"Everybody owns everybody else. Everybody follows, no one leads his own life. No one has any initiative. Everybody examines your moral conduct, and dictates the term of your existence. How can one have a religion, if he must live up to the faith of everybody else? How can we live if we must follow the dull and noble examples of those who are dead and never knew any better? Everybody listens to what the people say, and no one hears his own voice. This is an age of machinery. There are no more individuals; there are automatic walking and working machines which have been wound up by public opinion to run so many hours according to a well-approved system of regulations. 'What's the use of common-sense?' says a character in one of Jacob Gordin's plays. 'What's the use of common-sense when we have a Constitution?' Thousands of fools are kneeling before the fetish of public opinion. 'What will the people say?' they all ask. Nothing, I say, nothing. The people never say anything. They only talk. Individuals say it all. Those who depend upon others, who see strength in union are weaklings. United we fall, divided we stand. Those who dare to tread in the path of freedom, who dare to do things and say things, who own their bodies and never raise any mortgages on their souls, who make their own morality--they are the people who advance the world's progress and help to civilize our civilization. They have nearly always been called bad by their contemptible contemporaries--yet they represented all the goodness worth having. God give us the men who have virtue enough to do as they please, and courage enough to shock their neighbors. "But it's all system and monotony and imitation with the majorities, and a lot of slavish, knavish, puny and pious little beings, afraid of their own voices and not daring to draw their breath any more often than their neighbors do, and with whom morality and sanity is a matter of majority rule--beings like these are called the good people. "This idea must be reversed. We must come to realize the utter badness of the conventional, crawling, yours-truly-for-a-consideration, good people. Also we must come to realize the supreme goodness of so-called bad people--people who are too religious to go to church--to whom tyranny of any kind is the height of immorality, and slavery the depth of it. We must have more bad people to save this wicked world. And heaven save us from most of the good people of to-day. "It is one of those 'dumb-driven cattle' that I tried to pay my respects to in my paper--one of those cattle that here in democratic America become leaders of men. They do not know that the progress of the world has been built upon discarded customs and broken laws--but let us go down the street. I must have a drink of something before I can solve the problem to your satisfaction--or even convince myself that I am right." VII "The Goodness of a Bad Man"