There are just two ways in which those designated as the “lower classes” might become the means of our undoing: Some of “the interests” which have respectable standing might persuade, deceive, wheedle, or inflame them into the support of some evil that they could not originate; or, long-continued injustice and repression might lead to an explosion. No significant explosion of the classes in question will be brought about in any other way. In other words, what makes the “lower classes” dangerous, as far as they are dangerous, is the respectable classes. The depravity of our respectable thinking upon social and political interests shows itself, thus, in the actual (though, of course, unintended) meanness of blaming others where we ourselves deserve the blame, and even of attributing to others the evils that we cause through them when we use them for our own ends. 5--Nothing is more characteristic of respectability than its habit of finding exalted reasons for justifying conventional conduct, whatever it is. High ground for our conventional domestic conduct is found in the unalterable nature of the sexes, or in a trust committed by society, or in some ancient scripture. Reason for unlimited profit-getting is found by manufacturing psychology to order (the pseudo-psychology of the motives for enterprise), and in the old, comfortable middle-class self-sophistication that asserts that private selfishness is the best way to serve the common good. In ecclesiastical matters we have been much pushed in later years to find divinely good reasons for our customary conformities, such as saying in worship what we do not mean; keeping straight faces in the presence of small men arrayed in large historical and institutional dignities; supporting a denominationalism that we say we deplore, and excusing an evangelism that obviously needs an explanation. We are put to it to place all these things within a system of rational thought, but we manage to do it, though it takes some culture to accomplish the feat. In education--I speak from the inside--it is positively funny how many old and creaky things, and how few new things can be justified by mere guesses. This respectable habit of finding that we always are in every respect respectable makes it next to impossible for us to repent for even the deeper wrongs of conventional social practice. Even the harlots, Jesus declared, enter the Kingdom of Heaven before those who could give twenty reasons why harlots cannot get in at all.