Scott Nearing

“ The world is in chaos. The fabric of civilization is threatened. The health and happiness—the very life of the world—is threatened.
And those who speak particularly of those things; those who are seeking to warn, to prepare the people; those who attempt to preach law and order; who oppose war; who believe in peace—those who are attempting to serve the interests of humanity—go to jail for ten years.
The highest authority in the United States has served notice on the American people that from it they can hope for nothing in the way of preservation of their liberties. Their liberties are dead. ”

“ To-day machines replace men in a thousand industries. To-morrow slavery is called into question, until in the dim-glowering nineteenth century, men will struggle and die by tens of thousands;—on the one side, those who believe that the man should be the slave; on the other, those who hold that the slavery of the machine is alone necessary and just. Thus is every social institution altered from age to age. ”

“ Liberty and justice and right are to be made the cornerstone of peace, and America is to be the builder of an enduring temple in her honor. This democracy, founded on the proposition that all men are created free and equal, stands first for those things that lead toward the equalizing of opportunity. With equal fervor the democracy stands against all things that point toward tyranny, depotism, and vested might.
Militarism has an unsavory reputation. Wherever it has fastened itself on a nation, oppression, tyranny and injustice have grown as the flower grows from the seed. ”

“ Of the manufacturer who pays $2 or $3 as wages for child labor, and takes an enormous surplus in profits? Of the manufacturer who knowingly, for the sake of an extra automobile or some other plaything that may appeal to his fancy, takes from the children the vitality and life which he can never replace? Of the employer who pays his adult laborers such low wages that it is a physical impossibility for them to bring up a family and procure not the luxuries, but the bare necessities of life, and who are, therefore, compelled to send their children at the earliest moment into the mills? ”

“ Cities, the building blocks of civilization, not only transcend nature; they replace her. Up to a certain point man lived more or less consciously as a part of nature. Bit by bit and step by step man shifted from the stream, the glade, the tree and the cave to the hut, the village, the city, the nation, the empire, the civilization.
Early in this study I wrote of civilization as an experiment: an aspiration, a creative urge, a concept, a purpose, a unity of thought and act, a conscious sequence of related actions, a construct of multiplying complexity. ”

“ Compared with the necessity of protecting ruling class privileges and prerogatives, the right of a man to express his mind goes for nothing. That is the lesson of history and that is what we are witnessing today. Men who have stirred up the people; men who have raised their voices in protest; men who thought straight; men who have loved their fellow men too much; men who have had conviction and courage and purpose; men who were willing to stick by their ideals—such men have suffered in every age.
Eugene V. Debs has stirred up the people all his life. ”

“ Again the profiteers will stop at home and reap their harvests out of the agony and the blood of the nation.
Again, when the killing is over, a few old men, sitting around a table, will carve the world—stripping the vanquished while they reward the victors.
Again the preparations will begin for the next war. The people will be fed on promises, phrases and lies. They will pay and they will die for the benefit of their masters, and thus the terrible tragedy of imperialism will continue to bathe the world in tears and in blood. ”

“ THE ONE OBJECT OF EDUCATION IS TO ASSIST AND PREPARE CHILDREN TO LIVE.
Why have we established a billion-dollar school system in the United States? Is it to pay teachers’ salaries, to build new school houses, and to print text-books by the million? Hardly. These things are incidents of school business, but they are no more reason for the school’s existence than fertilizer and seed are reasons for making a garden. Gardens are cultivated in order to secure plants and flowers; the school organization of which Americans so often boast exists to educate children. ”

“ There is but one power which can bring freedom, welfare, happiness, and peace to the working class and to humanity. That power is the working class, if well organised, properly disciplined, self-devoted, and determined to fight all who would oppose and prevent its complete emancipation. The working classes, if united nationally and internationally, would constitute an insuperable barrier to capitalist oppression and an unbreakable bond of peace and economic security. The workers are able to defeat all those who by their reactionary tendencies keep the workers divided. ”

“ Social Adjustment and of Education, the American nation is thrown into the foreground, as the land for the development of the Super Race. The American people have within their grasp the torch of social progress. Can they carry it in the van, lighting the dark caverns of the future? Can they develop a race of men who shall set a standard for the world—men of physical and mental power, efficient, broadly sympathetic, actuated by the highest ideals, striving toward a vision of human nobleness? ”

“ Dreaming of liberty as a maiden dreams of her lover, humanity awoke suddenly, to find liberty on the threshold.
Through the ages mankind has sought truth and justice. Vested interests have intervened. The powers of the established order have resisted, but the search has continued. That eternal vigilance and eternal sacrifice which are the price of liberty, are found wherever human society has left a record. At one point the forces of light seem to be winning. At another, liberty and truth are being ruthlessly crushed by the privileged masters of life. The struggle goes on—eternally. ”

“ It taught the ecstasy of the handclasp of the comrade. It made it possible for me to get in touch with you, to multiply myself over and over again; to open the avenue, to spread out the glorious vistas; to know that I am kin with all that throbs; with all who become class conscious. Every man who toils, everyone of them, is my comrade. To serve them is the highest duty of my life. And in the service I can feel myself expanding. I rise to the stature of a man. Yes, my heart is attuned to yours. All of our hearts are melted into one great heart which throbs to the response of the people. ”

“ Not only must war be abandoned as a means of achieving social objectives, but exploitation of nature and man must be superceded by a planet-wide life style that conserves natural wealth and shifts the center of economic endeavor from competition to cooperation.
Abandonment of war as an instrument of policy and the renunciation of exploitation of man by man and nation by nation as a means of enrichment would put an end to the scandalous and corrosive extremes of riches and poverty that have cursed every civilization of which we have a written record. ”

“ Only dimly do men realize these limitations. The more they learn, the more clearly they understand the nature of the bonds that hold them, and the better are they prepared to break down the most hampering barriers, and to follow where aspiration and hope beckon. Yet, even among the masses of the people, who have had little time to learn, and less in which to reflect, there is a persistent longing to be free. The plea for liberty always awakens a response in them because, through their own lives they come into such intimate contact with the hateful burdens that oppression lays upon its victims. ”

“ The old education read out of the school those children who could not benefit by its teachings. How utterly different the concept which has gripped the minds of progressive, modern educators! Under their guidance education has become what Herbert Spencer called it—a preparation for complete living. No longer a fixed, objective standard, education has been recognized as an enlargement of the life horizon of each individual boy or girl in the community. “Teach us individual needs,” proclaim the educational progressives, “and we will tell you what the character of education must be.” ”

“ I am thinking of the women who, for a paltry wage, are compelled to work out their lives; of the little children who, in this system, are robbed of their childhood, and in their early, tender years, are seized in the remorseless grasp of mammon, and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the machines while they themselves are being starved body and soul. I can see them dwarfed, diseased, stunted, their little lives broken, and their hopes blasted, because in this high noon of our twentieth century civilization, money is still so much more important than human life. ”

“ General war presented twentieth century man with a dilemma, an opportunity and a choice. Should he continue the grab-and-keep society that had flowered in Europe and elsewhere during the previous century, with its consequent poverty for the many, unemployment, exploitation and the power-struggle of the empires, or make a revolutionary change? As the stalemated war of 1914-18 with its frightful destruction of life and property continued year after year, the determination in favor of revolutionary change grew and crystalized. ”

“ Every social group is dependent for its effectiveness upon the kind of individuals of which it is composed, and their ideas and ideals limit the ideas and ideals of the group. At the same time, a carefully thought out course of social action, like a carefully thought out course of individual action presents a standard toward which society may work.
A plan for social organization is like the blue-print with which the mechanic works. Science comprises his rules and methods of procedure, but the driving power comes, not from the blue-print and not from the formulas, but from the man himself. ”

“ The abandonment of war removes one of the most destructive forces of the past, because war has always tended to eliminate the best of every race. In the flower of their manhood, the noblest died on the field of battle—their lives uncompleted; their tasks unfinished—leaving, perhaps, no offspring to bear their qualities in the succeeding generation. Although the law of nature is the survival of the fittest, “In the red field of human history the natural process of selection is often reversed.” ”

“ Along the highroad that leads to empire moves the American people, in the heyday of its youth, sturdy, vigorous, energy-filled, replete with power and promise—conquerors who have swept aside the Indians, enslaved a race of black men, subdued a continent, and begun the extension of territorial control beyond their own borders. More than a hundred million Americans—fast losing their standards of individualism—fast slipping under the domination of a new-made ruling class of wealth-lords and plutocrats—journey, not discontentedly, along the imperial highroad. ”

“ How profoundly does this truth apply to the raw material of education,—the children who enroll in the schools! Under your very eyes they lose their childish ways, feel their steps along the precipice of adolescence, enter the wonderland of imagery and idealism, and pass on into the maturity of life. How vain is our hope that the child may remain a child; how worthless our prayer that adult life shall never lay her heavy burden of cares and responsibilities upon his beloved shoulders. ”

“ From the Supreme Court I got neither love nor inspiration; from Debs I got both.
In his generation in the United States, there is not a greater man than Eugene V. Debs—not because of what he has done, but because of what he is, and when the history of this generation is written, that fact will be recorded.
The masters in all ages have put men like Debs in jail because it is the truth-teller that the masters fear most. They fear the Truth; they fear the Light; they fear Justice; and the man who turns on the Light and speaks the Truth and cries out for Justice—is their greatest enemy. ”

“ The scientist and the engineer upon whose shoulders will rest the burden of rebuilding the new society, tighten their belts and turn to the mightiest task that men have ever faced.
The economic muddle in which the world now finds itself is one of many transition periods in the history of civilization,—a phase of the great revolution. Like any period of chaos, it is the seed-ground of the new order—the demolition which precedes construction.
Some day men may be wise enough and sufficiently well organized and equipped to demolish and construct at the same time. ”

“ As the competitive survival struggle develops, one of the contending parties establishes its superiority by winning military victory. In the course of this struggle the commonwealth, a cluster of equals, yields place to the pattern of empire—a center of wealth and authority with its associates, subordinates and dependencies.
The strong right arm of politics includes man-power, money and weapons. The politics of civilization faces a simple mandate: establish, stabilize and perpetuate a nucleus of wealth and authority; build around the nucleus a periphery of associates and dependencies. ”

“ They have seen the red flag of revolution wave where they had expected nothing but the banner of victory. They have seen whole populations, weary of the old order, throw it aside with an impatient gesture and bring a new order into being. They have good reasons to understand and fear the disturbing influences of war. They have felt them even in the United States—three thousand miles away from the European conflict. How much more pressing might this unrest be if the United States had fought all through the war, instead of coming in when it was practically at an end! ”

“ The heart of the international Socialist never beats a retreat. They are pressing forward here, there, everywhere, in all the zones that girdle this globe. These workers, these class-conscious workers, these children of honest toil are wiping out the boundary lines everywhere. They are proclaiming the glad tidings of the coming emancipation. Everywhere they are having their hearts attuned to the sacred cause; everywhere they are moving toward democracy, moving toward the sunrise, their faces aglow with the light of coming day. ”

“ Before the axe of such incisive radicalism, how the antiquated structure of the old school machinery came crashing to the ground, to be replaced by a system which recognized each teacher as an individual builder of manhood and womanhood, working to meet the needs of individual children. It is not an idle boast which the English make when they glory in the absence of a curriculum; for even the best curriculum, if mismanaged, is speedily converted into a noose, the knot of which adjusts itself mechanically under the left ear of teacher and child alike. ”

“ For him, civilization is "the sum of things in which the heritage of the child of the twentieth century is better than that of the child of the Stone Age. As a process it is the perfection of man and mankind. As an end, it is the realization of the highest ideal which men are capable of forming.... The goal of civilization ... is human society so organized in all of its constituent groups that each shall yield the best possible service to each one and thereby to mankind as a whole, (producing) the perfect organization of humanity." ”

“ Popular government lies in the hopes and beliefs of the people. Empire is the servant of ambition and the shadow of greed. Popular government has been evolved by the human race at an immense sacrifice during centuries of struggle against the forms and ideas that underly imperialism. Since men have set their backs on the past and turned their faces with resolute hope to the future, empire has repelled them, while democracy has called and beckoned. ”

“ They have led the first real convention of any democracy that ever drew breath. The first act of that memorable revolution was to proclaim a state of peace with an appeal not to the kings, not to the rulers, but an appeal to the people of all nations. They are the very breath of democracy; the quintessence of freedom. They made their appeal to the people of all nations, the Allies as well as the Central Powers, to send representatives to lay down terms of a peace that should be lasting. Here was a fine opportunity to strike a blow to make democracy safe to the world. ”

“ The modern system of job-ownership owes its effectiveness to the fact that it has been built upon two of the most potent driving forces in all the world—hunger and ambition—the driving force that comes from the empty stomach and the driving force that comes from the desire for betterment. Thus job-owning, based upon an automatic self-drive principle, enables the job-owner to exact a return in faithful service that neither slavery nor serfdom ever made possible. Job-owning is thus the most thorough-going form of mastery yet devised by the ingenuity of man. ”

“ If Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Carthaginians built extensive empires and massive civilizations that flourished for a time, then broke up and disappeared, are we to follow blindly and unthinkingly in their footsteps? Or do we study their experiences, benefit from their successes and learn from their mistakes? Can we not take lessons out of their voluminous notebooks, avoid their blunders and direct our own feet along paths that fulfil our lives at the same time that they meet the widespread demand for survival and well-being? ”

“ Already educators have recognized the potency of the saying: “The schools were made for the children, not the children for the schools.” Hence it follows that no school system is so sacred, no method of teaching so venerable, no textbook so infallible, no machinery of administration so permanent, that it must not give way before the educational needs of childhood.
Concerning the educational problem of to-day, yesterday cannot speak with authority. Each age has its problems—problems which may be solved by that age, or handed on unsolved to the future. The past is dead. ”

“ The possession of things, is, in itself, a narrow field. The control over productive machinery gives him who exercises it the power to enjoy those things which the workers with machinery produce. The control over public affairs and over the forces that shape public opinion give him who exercises it the power to direct the thoughts and lives of the people. It is for these reasons that the keen, self-assertive, ambitious men who have come to the top in the rough and tumble of the business struggle have steadily extended their ownership and their control. ”

“ It is because I believe as the revolutionary fathers believed in their day, that a change was due in the interests of the people, that the time had come for a better form of government, an improved system, a higher social order, a nobler humanity and a grander civilization. This minority that is so much misunderstood and so bitterly maligned, is in alliance with the forces of evolution, and as certain as I stand before you this afternoon, it is but a question of time until this minority will become the conquering majority and inaugurate the greatest change in all of the history of the world. ”

“ As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, and the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry fingerpoints the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the look-out knows that the midnight is passing—that relief and rest are close at hand.
"Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning. ”