive war machines, which, with a single discharge, will disrupt
and rip to pieces more human beings than have died in the whole history
of prize-fighting. He will bribe a city council for a franchise or a
state legislature for a commercial privilege; but he has never been
known, in all his sleep-walking history, to bribe any legislative body in
order to achieve any moral end, such as, for instance, abolition of
prize-fighting, child-labour laws, pure food bills, or old age pensions.

"Ah, but we do not stand for the commercial life," object the refined,
scholarly, and professional men. They are also sleep-walkers. They do
not stand for the commercial life, but neither do they stand against it
with all their strength. They submit to it, to the brutality and carnage
of it. They develop classical economists who announce that the only
possible way for men and women to get food and shelter is by the existing
method. They produce university professors, men who claim the _role_ of
teachers, and who at the same time claim that the austere ideal of
learning is passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence. They serve
the men who lead the commercial life, give to their sons somnambulistic
educations, preach that sleep-walking is the only way to walk, and that
the persons who walk otherwise are atavisms or anarchists. They paint
pictures for the commercial men, write books for them, sing songs for
them, act plays for them, and dose them with various drugs when their
bodies have grown gross or dyspeptic from overeating and lack of
exercise.

Then there are the good, kind somnambulists who don't prize-fight, who
don't play the commercial game, who don't teach and preach somnambulism,
who don't do anything except live on the dividends that are coined out of
the wan, white fluid that runs in the veins of little children, out of
mothers' tears, the blood of strong men, and the groans and sighs of the
old. The receiver is as bad as the