The blindness of them, not to see it! Whichever way we turn, where the selfishness crops out that is where the mistake is made that forfeits public sympathy, while it holds up the cause of human progress. Capital earns its fair reward. Promptly it seeks to crush out its neighbor—calls it protecting its own interests, as though we were so many beasts of prey whose appetites were the one thing we had in common; proclaims from the house-tops the age-old doctrine of privilege—God-given privilege!—from which the world has been trying for centuries to get away; calls the President of the United States, when he tries to make peace, a tinkering politician; and sits in the high seat of the constitution, as if it were made for the protection of property only and had nothing whatever to do with the people! I yield to no man in my respect for the constitution of our land. It is so great and so real that I object to having it worked up into either a sceptre to coerce men, or a fetish to cajole them, as much as I object to having the Bible used that way. I take the constitution to be a human document, the record of action taken by wise and patriotic men to meet emergencies that arose in their day. Unless we are to assume that wisdom died with them; that human experience was completed and bound in volumes to file away on dusty shelves, with nothing more ever to happen that requires judgment or action; or unless we are to confess ourselves unable to take such action when the time comes, we shall be wise to drop the fetish business and to deal with the constitution as men capable of defending their lives and their liberties, including the right to work, and the right not to be frozen to death at the dictation of a half dozen coal kings, upon any plane upon which those liberties may be attacked. This intense regard for the constitution, that is wont to develop in men and newspapers in exact ratio as their love of the brother dies, always suggests to me the fatal ritualism that is akin to the letter that killeth. Something has to make up for that which has been lost; but nothing ever can.