Excerpt from The Masses: And the Millionaires, Delivered Before the Oakland Nationalist Club, in Hamilton Hall, Oakland, California, on Monday Evening, May 26, 1890A few centuries ago these grim facts would have troub led nobody. Those were ages of force and brutality. Men were indifferent to the suffering of their fellows. The sense of human rights had not quickened. To-day it is different. General Grant tells us in his memoirs that, knocked about. In his boyhood in many log school-houses, he was told so, often that a noun was the name of a thing that bebegan to believe it. A similar fatality has overtaken modern Chris tianity. It has been preached so long from the pulpits of the world, that there are people even outside of the churches who begin to suspect its doctrines of truth. To the minds of millions of men and women, the equality and brother hood of man are no longer rhetorical phrases. Miraculous religion has fared as it could, but, side by side with the growth of hideous wrongs, the gronth of the moral instinct and the sharpening sense of the solidarity of our race, have been the great features of our time. The presence of pov erty and suffering in the midst of plenty is felt as a moral dis, cord. The conscience of civilization is troubled. The last decade of the nineteenth century begins with an interroga tion point for justice.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.