In fact, those in advance are punished for their advanced ideas, are ostracised, maligned, mobbed and often imprisoned at the dictates of the middle class, while the rear class of mere thoughtless plodders cheer the proceedings when an advanced thinker is thus caught and punished. It has always been thus. Galileo was an early victim, so was Bruno, Savanarola, and a thousand other bright mental lights who threw beams of illumination far in advance of the thick-headed middle class. The thinker has always been a martyr to truth and justice. The man who would remove the mental fetters that chain the human mind, has always been treated as a heretic and traitor to good government and morality. And the mobs that are chained to the old fogyism are always ready to crucify the thinker who would dare devise means of setting them at liberty. The middle class are always insisting that they have arrived at the top of advanced ideas, and that it is an unpardonable sin to advance one single step farther. Whatever form of government is accepted by them is the right form, and the “crank” who would suggest anything different, is a bad man. And the unthinking plodders take up the cry and shout “Bad man!” at everybody who accepts the new theory. In fact, the plodding mob is used as a tail to the middle class kite, and as of material assistance in helping to hold the kite in proper position to catch the breeze. And it is because the advanced class refuse to serve as a tail to the conservative kite that they are persecuted. They may in time persuade the mob of plodders to cease playing tail-piece to the middle class kite, and let the kite come down with a bang and break up its stock of old exploded theories and decayed ideas, and so leave them floundering in the mud of mental stagnation. Read up the history of the old martyrs, men who died on the scaffold and at the stake for truth’s sake, and you will find in every instance that they were men of advanced ideas—men who had broken away from conservative fogyism and had made some attempt to break the fetters that bind the minds of men and set them free. In the eyes of the middle class there can be no greater crime than to make an attempt to break the fetters of the mental slaves and stir the minds of the plodding, unthinking mob and set them to thinking real thoughts and evolving new theories. Go back a few years previous to the abolition of human slavery and notice how the advanced thinkers were treated. History tells how Thompson narrowly escaped the mob at Concord, for teaching that human slavery is a crime against God and man. Whittier was pelted with mud and stones, and Garrison was often mobbed in Boston.