These which have been described are the positive and more genial aspects of the bourgeois civilisation; the savage and terrible remain to be mentioned. For it must be understood that this civilisation of comfort and respectability furnishes its good things only to a class, and to an exceedingly small class. The majority of mankind it pens up in filthy hovels and tenements, to feed upon husks and rot in misery. This was once easy, but now it is growing harder—and thus little by little the _bourgeoisie_ is losing its temper. Just now it is like a fat poodle by a stove—you think it is asleep and venture to touch it, when quick as a flash it has put its fangs in you to the bone. The bourgeois civilisation is, in one word, an organised system of repression. In the physical world it has the police and the militia, the bludgeon, the bullet, and the jail; in the world of ideas it has the political platform, the school, the college, the press, the church—and literature. The bourgeois controls these things precisely as he controls the labour of society, by his control of the purse-strings. Unless proper candidates are named by political parties, there are no campaign funds; unless proper teachers and college presidents are chosen, there are no endowments. Thus it happens that our students are taught a political economy carefully divorced, not merely from humanity, but also from science, history, and sense; any other kind of political economy the student sometimes despises—more commonly he does not even know that it exists. And it is just the same with the churches and with theology. We have at present established in this land a religion which exists in the name of the world’s greatest revolutionist, the founder of the Socialist movement; this man denounced the bourgeois and the bourgeois ideal more vehemently than ever it has since been denounced—declaring in plain words that no bourgeois could get into Heaven; and yet his church is to-day, in all its forms, and in every civilised land, the main pillar of bourgeois society! With the press the bourgeois has a still more direct method than endowment; the press he owns. All the daily newspapers in New York, for instance, are the property of millionaires, and are run by them in their own interests, exactly the same as their stables or their _cuisine_. That does not mean, of course, that many of their journalistic menials are not sincere—it does not mean that the college presidents and clergymen may not be sincere. One of the quaintest things about the bourgeois editor, the bourgeois college president, the bourgeois clergyman, is the whole-souled naïveté with which he takes it for granted that just as all civilisation exists for the comfort of the bourgeois, so also all truth must necessarily be such as the bourgeois would desire it to be.