This New England plutocracy selects with meticulous care the professors who train its young. These trainers are required to be gentlemen of the most extreme conventionality; and they are none of them drunkards, and none of them epileptics, and they do not publicly manifest their Christian sympathy for prostitutes, however beautiful in spirit. On the contrary, they wear their neckties exactly right, and understand and respect all those subtleties which mark the distinction between students who have “made” the great secret societies and students who have failed. William Lyon Phelps, “Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale University,” signs himself also “Member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters,” a most august body of literary nonentities. If anyone of the characters in the novels of Dostoievski were to accompany Professor Phelps to one of the sessions of this august body, the other members would evacuate the hall. If Dostoievski himself were alive, and writing in the United States today, the masters of this august body would be just as apt to invite him to their membership as they are to invite Theodore Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson. Very well then; what is the purpose of “the Christian religion,” what is the meaning of the “spirituality” of Yale? Manifestly, it has no relationship to the young plutocrats of New England. It is an official religion, and its application is to the wealth-producing classes. Its aim is to teach American wage-slaves to kiss the hand which lashes them--precisely as poor sick Dostoievski kissed the Russian Tsardom. It is to provide a mystical basis for the American Legion--just as Dostoievski’s glorification of the Slavic soul prepared the way for the “Black Hundreds.” When Professor Phelps says that “the teachings of the New Testament” are better than all four of the gifts of “wealth or ease or comfort or health,” he is not making a literary criticism, nor is he saying anything that he means; he is peddling the standard dope which priests and preachers of ruling classes have been feeding to the workers through a hundred thousand years. Says Mrs. Ogi: “Some one ought to rewrite the Beatitudes according to the Bull-dog.” Says Ogi: “I have put all ten of them into one. It runs as follows: Blessed are the rich, for they have inherited the earth and you can’t get it away from them.” CHAPTER LXXXVI THE PEASANT COUNT