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.
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