Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/543

 New Varieties of Sin

(From "Sin and Society")

(American college professor, born 1866, a prominent advocate of academic freedom)

Today the sacrifice of life incidental to quick success rarely calls for the actual spilling of blood. How decent are the pale slayings of the quack, the adulterator, and the purveyor of polluted water, compared with the red slayings of the vulgar bandit or assassin! Even if there is blood-letting, the long-range, tentacular nature of modern homicide eliminates all personal collision. What an abyss between the knife-play of brawlers and the law-defying neglect to fence dangerous machinery in a mill, or to furnish cars with safety couplers! The providing of unsuspecting passengers with "cork" life-preservers secretly loaded with bars of iron to make up for their deficiency in weight of cork, is spiritually akin to the treachery of Joab, who, taking Amasa by the beard "to kiss him," smote Amasa "in the fifth rib"; but it wears a very different aspect. The current methods of annexing the property of others are characterized by a pleasing indirectness and refinement. The furtive, apprehensive manner of the till-tapper or the porch-climber would jar disagreeably upon the tax-dodger "swearing off" his property, or the city official concealing a "rake-off" in his specifications for a public building. The work of the card-sharp and the thimblerigger shocks a type of man that will not stick at the massive "artistic swindling" of the contemporary promoter

One might suppose that an exasperated public would