Frederic May Holland

“ A Sunday law too lax for Pennsylvania might be too strict for California. The system of post-offices is too well adapted for the general welfare to be given up hastily; but the Government ought to surrender the monopoly which now makes it almost impossible for citizens to free themselves from dependence on disobliging or incompetent postmasters. I have nothing to say against the Census, Education, Health, and Patent Bureaus, nor against the Smithsonian Museum, except that our citizens have a right to use their own property as freely on Sunday as on any other day of the week. ”

“ He had consecrated himself in boyhood to war against all oppressors; and his position to the last was that of his own Prometheus, suffering continually with the enslaved, but consoled by faith that his sympathy will hasten the glorious day when every man shall be "king over himself," when women, free "from custom's evil taint," shall make earth like heaven, when "thrones, altars, judgment-seats, and prisons" shall seem as antiquated as the pyramids, and when human nature shall be "its own divine control." ”

“ When he resumed it in September, he took an assistant editor, who had declared on the previous Fourth of July, in a fashionable Boston church: "I acknowledge that immediate and complete emancipation is not desirable. No rational man cherishes so wild a vision." Before Garrison set foot on slave soil, it occurred to him that every slave had a right to instant freedom, and also that no master had any right to compensation. These two ideas he advocated at once, and ever after, as obstinately as George the Third insisted on the right to tax America. ”

“ Spencer's attempt to substitute a thoughtful for a thoughtless goodness of character has been much aided by his protest against such undiscriminating exhortations to self-sacrifice as are constantly heard from the pulpit. Good people, and especially good women, welcome the idea of giving up innocent pleasure and enduring needless pain. The glory of martyrdom blinds them to the fact that, as Spencer says in his Psychology, "Pains are the correlatives of actions injurious to the organism, while pleasures are the correlatives of actions conducive to its welfare." ”

“ Early in the century it became generally known that Robert Owen's factories were unusually profitable, on account of what he did for the intelligence, health, and happiness of the operatives. His pamphlet, published in 1813, and often reprinted as a New View of Society argued strongly for universal education as the remedy for poverty and crime; public opinion was much enlightened on the Continent, as well as in England; but a sagacious member of the British aristocracy said to him: "Oh, I see it all! Nothing could be more complete for the working-classes; but what will become of us?" ”

“ The Parliament of Religions showed that there has been a growing conviction of the equal rights of holders of all forms of belief and unbelief; this conviction has been promoted by recognition of two great facts: first, that knowledge is based upon experience, and, second, that no one's life is so complete that he has nothing to learn from other people. If they do not believe as he does, it may be merely because experience has taught them truth which he still needs to learn. ”

“ Washington is not the only city whose rich men ought to remember the warning of Heber Newton: "Everything that tends to foster among our working people the notion of class privilege is making against the truest morality in our midst. As they look upon the case, it is the wealthy people, whose homes are private libraries and galleries of art, who protest against the opening of our libraries and museums to those who can afford no libraries and buy no pictures. Sabbatarianism is building very dangerous fires to-day."
We should all be glad to have more intellectual culture given on Sunday. ”

“ The tariff is a much plainer issue. We are told in Social Statics that "A government trenches upon men's liberties of action" in obstructing commercial intercourse; "and by so doing directly reverses its function. To secure for each man the fullest freedom to exercise his faculties, compatible with the like freedom of all others, we find to be the state's duty. Now trade-prohibitions and trade-restrictions not only do not secure this freedom, but they take it away, so that in enforcing them the state is transformed from a maintainer of rights into a violator of rights." ”

“ CHAPTER V. EMERSON AND OTHER TRANSCENDENTALISTS
I. The best work for liberty has been done by men who loved her too wisely to vituperate anyone for differing from them, or to forestall the final verdict of public opinion by appealing to an ordeal by battle. Such were the men who took the lead in establishing freedom of thought in America. Very little individual independence of opinion was found there by Tocqueville in 1831; and the flood of new ideas which had already burst forth in England was not as yet feeding the growth of originality in American literature. ”

“ Not only France, but also Great Britain, Canada, and Australia, give proof that the time has gone by when Americans had any right to claim, as they did in my boyhood, to be the only people able to govern themselves.
If any nation can maintain a free press, just laws, and elections of local magistrates, it ought to enjoy these rights, however slight may be its fitness for becoming a real republic; and the suppression of such rights by Cromwell and Napoleon cannot be pardoned consistently by any friend to liberty. ”

“ Industrial prosperity depends even more closely than military glory on the energy of men who have been at liberty to think and act freely. People develop most vigorously where they are least meddled with. The average man knows much more than his rulers do about his own private business; and he is active to promote it in ways which secure the general welfare.
Great stress is laid not only in Social Statics but in Spencer's book on The Man versus the State, and in several essays, on the many times that the British Government has increased an evil by trying to cure it. ”

“ When we think how much mischief has recently been done in the United States by illiterate and venal votes, we cannot blame Englishmen of the upper and middle classes for delaying to grant universal suffrage. They ought to have made rapid preparation for it, by liberal encouragement of popular education through free schools and a cheap press; but even the Whigs were too indignant at the violence of the Chartists, who made bloody riots in 1841. ”

“ Town affairs are usually so carefully looked after by people not in office as to be managed for the public welfare. Both in towns and cities the tendency is to enlarge rather than contract the functions of the government. A proposal that any city should let tenements or sell coal more cheaply than is done by individuals, would seem to be for the advantage of everybody except a few payers of heavy taxes. The majority of voters would care little about increase of taxation, in comparison with the prospect of more demand for labour and greater activity in business. ”

“ Why should every week in a democratic country begin with an aristocratic Sunday, a day whose pleasures are mainly for the rich?
Libraries and museums are blessed places of refuge; but "What are they among so many?" The residents of the District of Columbia are particularly unfortunate, as the Smithsonian Museum, National Library, and other buildings, which are open during six days, are kept shut on Sunday. Congress seems to be of the opinion that working people need no knowledge of natural history, except what they can get from sermons about Jonah's whale and Noah's ark. ”

“ Should those who wish to rest as much as possible on Sunday sleep in church? There is nothing irreligious in fresh air. The tendency of outdoor exercise to purify and elevate our thoughts is so strong that Kingsley actually defended playing cricket on Sunday as "a carrying out of the divineness of the Sabbath." If there is no hostility between religion and amusement on six days of the week, there cannot be much on the seventh. ”

“ Large exports do not depend on density of population but on ability to import freely. Readiness of any country to buy freely of her neighbours keeps them able and willing to buy whatever she has to sell. Free trade has given Great Britain, New South Wales, and Belgium their choice of the world's markets. Great Britain has also been enabled to keep up much more friendly relations with the rest of Europe than would otherwise have been the case. Liberty of commerce has helped her enjoy peace; and peace has preserved free institutions. ”

“ It was not their fault that excess in speculation on both sides of the Atlantic had brought on a panic which threw thousands of people out of work in the factory towns, and reduced other thousands to earning only twopence a day. A succession of bad harvests, just before 1841, made wages very low on the farms, and food too dear everywhere. Bread was sold in halfpenny slices; labourers robbed pigs of swill; children fought with dogs for bones in the streets; one person in every eleven was a pauper; and England seemed to Dickens like one vast poorhouse. ”

“ Those of most men are dark with superstition and prejudice. It is what we have heard earliest and oftenest that recurs most spontaneously. If all mankind had continued satisfied to "trust the instinct to the end though it can render no reason," we should still believe in the divine right of kings, and the supremacy of evil spirits. There would have been very little persecution if men could have known truth when they saw it. Parker believed devoutly in the intuitions, but he said that Emerson exaggerated their accuracy to such an extent that he "discourages hard and continuous thought." ”

“ When we feel this inner prompting to a brave or honest action which must be done promptly or left undone, it is our duty to act without hesitation or regard to our own interest. We are serving our race in the way which its experience has taught. Suppose, however, that there is time enough for deliberation, and that we see a possibility of harm to our neighbours, our family, or even to our own highest welfare. ”

“ Thus was established what some metaphysicians suppose to be the best form of government,—an enlightened despotism. The autocrat knew that he had risen to power as the most popular champion of political equality; and he gave this democratic principle such additional authority that it has continued supreme in France. Her sons are still equals before the law, owners of the land they till, exempt from taxes levied for the benefit of any privileged class, and free to choose their own career and mode of worship. ”

“ THE revolutionary movements of 1848 did much to encourage love of liberty in America, where the anti-slavery agitation was now becoming prominent in politics. The indignation against the Mexican war increased as it was found that nothing would be done to keep the promise of 1844, that Great Britain should be excluded from the Pacific. The purpose of the South, to enlarge the area of slavery but not that of freedom, was so plain that the northern Democrats proposed the Wilmot Proviso, by which slavery would have been forbidden in all territory acquired from Mexico ”

“ Socialism was still the religion of the working-men of Paris, who now formed the majority of the National Guard. Indignation at the failure of the new Government to repulse the Prussians led, on March 18, 1871, to the capture of all Paris by what was avowedly the revolution of the workmen against the shopkeepers, "in the name of the rights of labour," for "the suppression of all monopolies," "the reign of labour instead of capital," and "the emancipation of the worker by himself." ”

“ South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama took the same course; and it was agreed everywhere that abolitionists were to be lynched. Loyalty to slavery was required of all preachers and editors; no other qualification for every office, in the service either of the nation or of the State, was exacted so strictly; other controversies lost interest; and men who would have gained greatly from the introduction of free labour helped the slave-holders silence those intelligent Southerners who knew what urgent need there was in their section of emancipation for the general welfare. ”