Perhaps it was to the disgrace of the Alliance that Keidansky's disquisition, his merciless tirade against the good man, was received with some show of hand-clapping favor; and it may be to the credit of the membership that there were those in the audience who were surprised, shocked and startled, who dissented from and resented his utterances. At any rate, the dissenters and commentators stirred up a discussion, and for several days after that it was a topic of conversation and disagreement at the club, at the cafÉs and such places where our circles would congregate. Those who dissented and disagreed with the man who questioned the very bases of our morality said many, varying things and not all things were said in Keidansky's presence. And he? Sometimes he would say a word in explanation, or his defence, and for the rest he listened, looked wise, smiled and relished every attack made against him. His opponents finally agreed that his was a one-sided, partial view, and they told him that, after all, it was better to have a good man than a bad one.

"But it yet remains to be proved," he argued, "that the average good man is not a whole lot worse than the so-called bad man."

They all dared him to prove it, to present the other side of the case, the goodness of the bad man. "I don't care to prove anything," said Keidansky. "'Even the truth can be proved,'" he quoted a favorite decadent; "but if you want me to, I'll try to show you the other side of the story, as it seems to me. I'll write it to-night or to-morrow, and read it to you all, say, on the evening of the day after to-morrow, at the Alliance." We all agreed to be there, and accordingly assembled at the appointed time, and waited until Keidansky appeared with a folded manuscript sticking out of his coat pocket. He was all out of breath. He had been walking very fast so as to get here "just in time to be late." He had just finished his composition. "My lamp went out last night," he explained, "and so I had to do it all this afternoon, and just got through." And so here is his paper as he read it to us on "The Goodness of a Bad Man."

"He is a bad man, a worthless, useless member of society. Most of his neighbors say so, and he does not stand well in the community. His friends are few, with long distances between. He would not go far out of his way to do a fellow a good turn; does not believe in favours, he says, and nobody cares much for him. He lives, acts, thinks, speaks like a bad man, and to say nothing of popularity—very few of us have any—but who will have any respect for a man that scorns, jeers, sneers and pokes all manner of fun at respectability? Respectability, he says, is a mark of public formality behind which to hide private rascality, and the prettier the mask the more ugly the face.

"He disagrees with nearly everybody on almost every conceivable subject. No matter what other people think of his opinions, he actually believes them to be right. He is a bad man. He is not at all tolerant. When he disagrees with any one—and he does that most of the time—he bluntly and boldly tells him so up and down, and he is ever ready to state his reasons and argue the case. He will not conceal his convictions, even when he is your guest. Of course, this is a free country, and every man is entitled to his opinion—but one should have some tact, politeness, diplomacy, courtesy. If every one had these there would not be so much difference of opinion and discord in our land, and there would be more peace on earth. Polite people do not try to force their opinions upon others.

"Polite people have no opinions that differ from those of others. I doubt whether it is polite to have any opinions at all. The aristocracy is setting a good example. It never thinks. Persons who think too much are ever behind the times. But even if one has a right to his opinion, he certainly has no right to be cranky, eccentric, and disturb the mental peace of the community with his queer, revolutionary notions. Stubborn, stiff-necked, hard-headed, determined, impulsive, he is ever present with that ubiquitous mind of his, ever ready to give everybody a piece of it. Considering the frequency with which he gives everybody a piece of his mind, I wonder that it is not all gone by this time.

"He is a bad man. He is aggressive and arrogant. His faith in himself is offensive, his self-reliance, self-satisfaction unbearable. He has too much respect for himself to follow the dictates of others. His life is a life, he says, and not an apology for living; he will have to pay for it with death and wants to make the most of the bargain—live fully and freely in his own way, however reprehensible. He does not want his neighbors to love and interfere with him—unless he cared for their affection. He says it would be a sin to love his neighbors if they did not deserve his love. The welfare of the community, I heard him say, depends upon the absolute freedom, the self-salvation of each individual. No one can ever do anything for another unless he has made the most of his own life—good or bad. Self-preservation in the end prompts us to do most for others. Selfishness is a pronounced form of sanity. Altruism has enslaved the world. Egoism will save it. And I could quote you such monstrous heresies as will make your hair stand on end. He is a bad man.

"The world belongs to those who take things for granted. He will not take anything for granted and that's why he has to take more hard knocks than anybody else. He impiously questions, doubts, examines, investigates everything on the face of the earth and—God save us—even the things that be in heaven. He is a living interrogation point, ever questioning the wisdom of this world and the promises of the one to come. Nothing is so sacred as to be above his scrutiny; he has little reverence for any of our glorious institutions. He says they are the handiwork of men and often as crude and as useless as men could make them. Whatever has been erected can be corrected, he says. He thinks lightly of our laws; thinks they are at best but a necessary evil and that in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish all evil.

"He is a bad man. He does not even recognize the sacred authority of tradition, and has no decent regard for precedent. Precedent, he argues, only proves that some people lived before us and did things in a certain way. He does not even—well, think of a man who doubts the holy right of the majority! He does not believe that the majority is always right; in fact, he contends that it is always wrong. By the time the majority discovers a truth it becomes a falsehood, he avers. The majority only thinks it is always right. The majority is but another word for mediocrity. He does not heed what the people say. The monster called majority, in spite of his many heads, does very little thinking. What the people say seldom amounts to a meaning. Morality, he argues, is that which is conducive to one's happiness, without interfering with or injuring his fellow-men. To be moral is to live fully, freely, completely. Morality has nothing to do with the abnormal stifling, starving, thwarting of instincts and feelings.

"A truth, he told me, is a truth, and a principle is a principle, whether it is held by many or by one. Numbers no more make right than might does.

"'The strongest man on earth,' he says, 'is he who stands alone,' and he always quotes a man named Ibsen. He is a bad case. 'Customs and conventionalities be hanged,' he says, 'I have my own life to live and mean to manage it in my own way. I have laws of my own and must obey them.' I heard him say it myself, and I wonder what he means by these things. There are always those who know better than you what is good for you, but you don't want to mind them, he told me. The most advisable thing in the world is never to take any advice. There may be those, he once remarked, who have lived longer than you have, but they have not lived your life.

"He has a mania for principles. I think that is a chronic disease with him. He imagines it is all one needs in life. There is not a material advantage in the world but he would forfeit it for a moral principle, as he calls it. 'Ideals are very well,' I once said, 'but one must live.' 'Not necessarily,' he answered. 'One must die, if one cannot live honestly.'

"Always he talks about the so-called social problem of the age. I do not know just what that is; but if there is such a thing as a social problem it is how to abolish social reformers. This man is a social reformer, and he has some scheme of his own how to reconstruct society on a basis of what he terms justice and truth. In the promulgation of this scheme of his he foolishly spends much of his spare time and not a little of his money—and Heaven knows he has not any too much. But he says he does it all for his pleasure; that it is out of sheer selfishness that he would uplift the fallen and elevate the lowly. He is a bad man. It is no disgrace to be poor, of course; but it is criminal of the poor not to know their place. I half told him so, but he answered in his usual contradictory way that the poor have no place at all.

"He travels through life very much by his own crooked road, with his own conception of morality, justice and truth. Out of justice to the dead, he argues, we ought to abolish most of the institutions they have left behind. Otherwise they are being disgraced every day by the clumsy workings of the things they have established. If our honored ancestors desired to perpetuate their taboos, fetishes and inquisitions they had no business to die; they should have stayed here. By going to either of the places beyond they have forfeited their right to manage things here below. The dead should give the living absolute home rule.

"He is a bad man. He hardly ever gives any charity. He does not believe in charity; says it creates more misery than it relieves, and perpetuates poverty—the crime of mankind. Charity, he claims, curses both the giver and the receiver. It makes the former haughty and proud and the latter dependent and servile. What he wants is justice and the rights of all to earn the means of subsistence. And there is no use in quoting the Bible, when he talks of poverty. The Bible, he says, is a great book which could be immensely improved by a good editor with a long blue pencil. All the immoral problem-plays pale into pitiful insignificance beside some of the stories told in the Bible—and they are not anywhere half so well told. Did you ever hear such blasphemy? He is an infidel. He does not even believe the newspapers; has little faith in the great power of the press. Most of the newspapers, he told me, are published by the advertisers and edited by the readers. Journalists ever follow public opinion, and they are never sure of what they believe in because it is hard to find out what the people approve. Weather Bureau predictions are often Gospel truths beside editorial convictions. The best papers are yet to be printed. He has such rank disregard of the past and the present that he seems to think that all things really great are yet to come.

"He puzzles and vexes me. I don't know just what he is in politics. I doubt whether he is either a Republican or a Democrat. I suspect he votes for the Anarchist party. What an absurdity! They will never elect a President, and this foolish man has not the ghost of a chance to get an office. He is not at all consistent. He changes his mind very often. No matter how zealous or ardent he is about his ideas he is ever ready to reject them to-morrow and accept other views. He does not believe in the newspapers, in things visible and present, yet he has the utmost faith in far-away fictions, intangible Utopias and the realization of iridescent dreams.

"I dare not repeat all his outrageous blasphemies, and I positively cannot mention his awful heresies as to his religion. He cannot accept the religion of his fathers because they were infidels; infidels who built little creeds out of fear, who were afraid of their shadows, who had monstrous, libellous conceptions of God. He says that he has too much faith to belong to any denomination. Religion is so large that no church can hold it. No one should meddle between man and his Maker. Christ, I have heard him say, may never forgive the Christians for what they have made out of him, for robbing him of his humanity. No church for him. He would rather worship beneath the arched dome of the starry skies and offer up a prayer to the God that dwells in every human heart and thinking brain. He is a bad man.

"He is always on the ungrateful side of the few, the poor, the weak and the fallen; and he even sympathizes with beggars, criminals, fallen women and low persons; is not afraid to mingle with them. And what advantage can he ever derive out of that? Absent-minded, forgetful, engrossed in his queer ideas and impossible ideals, he gets lost in his theories and books, and loses life. He does not realize that millions have found this world as it is and millions more will leave it so. Poor man, he is a dreamer of dreams; and to see the invisible, to hear inaudible voices, is the most expensive thing in life. He sacrifices affluence, influence, power, political office, honor, Éclat, applause, the respect of the community, the regard of his neighbors, the praise of the press, the advantages of politics and of the people's approval—sacrifices all these for his pitiful brain-begotten fancies. He is a dreamer of dreams. Yet he seems to like this journey along the lines of most resistance, says it is least resistance to him, and he tells me that he enjoys his poverty and all, immensely. He freely indulges in most of the vain and worldly pleasures of life as he sees them, regardless of all others, considers one day as holy as another and no day so mean as to wear a long and sanctimonious face on, and he says that the only thing which he prohibits is prohibition in any form. His wife does not fear him, does not have to obey him, does as she pleases, and his children are as free and wild as little savages. He is a bad man.

"But what can be done? Ministers and other good men have repeatedly tried to save him, but he evades all their efforts, avoids all their sermons. He would save them the trouble of saving him, he says, because he thinks he can do it so much better himself. What can be done? All things are here to serve him, none to subserve him. He is a law unto himself, and has little or nothing to do with the Government, so he says. He is a bad man. He is not going to heaven—and yet, and yet—if there were more like him this world would be so different, and perhaps no one would ever want to go to heaven."

There was a pause and a silence at the close of the reading, but our essayist was soon spared "the agony of suspense," as he mockingly remarked. Then came comments of varied shades of opinion, approving and disapproving, constructive and destructive, too many to mention, and Keidansky enjoyed them all. At length I ventured to ask him what sort of administrator his friend, the bad man, would make if he was ever elected to office.

"He would never run for office," said Keidansky, "and if he ran he would never be elected; and if he ever was elected he would certainly be a dire failure because he does not believe in managing other people's business. The best of men will not want to, cannot do it, and politics is no test. The man who goes in with or for the crowd ceases to be himself; and therefore we ought to invent our public officials and not make them out of men. However, don't press me, I am not at all sure about these things. I only know that the bad man is coming; that he is here; that he is a dire terror—and will save the world. What I gave you here is a mere suggestion, a hint of a possibility, a premonition. Every conception is spoiled by the description of it. He will come, and time will not tame him. He will come, and the divine institution of police-court morality is doomed. The virtues of the future will be useful. They will be conducive to growth—real happiness.

"But, as I say, I don't want to appear dogmatic; nor to be too sure of things. The most useful thing about our theories is that we know them to be useless. The best thing about our ideas is that the world has not accepted them yet. If the world had accepted them these ideas would probably now look like last winter's snow. Better to wait until it is ready for them—then they will not go to waste. Better a bad world than a good world come too early—before the people are ready for it. But what's the use! I've done it, my friends, and my apology for life is—that I never apologize. Come, it's getting close, up here. Come, let us forth into the darkness and pray for eternal night—for night hides all the ugly splendors of the world."