2
Then reaching up the festering and varnished facades of your haughtiest moral dogmas, I write thereon in letters of blazing scorn:—“Lo and behold, all this is a fraud!”
Death! I say death to every lie!
I deny all things! I question all things!
And yet! And yet!—
—Gather around me O! ye death-defiant and the earth itself shall be thine, to have and to hold.
What is your “civilization and progress” if its only outcome is hysteria and downgoing?
What is “government and law” if their ripened harvests are men without sap?
What are “religions and literatures” if their grandest productions are hordes of faithful slaves?
What is “evolution and culture” if their noxious blossoms are sterilized women?
What is education and enlightment” if their deadsea-fruit is a caitiff race, with rotteness in its bones?
2
How is it that “men of light and leading” hardly ever call in question the manufactured “moral codes, under which they themselves are'born and tamed— under which our once vigorous Northern race is slowly and surely eating out its heart in peaceful inaction and laborious dry-rot?
Standard “moral principles” are arbitrarily assumed by their orthodox apologist to be a fixed and unalterable quantity, and that to doubt the divine-rightness of these “principles” is treason and sacrilege. When the greatest thinkers of a race are incapable, or afraid to perform their manifest and logical function, it is scarcely to be wondered that average citizens are also somewhat unwilling to “risk life, fortune and sacred honor” for the overthrow of popularized “right and wrong” concepts, that they know from bitter personal experience, are unworkable falsities. Although the average man feels in his heart that nearly all political and religious conventionalisms are dynamic deceits, yet how cautiously he avoids any
