But she did not notice his perturbation, she was following another
train.
"You Americans do not love money as much as the Europeans--who hoard it
away, who worship it on their naked knees; but you do something
worse--you love it for the sake of the sport, a cruel sport for the
poor. You go into speculation as the English go after big game. It is a
sport. This sport involves food--and you gamble with wheat and meat for
counters, while starving men and women pay for the game. America is yet
rich enough to afford this sport, but some day it will become crowded
like Europe, and then, beware! Wasn't it James Hinton who said that
'Overthrowing society means an inverted pyramid getting straight'?
"And America," she continued, "bribes us with the gilded sentimental
phrases of Rousseau, Mirabeau, and Thomas Paine woven into your national
constitution, with its presumptuous declaration that all men are born
free and equal--shades of Darwin and Nietzsche!--and that universal
suffrage is a panacea for all evils. In no country boasting itself
Christian is there a system so artfully devised for keeping the _poor_
free and unequal, no country where so-called public opinion, as
expressed in the press, is used to club the majority into submission.
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