ere should
be sedulous care, to work out the better habits. And all these steps
should be taken with a view to ultimate reconciliation, forgiveness,
and the holier bond between parent and child.

But now can we take one step further? Can we dispose our minds
and our hearts in the same fashion toward oppressors? I have in
mind, for instance, the hard proprietors of houses who pitilessly
wring the last penny from their tenants; the cruel taskmasters who
drive the workers, sometimes only children not yet full-grown,
twelve and fifteen hours a day; the unscrupulous exploiters on a
large scale, who raise the price of the people's food, and in their
eagerness for fabulous gain conspire by every corrupt means to
crush their less crafty or less shameless competitors. As we hate
wrong, must we not hate them? Shall we assail greed and
exploitation merely in the abstract? What effect will that have?
Which one of the oppressors will not hypocritically assent to such
abstract denunciation? If we seek to produce a change, must we
not proceed to more specific allegations and point the finger of
scorn at the offenders, saying as the Prophet Nathan said to King
David: "Thou art the man"? Is it not necessary to arouse the
popular anger against the oppressors and to encourage hatred
against the hateful?

Clearly the case is not the same as that of the criminal in the dock.
He stands there dishonored; the evil he has done has been brought
home to him; he is covered with the garment of shame. But those
others are invested--despite the evil they have done and are still
doing--with every outward symbol of success; they triumph
defiantly over the better moral sense of the community; they
inhabit, as it were, impregnable citadels; they have harvested
unholy gains which no one seems strong enough to take from
them; and the influence they wield in consequence of their power
to benefit or harm is immense. Is it a wonder, then, that such
oppressors are branded as monsters, and that the hoarse note of
some of the Hebrew psalms is sometimes to be heard re-echoing in
the cry of the social radicals of our time--Let vengeance be visited
upon the wicked; let the oppressors be destroyed from the face of
the earth!

But the logical and inevitable conclusion of the thought I have
developed to-day is, that we are bound to recognize the
indefeasible worth latent even in the cruel exploiter and the
merciless expropriator. I have already sufficiently indi