And how smoothly and automatically the system worked! How these dignitaries stood together, and held up each other’s hands, maintaining the august tradition, the atmosphere of authority and power! The bishops praising the editors, and the editors praising the professors, and the professors praising the bishops! And when the circle was completed, what _lése_ _majesté_ it seemed for an ordinary mortal to oppose their conclusions! The bishops, one perceived, were “orthodox”--that is to say they were concerned with barren formulas; and they were “spiritual”--they were concerned with imaginary future states of bliss. The editors were “safe” and “conservative”--that is to say, their souls were dead and their eyes were sealed and their god was property. And when it came to the selecting of the college professors, of the men who were to guide and instruct the forthcoming generations--what precautions would be taken then! What consultations and investigations, what testimonials and interviews and examinations! For after all, in these new days, it could be no easy matter to find men whose minds were sterilized, who could face without blenching all the horrors of the capitalist regime! Who could see courts and congresses bought and sold; who could see children ground up in mills and factories, and women driven by the lash of want to sell their bodies; who could see the surplus of the world’s wealth squandered in riot and debauchery, and the nations armed and drilled and sent out to slaughter each other in the quest for more. Who could know that all these things existed, and yet remain in their cloistered halls and pursue the placid ways of scholarship; who could teach history which regarded them as inevitable; who could care for literature that had been made for the amusement of slave-drivers, and art which existed for the sake of art, and not for the sake of humanity; who could know everything that was useless, and teach everything that was uninteresting, and could be dead at once to the warnings of the past, and to all that was vital and important in the present. Section 11. Not since he had discovered the master-key of Evolution had Thyrsis come upon any set of ideas that meant so much to him. It was not that these were new to him--they were the stuff out of which his whole life had been made; but here they were ordered and systematized--he had a handle by which to take hold of them. The name of this handle was “the economic interpretation of history”. And its import was that ideas did not come by hazard, or out of the air, but were products of social conditions; and that when one knew by what method the wealth of any community was produced, and by what class its “surplus value” was appropriated--then and then only could one understand the arts and customs, the sciences and religions, which that community would evolve.