The awful thing, he said to himself as one who reads what is written, was not to have too little power over others; it was to have too much. To have the means of oppression was to go mad and use them; it was to confuse the means with the right. Too much power over others and too little over himself, both states a result of a system based upon compulsion, had made the man in russet brown all that the man in russet brown had been; it made Luke a potential murderer and ravisher. He saw all life as endlessly creating and no two hours the same. Seeing this, he understood why it was that, when authority was laid upon any one, that one rebelled in proportion to his vitality. He saw the present wrong and the future impotence of churches and laws, of politics, governments, and property. To believe in any one of them, to traffic with any of them, was now to exercise compulsion over his fellows and now to delegate to his fellows his power over himself. He must give up everything that was easy and comfortable—the easy thought and faith as freely as the easy food and lodging. He must join the oppressed. He leaned through the battered window and filled his lungs with the pure night air. He looked up to the patch of heaven overhead where a yellow moon was riding. "I haven’t let their corruption destroy my purpose," he said to the moon. "I’ve simply put myself where they can’t destroy _me_. I’ve put myself where they can’t lie to me again. I’ll fight them as one man against the world; I’ll lose, but I won’t be using their weapons; I won’t be what they are, and I’ll lose as a free man. So far as the world inside of me’s concerned, they invaded it and bossed it. I’ve chucked them out of it, and _I’ve_ destroyed _them_!"