Various

“ Most of us refuse to engage in prophecies. But so much is clear: the good and the beautiful that may prevail under a thorough-going capitalism must be better and more beautiful than the values of old time. Capitalistic freedom demands that there must be greater variety and wealth of beauty than an earlier order required; capitalistic fraternity demands that charity and toleration must extend beyond the bounds of class and race. Unless the art and the practical ethics of perfected capitalism represent an advance in universality, they will be thrust aside as meaningless and worthless. ”

“ In the Modern Republic it seemed something like the sacrifice of the best to the good, the leveling down of the highest as well as the raising up of the lowest. Certain kinds of talent and effort were in great danger of neglect—the kind of talent and effort which had made nations live in history. If there was anything in the record of the past, if civilization was not on the wrong track, and if literature and religion and the arts were indeed the supremely worth while, it seemed plain that the encouragement of uniformity beyond limits was a crime against the race. ”

“ The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; the same desire magnified and intensified by liberty overmasters democracy—the truth being that the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction; and this is the case not only in the seasons and in vegetable and animal life, but above all in forms of government. The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery. And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty. ”

“ What is wrong in the world they do not merely deplore; they wish to set it right. And if the wrong is so pervasive, the evil so deep-seated, the depravity so general, as these manifold presentments make it out, what more natural than that they should sum up the whole case in the conviction that the existing order of society is a failure, and be ready to welcome almost any experiment that holds out the promise of something better?
It is for this reason, above all others, that he who recklessly or thoughtlessly distorts or exaggerates the facts of our time assumes a grievous responsibility. ”

“ There is the true Burke; he knew, as Paine knew, that the support of these institutions was in their symbolic sway over the imaginations of men, and that, with this defence undermined, they would crumble away beneath the aggressive passions of the present, or would remain as mere bloodless vanities. He thought that the real value of life was in its meaning to the imagination, and he was not ashamed to avow that the fall and tragedy of kings, because they bore in their person the destiny of ancient institutions, stirred him more profoundly than the sufferings of ordinary men. ”

“ Capitalism is material, gross, ugly. Yes, but it has a soul—toleration, liberty, fraternity. And this, like most souls, is not so much in being as in becoming. It is only in the most highly capitalistic centers that even business has partly freed itself from elements of personal oppression. There is no state nor city in which the fraternity of labor is more than an emerging fact. Under capitalism, workingmen are brothers, but there is still a vast deal of the Cain and Abel in their feelings toward one another. ”

“ Just as the schoolboy learns to say parrotwise that the sun sits still and swings us round, though he sees him every evening descend to rest in New Jersey like a tired commuter; and just as the uncompromising idealist behaves exactly like the man who believes in the knowable reality of the world; so the most convinced determinist must act from morning to night as though he were a free agent, and must judge his fellowmen as though they too were choosers. Moreover almost all of us adopt instinctively some concrete reason for the choices we assume we are making. ”

“ His faith in men had suffered the same rude shocks as his faith in democracy—quite naturally, for neither faith stood alone. He had come to see that the sordidness of human beings reached heights and depths which his youth, slow to believe and slower to perceive, had never imagined. Surely, the love of money was the root of all evil—or of nearly all. The heated oratory of the campaign was mostly inspired by love of money or place. The patriotic sentiment that so abounded in the press was mostly gush, the news was colored, and the whole belonged to men with axes to grind. ”

“ Solidarity is unthinkable without a measure of toleration. The American trade unionist learns to tolerate the alien origin, the broken speech and uncouth manner, the strange religion, and the unexpected outlook upon life, of the foreign workman who must either become a brother unionist and faithful ally, or a scab and an enemy. And out of this toleration is created a sphere of personal freedom from social encroachment such as no workman of an earlier epoch ever enjoyed. Fraternity and liberty, these are the positive acquisitions won by labor out of the very oppression of capitalism. ”

“ But intellect was not the greatest thing in the world. Might not the ever increasing skill in pigeon-holing lead before long to a definition of religion, the cessation of doctrinal quarrels, and the sinking of all differences in a common ideal of administration, conduct, and even belief? Yes; might it not lead to the final obliteration of national and racial, and even social, distinctions? Might it not lead, and at no distant date, not only to democracy and social equality, but to universal democracy—when the war-drum throbbed no longer, etc.? ”

“ So, too, a respectable woman of New York who asks whether it may not be a greater wrong for a girl to submit to the slavery of low wages than to sell herself on the street, is manifestly not helping the tempted to resist. She is even doing what she can with her words to confuse the very bounds of moral and physical evil.
There is, in fact, a terrible confusion hidden in the New Morality, an ulcerous evil that is ever working inward. Sympathy, creating the desire for even-handed justice, is in itself an excellent motive of conduct, and the stronger it grows, the better the world shall be. ”

“ I have witnessed many cases of personal unhappiness among women, some of domestic shipwreck, owing to a wife's moral confusion, some of women hounded by unreasonable discontent into public careers for which they have no capacity, and perhaps the most pitiful cases of all, women pursued by an aimless restiveness which finds no stated expression, but colors atrociously their every act. Peace and clear thinking wither as those women pass. They are mostly victims of a false theory that a woman has the innate right to be amused, and that for such amusement she need not pay. ”

“ He still remembered vividly the time when all men were easily classifiable—into good and bad, Christian and heathen, saved and unsaved, rich and poor, wise and foolish, as easily as into black and white, or fat and lean; when all nations except the United States, and all governments except democracy, were inferior. He remembered the surprise with which he had heard for the first time that there was a difference between prohibition and temperance, that there were many forms of intemperance besides drunkenness, that English government had many points of superiority over American. ”

“ To speak of capitalism as endowed with a soul, is indeed a paradox. But the conception of soul is itself paradoxical. The man of science dispenses with it in so far as he can. All that compels us rationally to posit the existence of soul, is its works, good and evil. The hypothesis of a human soul has been forced upon us by the fact that there is in the action of man an element that transcends the needs and purposes of the body, an element that we often see growing into such commanding importance that it reduces the body to the rank of mere instrument. ”

“ Today a college education is supposed to be merely useful. Yet at the same time it is felt to be a ground for wonder that so many can pass through the college course with no visible refinement of taste or speech, no clarification of the sense of honor and justice, and no increase in thoughtfulness or in independence of mind—that, in a word, a college graduate is indistinguishable in general society. Some time ago I sat at a hotel table with six commercial travellers and one college graduate, who was also a college professor,—all talking baseball. ”

“ To ask whether either writer or editor really believes the picture to be true—to hark back to Dickens's solemn assurance of the truthfulness of his indictments against the evils he attacked—is the most that need be said on the subject, to anyone accustomed to sober or responsible thinking. But among the millions of defenceless people—young, half-educated, well-intentioned, untrained to serious thought—to whom such stuff is being fed every day, there is a vast number that are misled by it into a false view of the world, and into a state of mind that is most unwholesome and deplorable. ”

“ The democratic passion for freedom and equality and uniformity once fully realized, what deadness and monotony! And as for the boasted educating power of responsibility, there was as little chance for it in the frictionless machine of perfect democracy as under despotism itself.
Democracy certainly did savor of the machine; just as the object of machinery was to insure a uniform product without personal handling of each individual piece, so the object of democracy seemed to be in such wise to regulate the affairs of men that justice would be automatic. ”

“ Hence we should condemn no man, even as we do not condemn ourselves. There is no place for sharp judgment, and the laws which impose penalties and restrictions, and set up false discriminations between the innocent and the criminal, are subject to suspicion, and should be made as flexible as possible. In place of judgment we are to regard all mankind with sympathy, feeling with them a sort of emotional solidarity, the one great virtue, in which are included, or rather sunk, all the law and the prophets. In fine, we have arrived at humanitarianism; humanity has become God. ”

“ Away with pigeon-holing then, as violent, tyrannical, and oppressive, a foe to individuality of men and ideas, and an obstacle to real progress! Away with curbs and yardsticks and tapes and molds and stamps and presses and dies, and all manner of interference with nature and her methods of expansion! Let nature, and especially human nature, realize itself, like any plant or flower! Fired by imagination, the Essayist started up, glowering at his desk and thinking of the axe. ”

“ Society must always frown upon the morose and solitary drinker—the man who drinks merely for the purpose of injecting alcohol into his system. Drinking should be regarded only as a means, not as an end. It is not good in and for itself; it is good only as an aid toward loftier things. The great virtue of drinking, granting it virtue, is that it may ease the perilous and delicate ascent to human intercourse, or, to change the metaphor, alcohol is the best of social lubricants. ”

“ The War System is making this great, rich, resourceful world a bankrupt concern in the hands of its creditors. The nations of the earth still owe some 40 billions of dollars in gold for the wars of the last 100 years, from Waterloo to Adrianople. But one nation of all the number (our own) has made any progress whatever in paying its share of this debt. The tendency is ever to borrow more, up to and beyond the limit of credit. The interest is paid, perhaps by borrowing, but there is no haste about the principal. Except for war, no nation on earth would ever need to borrow a dollar. ”

“ Was it Love that prepared those winding coils of torture to enclose for endless time the vast majority of mankind? Was it even justice to make the everlasting doom of a soul depend on its grasp of truth in these few years spent in a world of shadows and illusions? ”

“ It is fairly certain that in the same city at the same period "Orator Henley" was as convinced of his own omniscience as any sociologist or political economist who discusses the future of the family or white slavery before a woman's club. Every age must cherish its pet variation of the standing illusion of the race—that for our day and generation we are wiser than our ancestors were for theirs. Who would not run after a good thing, and what better things are there to run after than schemes for human regeneration, even if we frequently find that our rainbow has not led us to a pot of gold? ”

“ It was so much easier to force men to accept your own beliefs and plans than to take the trouble to acquaint yourself with theirs. It was so much more satisfying and final to follow mere logic and go to the end of the process than always to be engaged in that most laborious of tasks—thinking and forming judgments. To write a volume embodying all the facts was much easier than to write an essay presenting the essentials and their interpretation. A perfectly democratic or a perfectly absolute government was far less difficult to plan than the ideal commonwealth. ”

“ Every-day efficiency, even every-day right-mindedness, is not the only thing about which there is occasion for solicitude. It seems usually to be forgotten on both sides of the discussion that there occur every now and then, in the history of a nation, questions of a crucial nature upon the right or wrong decision of which rest momentous and enduring consequences. Such questions, under the traditions of representative government as they have grown up in the course of ages, are fought out in a very different way from that which marks the ordinary routine of legislation and government. ”

“ Yet not much more than a century ago the preaching of social sympathy could send a Lebon and his kind over France with an insatiable lust for killing, complicated with Sadism, while at home the leader of the Government of the most civilized country of Europe was justifying such a régime on the pious principle that, "when the sovereign people exercises its power, we can only bow before it; in all it does all is virtue and truth, and no excess, error, or crime is possible." The animal is not dead within us, but only asleep. ”

“ It was easier to be an ignoramus or a pedant than a real scholar, a dogmatist or an atheist than a good preacher, a lecturer on education than a teacher, a slouch or a dandy than a well dressed man, a persecutor or a humanitarian than a saver of souls, a despot or an anarchist than a shepherd of the people, a censor or an abettor than a monitor and adviser, a total abstainer or a drunkard than a temperate man, a conservative or a radical than a patriot, a boor or a fop than a gentleman. ”