one of them is that selfish individualism which would sacrifice the whole world for its own private enjoyment; but I think another of them is that more insidious kind of selfishness, which boasts itself social, but despises individuals, and forgets that any one humble neighbor has something in him which could not be paid for by the price of the whole world. An opponent of present styles of architecture might complain that a sky-scraping apartment house offers a singular illustration of both these forms of the antichrist; both the selfish individualism which would exalt itself regardless of a whole neighborhood's discomfort, and also the false collectivism which obliterates for its own tenants the sacred boundaries of the individual home.

Let us look now at this second antichrist, this false and mutilated collectivism or socialism, for it is one of the great perils of our day. I am not talking merely of the form of opinion which calls itself socialism, but of all the tendencies and influences which are likely to suppress the individual man, robbing him of what should be worth more to him than all the world beside.

The most vivid illustration of such suppression of individualism comes from the spectacle which has often been forced upon us, and always fills us with shame and distress-the spectacle of a mob at

a lynching; for this is the act of a crowd always, not of an individual. A lynching is the ninety and nine attacking the one. Those ninety and nine together do things that no one of them could bring himself to do alone. America is almost the only country in the world where deliberate torture survives as a regular institution. I say "regular," for enough of these lynchings occur every year to make a kind of rule. America is the only country in the world to-day where men are regularly condemned to be burned alive. The most despicable tyrant of the East does not manifest such awful cruelty as is shown regularly at an American lynching, when the ninety and nine throw themselves upon the one.

This means that, viewed as a question of morals, the damage done to that one victim may be less alarming than the damage done to each of the ninety and nine. The mob kills that one victim cruelly, and there is an end; but the mob robs each of its own members of every vestige of moral discrimination, every trace of individual courage, dignity, pity, till you have a herd of cowardly and bloodthirsty maniacs, with their incredible ferocity. And it is all because each member of that reprobate company has lost his own proper individualism, and surrendered himself to the fatal frenzy of the mob. If you should take the very worst of those

men by himself and put him in a magistrate's chair, so as to force upon him some sense of his individual responsibility, and then bring this same suspect before him for sentence, would he condemn him to be burned alive? No American magistrate has done that. I will not believe that a single American could be found who would be capable of more fiendish cruelty than the Tartar or the Turk— not if you give his individual manhood a chance; but let him lose himself with ninety-eight others, and you see what we have seen. Now, that is the socialistic principle run mad, this particular antichrist.

A mob at a lynching is the most awful manifestation of this kind of degeneracy, but by no means the only manifestation of it. Here is a company of boys at college tempted to condone or commit acts of dishonesty in the classroom, or dishonor on the playground, or cowardly blackguardism toward one unpopular newcomer, because that has been the college sentiment. Each is tempted to accept the college sentiment, and surrender his own proper individual manliness to this collective unmanliness of the ninety-nine.

Here is a company of business men on Wall Street, or of politicians in the City Hall or the Capitol, each of them a man whom you would be glad to know if you could catch him alone. But

put ninety-nine of them together; let them pool the moral issues, each surrendering his own individual conscience to the keeping of the crowd; you know that a crowd of politicians or traders sometimes become only less demoralized and demoralizing than a mob at a lynching. There is almost nothing that they will not do to gain their end. This is one chief peril connected with the immense aggregations of capital seen in our day. What has become of the individual man, and his individual principle? He himself has lost sight of it, and does not know where to look for it again. The business may prosper; the business may be gaining the whole world, and the man gets his good share of the gain, but meanwhile he has lost himself. And in the long run that loss proves too great for the whole world to pay for.

Precisely the same is true of the aggregations of labor. In olden times a workman stood out by himself; standing alone, he was very helpless, and his conditions might sometimes be hard and perilous; but at the worst he was an individual man, and any good shepherd who went to look for him knew when he had found him. Now, in many branches of industry, these individuals, where are they? They are not to be found at all; you must deal with the entire ninety and nine together. And we cannot deny that this association of workmen

has accomplished some great benefits; I believe it has been controlled in part by the very spirit of the Christ; but we are looking now at this other side of it, this insidious spirit of antichrist which is always threatening to invade these larger companies of men, whoever they are, robbing them of their individual character, enslaving them, bringing them under a new tyranny. And often for the workman this new tyranny proves to be more cruel and more demoralizing than the old. When unprincipled men have seized the reins of power in some labor organization, how often the unhappy workman has confessed under his breath-for he dares not say it aloud-that he could wish himself back in the old days when he could deal with his employer for himself. He has lost himself, and the whole labor world cannot make that loss good.

Oh, from how many sides the truth is forced in upon us that the machinery of popular government never insures liberty; that it may bring a new slavery; that the tyranny of a whole people may become more cruel and more destructive of manhood than that of a king.

Look at the tyranny of fashion: those evil customs of dress and bearing and entertainment for which no individual will confess himself responsible; but the ninety and nine have decreed them. and