"Just now our city is being held up by the police, and at the point of a club told to be good and pious and religious. We are told not to breathe, or sigh, or sneeze, or smile, or show any signs of life on Sunday. Orders to stop the circulation of our blood on that day have not yet been issued, but everything comes to those who wait--every evil comes to those who have over-zealous pietists among them. To heaven, or be damned. It is a case of your adherence, or your life. You must be killed, or cured. Now in this disregard of disbelievers, the narrowness of vision and hurtful overzeal, I discern something immoral. "Yet it is a matter of principle to spread whatever gospel one has been captured by. Personally, I have never been so tortured by any as by those people who wished to save me, and out of justice to them, I must say that they tortured me according to their highest principles. It must be admitted that there is an amount of good and pleasure for the agitator, involved in agitation, yet his work cannot, generally, be called moral on the ground that it conduces to happiness, because he is only one, and those whom he is molesting to save are many. "And so many of those who sacrifice and abnegate and deny themselves, who neglect nature, ignore the laws of their being, emaciate their bodies and starve their souls, is it not immoral of them to weaken their constitutions, minds and spirits, and diminish their power for positive good in the world? In the end, are not many of them miserably misled by their highest principles? "If he loseth the world, what shall it profit a man that he gaineth his soul? Of what earthly use is a soul, without a wicked world to use it in? To what good is a soul without all the opportunities of losing it? "Alone in the mountains, far from the madding crowd, it is easy to be sane and soulful and saintly; but to me, every effort to separate the soul from the world is immoral, though it is in accord with some lofty principles. The soul outside of the world is a tramp who shirks work. To remain in the world, to do, to work, to wage war against weakness, to live strongly and have no fear--that is the soul doing its duty, and sowing happiness for all. "And speaking of happiness for others, in the first place, it is not right to force it upon others against their consent, and in the second place, it is wrong to do it at the expense of your own welfare. Do all that you can for yourself first, or you are not justified in trying to manage other lives on a better basis. I believe in perfection, but I believe that as much of it as is possible should begin with the perfectionists. I believe that nothing is worth doing, unless there is a sound reason for it. I believe in egoism. Altruism may have done much good, but I pity the Altruists, who have enervated, weakened and impoverished themselves by their mostly futile attempts to help others. "Largely, altruism is an attempt to do for others what you cannot do for yourself.