The rich will learn in the dangers of a social revolution
     that the poor will not sacrifice both wealth and
     immortality.

What is to be done about this?  The question answers itself:  Step up, ladies and gentlemen, and empty your purses into the Psychical Research hat!  So that we may accumulate statistics as to the cost of milk and honey in Jerusalem the Golden!

You read what I had to say about Bootstrap-lifters, and the Wholesale Pickpockets’ Association making use of their incantations.  You admired my ability to sling language, but not my taste; and you certainly did not think that I would back my rhetoric with facts.  But what do these quotations mean, unless they mean what I have said?  Are not these three professors men of culture?  Are they not as “spiritual” as any men of learning you can find in our present-day society?

And now stop for a moment and put yourself in the position of the young student of the working-class, who goes to these books and discovers that truth is not truth, but only a bait for a snare.  Who discovers that professors of ethics, practical or impractical, are not interested in justice among men, but only in collecting funds for their specialty; that in order to get funds, they are willing to teach the rich how to paralyze the minds of the poor!  Do you wonder that such young students conclude that #bourgeois# thinkers do not know what honesty is, but are prostitutes, retainers and lackeys, to be kicked out of the temple of truth?

#Running the Rapids#

And now, can you form to yourselves a clear concept of what it means to society that practically all its moral teaching should be in the hands of men who are incapable of clean, straight thinking?  That all the intellectual prestige of the Church should be lent to the support of vagueness, futility, and deliberate evasion?  Here we are, all of us, caught in the most terrific social crisis of history; I search for a metaphor to picture our position, and I recall a canoe-trip in the wilds of Ontario, hundreds of miles down a long swift river.  You sit in the bow of the canoe, your partner in the stern, watching ahead; and there comes a slide of smooth green water, and you go over it, and into a torrent of foaming white, which seizes you and rushes you along with the speed of a race-horse.

With every sense alert, you watch for the rocks, and when you see one, you dip your paddle on one side or the other and with a quick motion draw the canoe clear of the danger.  If by any chance you fail to do it, over you go, and your partner with you, and all your belongings go down-stream, and maybe you are sucked into a whirlpool, and not seen for several hours afterwards.  Precisely like this is the voyage of life, for the whole of society and for every individual.  The paddle which would save us from the rocks is experimental science; but in most of our canoes we put a man who has no paddle, but a Holy Book; and he casts up his eyes and murmurs words in ancient Greek and Hebrew, and now and then, when he sees an especially formidable obstruction—­a war, or the gonococcus, or the I.W.W.—­he casts a holy wafer upon the foaming torrent.