the word “commercial” as an epithet, who regards business enterprise as synonymous with graft and greed, who speaks of certain men as “self-made” and others as “educated,” who gives more attention to war than to peace, who seeks to destroy rather than to create and build up, is essentially un-American ❦ The word “education” sometimes stands for idleness, but the American Philosophy symbols work, effort, industry. It means intelligent, thoughtful, reasonable and wise busy-ness—helping yourself by helping others. ¶ The world’s greatest prizes in the future will go to the businessman. The businessman is our only scientist, and to him we must look for a Science of Economics that will eradicate poverty, disease, superstition—all that dissipates and destroys. The day is dawning! [Illustration] [Illustration] Freedom and Responsibility I am told that hospitals, jails, almshouses and insane-asylums are for people who are unable to care for themselves properly. Therefore, they are sent to these places, where men and women, specially delegated, spend their lives looking after them. ¶ So it seems that the incompetent, in addition to not adding to the wealth of the world, actually take competent people from a world of usefulness to minister to them. After a few years as a guard, the man is quite as incompetent as are the prisoners—and more so—because the prisoner works and the guard does nothing but guard. ¶ And for the man who works there is a chance; but the man who doesn’t is damned, body and soul. Hospitals, prisons and poorhouses are places where people live who can’t or won’t work. These places do not cure our bodily or social ills—they are palliatives, all. They do not prevent incompetence nor stop the production of the weak and incompetent. Every year we have to pull down our hospitals and build greater. Ben Lindsey, Luther Burbank, John Davey, Horace Fletcher, all men essentially of one type, are working to shut off the regular annual crop of criminals ❦ Preachers have preached their silly tales of where we came from and where we are going to, directing the attention of men from this world to another, and with myth, miracle, mystery—with dead languages, dead ideas and dead formulas—have scared the world stiff. That’s why we are sick. ¶ We have bred from the worst in the worst possible way, under the worst conditions ❦ We have it thundered at us from a million pulpits that the indissoluble marriage-tie was a sacred scheme, devised by God Almighty, who also provided that women shall be incarcerated in a kitchen. The result has been the doormat wife, with a liar for a husband—for men lie only to inferiors and tyrants—and a brood of legitimate candidates for hospitals, poorhouses and prisons. ¶ Christianity was absolutely supreme for a thousand years. Did she abolish poverty, disease and crime? Not exactly—these things increased under Christian rule. And Religion is not yet willing to step aside and give