and respect of decent men; are unworthy to be called real men because of their tyrannical abuse of their helpless brothers.

William Booth, president of the Salvation Army, Jack London, the socialist novelist, Jacob Riis, the New York newspaper idealist, Maud Ballington Booth, the leader of the Volunteers of America, Charles Montgomery, of San Francisco, the prisoner's friend, and Dana Bartlett, of Los Angeles, the brother of poor "Dagoes," Portuguese and Mexicans, are all more or less widely diverse examples of contemporaneous rebellion and protest against existing social conditions. Each works in his own way to ameliorate these conditions, but the work of each is a protest against those laws of supply and demand, of competition, of worship of material things, that allow it to be possible that some men can gain more wealth than they can ever utilize, even if they lived to be ten thousand years old, and never earn another cent, whilst others can earn barely enough to keep body and soul together and who live every day in dread of the future because they are capable of earning no more than enough to keep them one, two, or three meals away from starvation.

In a copy of his book, The People of the Abyss, which Jack London sent to me, which truthfully portrays the life of the submerged tenth of London, he wrote something like this on the title page;

"Dear James-With the facts of these pages before me, I may agree with you in your favorite quotation from Browning, that 'God's in his heaven,' but I cannot agree with you that All's right with the world.'"

It is the fashion with certain people to decry Jack London's socialism, but I happen to know that he has personally sacrificed thousands of dollars to his principles in this matter, has lost the friendship of many wealthy people who would have showered their gifts upon him had he been complacent towards what he calls "predatory wealth," hence I hail his acts of contemporaneous rebellion and his taking upon himself of the battle for these, his weaker brothers and sisters, as heroic, and fully worthy of the highest esteem of all good men, whatever they may think of the methods by which he would bring about the desired changes.

All through his life there has been a strong current of contemporaneous rebellion and belligerent sincerity in the work of the poet of the Sierras, Joaquin Miller. He was brought up as a Quaker and taught to believe in non-resistance, hence he preached peace at the beginning of the Civil War until his printing office was wrecked and his life threatened. When the world at large was condemning the Indian, he went and stood by his side, and when he believed him to be in the right, fought battles on his behalf. All through his life he has

boldly stood for man's larger freedom, and against entrenched tyranny. When England made war upon the Boers, he denounced the warlike and jingo politicians with a power and strength seldom surpassed in poetry, in spite of the fact that the English had always been his best friends and the largest purchasers of his poems.

While he lived in California, not far from San Francisco, and California was a hotbed of the sentiment that demands the exclusion of the Chinese and Japanese, he ever fearlessly and in unmistakable terms denounced this action as opposed to the fundamental principles of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, and demanded of his fellow citizens that they adhere strictly to these never-failing and abiding truths.

These men are but few of the many I might mention, but they will serve as types. They have been and are willing to suffer for the general good of mankind. Therefore, in the presence of their moral heroism and courage, let us cry with George Linnæus Banks:

I live to learn their story

Who've suffered for my sake,

To emulate their glory,

And to follow in their wake;

Bards, patriots, martyrs, sages,
The noble of all ages,

Whose deeds crowd history's pages

And Time's great volume make.

I live . . .

For the cause that lacks assistance,
For the wrong that needs resistance,
For the future in the distance,
And the good that I can do.

CHAPTER XVII

RADIANCIES OF SINCERITY

We need more of the virtue of belligerent sin

E

cerity. What the world needs to-day is bold, outspokenness for principle. It is not enough that we hold principles in the quietude of our own homes and discuss them in the sanctity of our bedrooms. We need a belligerent sincerity of fundamental principles in the mart, the store, in the counting house, in the bank, on the board of trade, and the stock exchange. The tendency of men in office and men in employment is to be subservient for the purpose of their own advancement. It is so easy to yield a principle to gain an increase in salary or to win the support of a swaying party vote. In this age of great aggregations of capital, when corporations are conducting gigantic enterprises, it is so easy for subordinates to place all the responsibility of conscience upon their chiefs and to refuse to accept responsibility for acts of which they themselves are the instruments on the plea, "I am but a servant and carry out the will of my superior." Relentless crushing out of competitors, secretly securing rebates, unjust