Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/238

202 —Whence this excessive impatience of our times which makes so many criminals under conditions that would seem more likely to produce the opposite tendency? What compels one man to use false weights; another to set his house on fire, after having ensured it for a good round sum; a third, to aid in false coiming: while three-fourths of our upper ten indulge in legalised fraud and suffer from the qualms of conscience which follow in the train of StockExchange dealings and speculation? It is not real want, they are not without means; perhaps they even have enough to eat and to drink without harassing care —but a terrible impatience at the slow piling up of money, and an equally terrible longing and love for these piles, urges them on, day and night. But in this inpatience and this love there reappears that fanaticism of the thirst for power which formerly was stimulated by the belief that we were in the possession of truth, and which was called by such beautiful names that we could be inhuman and yet preserve a clear conscience. (Burning Jews, heretics, and good books, and exterminating whole cultures, such as those of Pern and Mexico.) The instruments of this thirst for power are different now, but the same volcano is still aglow, impatience and an excessive love require their victim, and what was formerly done for the "love of God" is not