Men are somnambulistic. Stupefied by the long night of instinct out of which it arose, the human mind is only half awake. Washington was the father of a country, but he held human beings as slaves and paid his hired help in Virginia whisky. It took Americans one hundred years to find out that “all men” included Ethiopians. Men who risked their lives to achieve personal and political liberty for black men deliberately doom white women to a similar servitude. Rich men give millions to museums or universities, when they would know, if they had the talent to stop and think, that the thousands who make their wealth work like wretches from morning till night and suffocate in garrets and feed on garbage, in order that they may be munificent. Human beings preach as the cardinal of morality that they should act upon others as they would be pleased to have others act upon them, and then take the most sensitive and beautiful beings all palpitating with life, and chop them into fragments with a composure that would do honor to the managers of an inferno. It has been said that when a proposition is presented to us for our acceptance or rejection we treat it as we would treat an article of furniture presented to us for our apartments. We try it. If it fits in character and complexion, we accept it, and it becomes a part of our paraphernalia. If it does not fit, we reject it. Every proposition that comes to our intelligence is thus accepted or dismissed, depending on the congeniality or uncongeniality of the subjective and the objective. It is impossible absolutely for mind, constituted as it is on the earth, to accept a proposition that is antagonistic to it. And when a proposition is presented to the mind, the only way in the world to win its acceptance is by coaxing and modifying the mind itself. I come to you tonight with a proposition. In a very feeble and fragmentary way I attempt to do what every polemic attempts to do—to dynamite your minds, to havoc their foundations and reconstruct them in harmony with the proposition I champion. But there are so many attitudes of opposition possible, so many objections that are thinkable, and so many things assumed by those who pitch themselves against it, that I cannot hope in one evening to accomplish more than a beginning. But if I can somehow succeed in dilating your pupils a little, and enable you to realize in some measure the infamy in which you and the rest of the occidental world are today engaged, I shall feel better than if I had spoken to stones.