If you should chance to consult a Methodist, a Baptist, a Presbyterian, a Lutheran, or any other current American sectarian, on this subject you would find (which after all is a dull thing to point out at this day and date) that his conception of the things which he sees about him is bounded by what he was taught in his Sunday School or his church, or what he has stored up or gathered from the conventions of his native town. (His native town! Kind heaven!) And although the world has stored up endless treasures in chemistry, sociology, history, philosophy, still the millions and millions who tramp the streets and occupy the stores and fill the highways and byways and the fields and the tenements have no faintest knowledge of this, or of anything else that can be said to be intellectually “doing.” They live in theories and isms, and under codes dictated by a church or a state or an order of society which has no least regard for or relationship to their natural mental development. The darkest side of democracy, like that of autocracy, is that it permits the magnetic and the cunning and the unscrupulous among the powerful individuals to sway vast masses of the mob, not so much to their own immediate destruction as to the curtailment of their natural privileges and the ideas which they should be allowed to entertain if they could think at all--and incidentally to the annoying and sometimes undoing of individuals who have the truest brain interests of the race at heart: vide Giordano Bruno! Jan Huss! Savonarola! Tom Paine! Walt Whitman! Edgar Allan Poe!