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.
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