arguments as eagerly as a spy would listen to the enemy's arrangements.
But if you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite
politics, you will find that no medium is admitted between violence
and evasion. You will have no answer except slanging or silence.
A modern editor must not have that eager ear that goes with the
honest tongue. He may be deaf and silent; and that is called dignity.
Or he may be deaf and noisy; and that is called slashing journalism.
In neither case is there any controversy; for the whole object of modern
party combatants is to charge out of earshot.

The only logical cure for all this is the assertion of a human ideal.
In dealing with this, I will try to be as little transcendental
as is consistent with reason; it is enough to say that unless we
have some doctrine of a divine man, all abuses may be excused,
since evolution may turn them into uses. It will be easy for
the scientific plutocrat to maintain that humanity will adapt itself
to any conditions which we now consider evil. The old tyrants
invoked the past; the new tyrants will invoke the future evolution
has produced the snail and the owl; evolution can produce a workman
who wants no more space than a snail, and no more light than an owl.
The employer need not mind sending a Kaffir to work underground;
he will soon become an underground animal, like a mole.
He need not mind sending a diver to hold his breath in the deep seas;
he will soon be a deep-sea animal. Men need not trouble
to alter conditions, conditions will so soon alter men.
The head can be beaten small enough to fit the hat.
Do not knock the fetters off the slave; knock the slave until
he forgets the fetters. To all this plausible modem argument
for oppression, the only adequate answer is, that there is a permanent
human ideal that must not be either confused or destroyed.