“But even of those who have some smattering of history we find thousands appearing at the polls every year, having heard a little of the cant and the bluster of partisan politics, and having nothing more to fit them for their duties as citizens in a land whose national and state and city governments they have never studied. “Moreover, they have the wildest notions in regard to those great questions of labor, wages, and reform which are agitating our country. Such are the men who hold the ignoble conviction that every man is selfish at heart, that to the victors belong the spoils, and that desire for office is inevitably ambition for personal gain. “You have learned in the past somewhat of the cost to this city and state of the presence of anarchists within your midst. But what are you doing to make good citizens of the thousands of men, women, and children who are said to be enrolled in anarchist Sunday-schools here in this city? “What is being done to prevent the children of the mob that tears up your horse-car tracks when you have a strike from following ten years hence their fathers’ example? “But I am not speaking merely of rumsellers or anarchists, or of ignorant foreigners or men who sell their votes. I am speaking of the banker’s sons as well as the blacksmith’s. “There is among many of the hard-headed young business men of our time whom I have met a TERRIBLE SKEPTICISM. They are skeptical of humanity, of virtue. There is a belief that every man has his price, that politics is a machine, to be run for the benefit of those who have it in charge. There is, even among honorable men, a tendency to joke at public scandals, to sneer at Sunday-school politics and womanish ideals. “Now, to me, this hard and cold skepticism betokens a rottenness and a corruption in the body politic scarcely less terrible to contemplate than the open, high-handed peculation which occasionally startles the community and forms a nine days’ wonder. “For, as I need not say, a sick man is as sure to die from blood-poisoning as from an open cancer. The latter may shock us more, but the former is just as deadly. And the danger to this great city to-day is not so much from the dynamite of the anarchist as from the indifference and inactivity of the men and women who have your brains, your wealth, your culture, and many of them your nominal Christianity. “Pardon me if I seem to be addressing you, my elders and betters, as if I were presuming to tell you anything new or anything which you could not state quite as forcibly as I may do. “It is not that I have anything new to say that I venture to speak thus, but that I may clearly state my own position and grounds for action in the matter which I shall soon present to you.