France and America, which have put an end to the power of the
priestly caste to take property by force, and to dominate the
mind of the child without its parents' consent.

This is as far as any nation has so far gone; it has apparently
not yet occurred to any legislature that the State may owe a duty
to the child to protect its mind from being poisoned, even though
it has the misfortune to be born of poisoned parents. It is still
permitted that parents should terrify their little ones with
images of a personal devil and a hell of eternal brimstone and
sulphur; it is permitted to found schools for the teaching of
devil-doctrines; it is permitted to organize gigantic campaigns
and systematically to infect whole cities full of men, women and
children with hell-fire phobias. In the American city where I
write one may see gatherings of people sunk upon their knees,
even rolling on the ground in convulsions, moaning, sobbing,
screaming to be delivered from such torments. I open my morning
paper and read of the arrest of five men and seven women in Los
Angeles, members of a sect known as the "Church of the Living
God", upon a charge of having disturbed the peace of their
neighbors. The police officers testified that the accused claimed
to be possessed of the divine spirit, and that as signs of this
possession they "crawled on the floor, grunted like pigs and
barked like dogs." There were "other acts, even more startling",
about which the newspapers did not go into details. And again, a
week or two later, I read how a woman has been heard screaming,
and found tied to a bedpost, being whipped by a man. She belonged
to a religious sect which had found her guilty of witchcraft.
Another woman was about to shoot her, but this woman's nerve
failed, and the "high priest" was called in, who decreed a