manity to man. It was because of this fundamental humanism in him that he took to his "opium smoking" in his despair, for in the last analysis the drunkard is a better man, morally, than those who try to justify the sorry parts that they have to play in society. It was this humanism, too, that made him, once he found an opportunity to command an audience, the ruthless critic dedicated to the unpleasant but necessary task of reminding us of our man-eating past and our man-eating tendencies of the present, and the relentless iconoclast who devoted his life to the destruction of old superstitions and ancient hypocrisies that tend to perpetuate the institution of man-eating. He never made any attempt to formulate and express his own beliefs regarding man's ultimate future. When pressed to do so, he invariably gave the laconic answer that he was only interested in the immediate objectives that must be achieved before everything else. These are, he said, (1) the right to life, (2) the right to food and shelter, and (3) the right to the unlimited development of the individual. "Everything that stands in the way of these three objectives," he declared, "must be trampled under foot and stamped out, whether it be ancient faiths or modern fads." The only elaboration that he would make on these three objectives was that by life he did not mean mere existence, by food and shelter he did not mean unnecessary luxuries, and by the free development of the individual he did not mean unwarranted licence.
If we bear these three touchstones constantly in mind as Lusin did, all the apparent inconsistencies in his writings will disappear and we shall understand his apparent quarrelsomeness. We'll understand why he quarreled with the "new gentry"—well-fed and well-washed students who returned from England and America with their "gentlemanly" ideas
