Page:Dr Stiggins, His Views and Principles.pdf/42

 reasoning? I am older than you, and I have learned to dread the devilish strength of the forces of reaction. Believe me, the enemy is always on the alert; there are not wanting those who have read the annals of Popery and Tyranny with, I am afraid, no honest aims. In the bad old days, in the ages described so justly as dark, they tell us that adulteration was a crime, that "making a corner" was a felony, that our worthy friends in Chicago would certainly have been hanged to the nearest tree. Ah, I see you shudder, and you do well; but have you forgotten the fleshpots of Egypt, after which some writer (who lived many centuries after the probably mythical Moses) tells us the children of Israel lusted? Believe me, the old Hebrew Book has not lost its freshness; here in England, as in some possible desert which could not have been near Sinai, we have many who are willing and ready to lust after the fleshpots, to clamour for beef which is not tuberculous, to scorn the poisoned but spicy rat, to murmur against fragments of their brother