The fundamental sin of all dominant classes has been the taking of unearned incomes. Political oppression has always been a corollary of economic parasitism, a means to an end. The combination of the two constitutes the largest and most continuous form of organized evil in human history. Jesus used the illustration of pegs maliciously driven into the path to make men stumble and fall. It would require some illustration drawn from modern machinery to express the wholesale prostration of bodies and souls where covetousness has secured continuous power and has been able to get in its full work. Anyone who has ever looked with human understanding at the undersized and stupid peasants of countries ruled by their landlord class, or at the sordid homes and pleasures of miners or industrial workers where some corporation feared neither God nor the law, ought to get a comprehension of the power of evil that has rested like an iron yoke on humanity. We think most readily of the children of the poor as a product of exploitation; underfed and overstimulated, cut off from the clean pleasures of nature, often tainted with vice before knowledge has come, and urged along by the appetites and cruel selfishness of older persons, they are a standing accusation against society itself.(5) Jesus would have felt that the children of the rich are an even worse product of exploitation than the poor. When “society” plays, it burns up the labor of thousands like fireworks. The only possible justification for the aggregations of wealth is that the rich are to act as the trustees and directors of the wealth of society; but their children—except in conspicuous and fine exceptions—are put out of contact with the people whom they must know if they are to serve them, so that it takes heroic effort on the part of noble exceptions to get in contact with the people once more, and to discover how they live. In all nations the atmosphere of the aristocratic groups drugs the sense of obligation, and possesses the mind with the notion that the life and labor of men are made to play tennis with. The existence of great permanent groups, feeding but not producing, dominating and directing the life of whole nations according to their own needs, may well seem a supreme proof of the power of evil in humanity. IV