Page:Americans (1922).djvu/326

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an unpopular position. Sitting in the neighborhood of Plymouth Rock, he discovers that the scutcheon of his Puritan forefathers blushes with the blood of Quakers and Anabaptists; and in his Emancipation of Massachusetts, Puritan as he is, he remorselessly prosecutes them as selfish and bloodthirsty hypocrites. Looking further into history, he concludes that the same indictment can be brought against all religious societies and organizations from the time of Moses down; for the facts constrain him to believe that the two master passions of man are Fear and Greed. If he refrains from censure, it is because he holds that mental as well as physical phenomena are determined as fatally as the earth moves round the sun. The examination of long periods of history impresses him with "the exceedingly small part played by conscious thought in moulding the fates of men." He applies the doctrine of manifest destiny in the most fatalistic sense to the Philippine Islands and to capitalistic society, which, however, seems to him on the point of disintegration into a condition from which it can only be revivified by an "infusion of barbarian blood."

Brooks attributes many of his views to Henry and undertakes to interpret him; but temperamentally he is not qualified to understand him. He admits, indeed, that there were crypts in his brother which he had never entered. Chief of these was the unfathomable crypt of his skepticism. By con-