Pessimism Is Mental Disease. It Means Illness

And As For Other Men, Who Worked In Tank-rooms Full Of Steam, And In Some Of Which There Were Open Vats Near The Level Of The Floor, Their Peculiar Trouble Was That They Fell Into The Vats; And When They Were Fished Out, There Was Never Enough Of Them Left To Be Worth Exhibiting,-sometimes They Would Be Overlooked For Days, Till All But The Bones Of Them Had Gone Out Into The World As Durham's Pure Leaf Lard! This Contributed To The Passing Of The Pure Food Act Of 1906.

It Was All So Very Businesslike That One Watched It Fascinated. It Was Pork-making By Machinery, Pork-making By Applied Mathematics. And Yet Somehow The Most Matter-of-fact Person Could Not Help Thinking Of The Hogs; They Were So Innocent, They Came So Very Trustingly; And They Were So Very Human In Their Protests - And So Perfectly Within Their Rights! They Had Done Nothing To Deserve It; And It Was Adding Insult To Injury, As The Thing Was Done Here, Swinging Them Up In This Cold-blooded, Impersonal Way, Without Pretence At Apology, Without The Homage Of A Tear.

Human Beings Suffer Agonies, And Their Sad Fates Become Legends; Poets Write Verses About Them And Playwrights Compose Dramas, And The Remembrance Of Past Grief Becomes A Source Of Present Pleasure - Such Is The Strange Alchemy Of The Spirit.

In A Society Dominated By The Fact Of Commercial Competition, Money Is Necessarily The Test Of Prowess, And Wastefulness The Sole Criterion Of Power.

There Are A Score Of Great Religions In The World, Each With Scores Or Hundreds Of Sects, Each With Its Priestly Orders, Its Complicated Creed And Ritual, Its Heavens And Hells. Each Has Its Thousands Or Millions Or Hundreds Of Millions Of True Believers Each Damns All The Others With More Or Less Heartiness - And Each Is A Mighty Fortress Of Graft.