Page:Emma Goldman - The Social Significance of the Modern Drama - 1914.djvu/261

 Mr. Dowler. Everyone knows there is no more valuable blessing than work.

Paul Ruttledge decides to put his visitors " on trial, to let them see themselves as they are in all their hypocrisy, all their corruption.

He charges the military man, Colonel Lawley, with calling himself a Christian, yet following the business of man-killing. The Colonel is forced to admit that he had ordered his men to. fight in a war, of the justice of which they knew nothing, or did not believe in, and yet it is " the doctrine of your Christian church, of your Catholic church, that he who fights in an unjust war, knowing it to be unjust, loses his own soul." Of the rich man Dowler, Paul Ruttledge demands whether he could pass through the inside of a finger ring, and on Paul's attention being called by one of the tinkers to the fine coat of Mr. Dowler, he tells him to help himself to it. Threatened by Mr. Green, the spokesman of the law, with encouraging robbery, Ruttledge admonishes him.

Ruttledge. Remember the commandment, " Give to him that asketh thee"; and the hard commandment goes even farther," Him that taketh thy cloak forbid not to take thy coat also."

But the worst indictment Ruttledge hurls against Mr. Green. The other professed Christians kill,