open display of antagonism thereto? He has not the courage of his opinions. He is afraid to say openly what he thinks secretly. In other words he is living in a state of subjectiveness; of vassalage. He allows his brain to be dominated and held in bondage by the brain of another. From his infancy he has been deliberately subjected to a continous external pressure, especially designed to coerce his understanding into strict accord with pre-arranged views of moral, political or religious “duty.” He has not been permitted one moment of real mental liberty. He imbibed fraudulent conventionalisms with his mothers milk. He listens to the most hideous lies being glorified in his presence as sublime truths. He hears falsehoods sung in swelling chorus. He hears them sounded on bugles of silver and brass. He hears them intoned by “congregions of the faithful’’ amid peals of sacred music, and the solemn roll of chanted prayer. Thus his mind is sterilized by authority before it has had a chance to mature. Thus youth is mentally castrated, that its natural vitality may be afterwards used up in the yoke of custom which is the yoke of slavery. In the nursery, at school, and at college, plastic brain-pulp is deliberately forced into the pre-arranged mould. Everything that a corrupt civilization can do, is done to compress the growing intellect into un natural channels. Thus the great mass of men who inhabit the world of to-day have no initative, no originality or independence of thought, but are mere subjective individualities, who have never had the slightest voice in fashioning the ideals that they formally revere.
Although the average man has taken no part in manufacturing moral codes and statute laws, yet how he obeys them with clog-like submissiveness? He is trained to obedience, like oxen are broken to the yoke of their masters. He is a born thrall habituated from childhood to be governed by others.
Chinese civilization deliberately distorts its childrens feet, by swathing them in bandages of silk and hoopiron. Christian civilization crushes and cramps the minds of its youth by means of false philosophies, artificial moral codes and ironclad political creeds. Deleterous sub-theories of good and evil are systemat-
