Nor did I fare better with the masters themselves. I had expected to
find men who were clean, noble, and alive, whose ideals were clean,
noble, and alive. I went about amongst the men who sat in the high
places--the preachers, the politicians, the business men, the
professors, and the editors. I ate meat with them, drank wine with
them, automobiled with them, and studied them. It is true, I found
many that were clean and noble; but with rare exceptions, they were
not ALIVE. I do verily believe I could count the exceptions on the
fingers of my two hands. Where they were not alive with rottenness,
quick with unclean life, there were merely the unburied dead--clean
and noble, like well-preserved mummies, but not alive. In this
connection I may especially mention the professors I met, the men who
live up to that decadent university ideal, "the passionless pursuit
of passionless intelligence."
I met men who invoked the name of the Prince of Peace in their
diatribes against war, and who put rifles in the hands of Pinkertons
with which to shoot down strikers in their own factories.
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