“Don’t fool yourself; Rousseau actually was persecuted! And see what evidence he would have, if he were alive today, and could investigate this Babbitt case! The House of Morgan, on the corner of Broad and Wall streets, just across the way from the United States Treasury building; and the billion dollars which this House of Morgan made buying war supplies for the Allies; and the thirty billion dollars which the United States Treasury paid out to save the House of Morgan’s French and British loans; and the Boston connections of the House of Morgan, Lee, Higginson & Company, with their network of banks and trust companies; and the Lee-Higginson and Morgan control of the governing bodies of Harvard University; and Harvard’s answer to ‘The Goose-Step,’ the election of its distinguished graduate, Mr. J. P. Morgan, to its sacred band of overseers; and the Boston ‘Transcript,’ and the Harvard ‘Lampoon,’ and the Laski case, and the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and the Boston police strike, and Cal Coolidge, the queer prank that fate played on Boston’s aristocracy. Picture the situation in the year 1919, the days of Attorney-General Palmer; the Harvard mob smashing that police strike, and the hundred per cent patriotic plutocrats of Boston raiding the offices of the ‘Reds,’ and cracking the skulls of everybody they found there--” “The Harvard manner?” says Mrs. Ogi. “Throwing them into jail, or packing them by hundreds into rooms in office buildings without toilets, and shipping them back to Europe where they came from. And right in the midst of that campaign, in that same anno mirabile of 1919, comes our Babbitt professor--I mean our Professor Babbitt--with a schoolmaster’s ferule in one hand and a slung-shot in the other, scolding and at the same time committing mayhem upon every artist who in the past hundred and seventy-five years of history has ever had a human feeling. It is supposed to be a work of scholarship, of literary criticism; it is written to teach ‘decorum’--by such examples as this: ‘The humanitarian, all adrip with brotherhood, and profoundly convinced of the loveliness of his own soul.’ And again: ‘Both Rousseau and his disciple Robespierre were reformers in the modern sense--that is they are concerned not with reforming themselves, but other men.’ What is one going to do with a man like that?” “What did they do with them in the French revolution?” asks Mrs. Ogi. “Les aristocrats à la lanterne!” says her husband. “I’ve forgotten all my French,” says Mrs. Ogi, “and so will most of your readers. But I’ll tell you this--the professor sounds exactly like you, except that he’s on the other side!” CHAPTER XLVI THE POISONED RAT