In the city of Toulouse, in southern France, a young man named Calas committed suicide, as result of religious mania; he was a member of a Protestant family, and the Catholic authorities in Toulouse accused the father of having murdered the boy to keep him from turning Catholic. They had no shred of evidence, but they cruelly tortured the old man, and finally executed him, and confiscated the property of the family. Voltaire took up the case in a frenzy of indignation; he employed investigators and lawyers, he wrote pamphlets and circulated them, he wrote innumerable letters and appeals; for three years he devoted his time to making the case a political and religious issue in France. No man could have displayed nobler public spirit, or more genuine human sympathy; for three years, so he wrote, he never smiled without feeling that he had committed a crime. When at last the verdict of the Toulouse courts was reversed, he fell into the arms of one of the Calas lads, and wept like a child. He said--he, the veteran playwright: “This is the most splendid fifth act I have ever seen on any stage!” There came one such case after another. Just as in Russia the Black Hundreds spread the rumor that the Jews were accustomed to shed the blood of Christian children, so this Catholic machine made war on the Protestants by accusing them of hideous crimes. Voltaire espoused the “Sirven case” in the same fury of indignation; it had taken the courts two hours to condemn the victims, he said, and nine years to do them justice! Out of his agony of protest came one of his greatest works, the “Treatise on Toleration”--burned by the hangman, like everything else. Also there came his immortal slogan, which he took to putting on all his letters: “Écrasez l’infame”--that is, crush the infamous thing, meaning Catholic absolutism. Now America also has its “infame,” which is capitalist absolutism; and we await the arrival of some man of letters, capable of the heroic and unselfish idealism of Voltaire. To him there were brought ten or a dozen cases of cruelty and torture in the course of twenty years; but hardly a month passes that my mail does not contain a story of cruelty and torture equally hideous, committed by the powers which are now destroying liberty and enlightenment in America. Consider, for example, the case of the Centralia prisoners, a story of brutality, torture, murder, terrorism, and the subornation of the law by the lumber barons of the Northwest; a story just as pitiful, just as revolting, just as worthy of Voltaire’s immortal slogan. “If you are not careful,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you will be accused of putting propaganda into this chapter!”