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verse's deeper reaches." Perhaps the young clergyman recognized this

as the test of the Christian temper, at any rate he required little assent

to dogma or miracle, and assured me that while both the ministry and

the officers of his church were obliged to subscribe to doctrines of well'

known severity, the faith required of the laity was almost early Chris'

tian in its simplicity. I was conscious of no change from my childish

acceptance of the teachings of the Gospels, but at this moment something persuasive within made me long for an outward symbol of fellow'

ship, some bond of peace, some blessed spot where unity of spirit

might claim right of way over all differences. There was also growing

within me an almost passionate devotion to the ideals of democracy,

and when in all history had these ideals been so thrillingly expressed as

when the faith of the fisherman and the slave had been boldly opposed

to the accepted moral belief that the well-being of a privileged few

might justly be built upon the ignorance and sacrifice of the many?

Who was I, with my dreams of universal fellowship, that I did not

identify myself with the institutional statement of this belief, as it

stood in the little village in which I was born, and without which testimony in each remote hamlet of Christendom it would be so easy for

the world to slip back into the doctrines of selection and aristocracy?

In one of the intervening summers between these European journeys I visited a western state where I had formerly invested a sum of

money in mortgages. I was much horrified by the wretched conditions

among the farmers, which had resulted from a long period of drought,

and one forlorn picture was fairly burned into my mind. A number of

starved hogs —collateral for a promissory note —were huddled into an

open pen. Their backs were humped in a curious, camel-like fashion,

and they were devouring one of their own number, tbe latest victim of

absolute starvation or possibly merely the one least able to defend himself against their voracious hunger. The farmer's wife looked on indifferently, a picture of despair as she stood in the door of the bare, crude

house, and the two children behind her, whom she vainly tried to keep

out of sight, continually thrust forward their faces almost covered by

masses of coarse, sunburned hair, and their little bare feet so black, so

hard, the great cracks so filled with dust that they looked like flattened

hoofs. The children could not be compared to anything so joyous as

satyrs, although they appeared but half-human. It seemed to me quite

impossible to receive interest from mortgages placed upon farms which