Inhumanity

“ And this belief in a life beyond the grave, and pretended knowledge of its conditions—under one form or other one of the most ancient and widespread conceptions of the human race—what has it led to? Inhumanity in time past, inhumanity now; bloodshed and misery, dark delusion, degrading superstition, priestly pretence, persecution and intolerance, creed exclusiveness and bigoted zeal, misdirected fervour and visionary hopes—all the offspring of this conviction—fill the records of mankind. ”

“ You exaggerate their weaknesses, and you make a crime to them of the slightest imperfections; and that is an inhumanity. You turn even their zeal and fervour into ridicule; and that is an impiety. And behold, my brethren, the three descriptions of the world's injustice toward the pious: — an injustice of temerity, which always suspects their intentions; an injustice of inhumanity, which gives no palliation to the slightest imperfections; an injustice of impiety, which, of their zeal and sanctity, makes a subject of contempt and derision. ”

“ I am not one of those modern philosophers, who derive the vices of mankind from the influence of civilization; but I am safe in asserting, that their number and malignity increase with the refinements of polished life. To prove this, we need only survey a scene too familiar to affect us: it is a bedlam; which injustice, inhumanity, avarice, pride, vanity, and ambition, have filled with inhabitants. ”

“ It has been left to me to show that this inhumanity, this indivinity, this Sin, has, like all man's ideas, conceptions, and fantasies, a Material source in the properties of the forms of Matter of which man consists. ”

“ I had not then learned the measure of "man's inhumanity to man," nor to what limitless extent of wickedness he will go for the love of gain. ”

“ But "man's inhumanity to man" is not the last word. The truth lies deeper. It is economic slavery, the savage struggle for a crumb, that has converted mankind into wolves and sheep. ”

“ And this process will be repeated again and again, each generation transmitting cunning and cruelty intensified to the next. Our great cities already breed men degraded below the level of the lowest savages [33] known to us, but even they can give us but little idea of what the struggle for existence will yet produce from the ruins of civilisation in the course of the Evolution of Inhumanity. ”

“ Man’s inhumanity to Man,
Makes countless thousands mourn. ”

“ And lastly, it is to be noticed that not by any means all the individuals belonging to more advanced societies who come in contact with savages use them with inhumanity, or even retaliate on treachery and injury. ”

“ The foreign observer complains, in this connection, of the inhumanity of the inhabitants of the country, who were unmoved by the sight of their fellow-creatures falling down and dying of hunger in the streets. ”

“ Without arguing this matter of my general reputation, accepting it at its current face value, let me add that I have indeed lived life in a very rough school and have seen more than the average man’s share of inhumanity and cruelty, from the forecastle and the prison, the slum and the desert, the execution-chamber and the lazar-house, to the battlefield and the military hospital. I have seen horrible deaths and mutilations. I have seen imbeciles hanged, because, being imbeciles, they did not possess the hire of lawyers. ”

“ But the humanitarianism itself is sounded in a harmonious chord, whose overtone is a ridicule, more grim than gay, of the delinquents;—those who lack the spirit of humanity, yet are the very ones, on the principle of noblesse oblige, in whom it should well up most abundantly. If they fail through that ignorance and mental limitation from which not even the aristocracy are always exempt, the blow is tempered accordingly; but it falls more heavily when the roots of the evil are the black ones of selfishness and perversity. ”

“ After all, what does humanity most lack? Appreciation for its geniuses. As it is, we're persecuted, tortured, racked, through a lifetime of perpetual agony, into the asylum or the grave. But no longer will I be their bauble. Humanity, hypocrite that you are—to hell with you. ”

“ And so through countless years of ignorance and cruelty—of thought and crime—of murder and worship, of heroism, suffering, and self-denial, the race has reached the heights where now we stand.
Looking back over the long and devious roads that lie between the barbarism of the past and the civilization of to-day, thinking of the centuries that rolled like waves between these distant shores, we can form some idea of what our fathers suffered—of the mistakes they made—some idea of their ignorance, their stupidity—and some idea of their sense, their goodness, their heroism. ”

“ What if I should undertake to show humanity attacked in its very source, and even in the most sacred of all ties, in which fortune is consulted before nature, and, the disorders of society confounding all virtue and vice, continence becomes a criminal precaution, and a refusal to give life to a fellow-creature, an act of humanity? But, without drawing aside the veil which hides all these horrors, let us content ourselves with pointing out the evil which others will have to remedy. ”

“ And, finally, let us ask again—what is this act of antagonism against the natural states of humanity?—what is this act in which we sacrifice our sensations, passions, and desires, that is, our false selves, upon the shrine of our true selves?—what is this act in which Freedom and Will are embodied to defeat all the enslaving powers of darkness that are incessantly beleaguering us?—what is it but morality of the highest, noblest, and most active kind? and, therefore, what is human philosophy, ultimately, but another name for human virtue of the most practical and exalted character? ”

“ But we have our weaknesses and infirmities in common with all men. It is incident to humanity, and the devourer is at work seeking to destroy, to contaminate, to corrupt and defile, and to lead men down to perdition, to produce discord and envy, hatred and strife, and every evil that proceeds from that source. ”

“ And we see that parallel with the ascending white line of humanity runs an ascending black line,—the bad man of civilization is in some ways worse than the bad man of savagery. And this complexity of good and evil is recognized at a time when a higher sensibility has made the old familiar pain and sin of humanity seem more than ever intolerable.
Yet the spectacle of creation and of the world, as we see and know it, makes upon us an impression far beyond that of mere perplexity or dismay. It produces a sentiment which we may best call awe. ”

“ But instead of these visionary ones we should point out and warn men from the substantial gates of the true hell. Whatever is a cause of insubordinate and discordant fruition in body or soul, individual or community, is a real gate of hell. All the moral and social evils, intemperance, war, ambition, avarice, the extremes of poverty and wealth, ignorance, bad example, despotism, disease, every form of vice or crime, all the influences that destroy or mar human virtue, excellence, and harmony, are so many open gates of hell, drawing their victims in. ”

“ I attack the monsters, the phantoms of imagination that have ruled the world. I attack slavery. I ask for room—room for the human mind.
Why should we sacrifice a real world that we have for one we know not of? Why should we enslave ourselves? ”

“ Through the dim long years that have fled, humanity has suffered more than can be conceived Most of the misery has been endured by the weak, the loving and the innocent Women have been treated like poisonous beasts, and little children trampled upon as though they had been vermin. Numberless altars have been reddened, even with the blood of babes; beautiful girls have been given to slimy serpents; whole races of men doomed to centuries of slavery, and everywhere there has been outrage beyond the power of genius to express. ”

“ Only from dens, lairs, and caves, only from mouths filled with cruel fangs, only from hearts of fear and hatred, only from the conscience of hunger and lust, only from the lowest and most debased could come this most cruel, heartless and bestial of all dogmas. ”

“ Now, while there are those men in the van of society, who aspire at more, chiding and taxing mankind with idleness, cowardice, and even sin, there are yet those others who loiter on the way, from weakness or wilfulness, refusing to advance—idlers, cowards, sinners. If born in the rear, afar from civilization, they are left to die—the savages, the inferior races, the perishing classes of the world. If born in the centre or civilization, for a while they impede the march by actively hindering others, by standing in their way, or by plundering the rest—the dangerous classes of society. ”

“ Having been hurled into an existence gigantic, monstrous, in which there were no limits to either the devotion or the cruelty of human beings toward one another, all other ways of living had grown pale and small. ”

“ How unwise had the wanderers been, who had deserted its shelter, entangled themselves in the web of society, and entered on what men of the world call "life,"—that labyrinth of evil, that scheme of mutual torture. ”

“ Men, from causes too intricate to be here discussed, had become insensible and selfish: their own will had become feeble, and yet they were its slaves, and thence the slaves of the will of others: lust, fear, avarice, cruelty, and fraud, characterized a race amongst whom no one was to be found capable of CREATING in form, language, or institution. The moral anomalies of such a state of society are not justly to be charged upon any class of events immediately connected with them, and those events are most entitled to our approbation which could dissolve it most expeditiously. ”

“ Our work, unmanly social conceptions of good and evil, and their enormous ascendancy over body and mind, live at last weakened all bodies and minds and crushed all self-reliant, independent, unprejudiced people, the pillars of a strong civilisation. ”

“ Look around you and see how lonesome you are in this wide world of ours. As far as modern civilization throws its rays, what people, what class of society is there like you? Cry out into the world your “wild and guilty fantasy” of property in man, and every echo responds with a cry of horror or contempt; every breeze, from whatever point of the compass it may come, brings you a verdict of condemnation. ”

“ But the perpetration of such hideous cruelty could never have become a permanent national custom, but for this universal desire in the human mind to behold man in every situation, putting forth his strength against the current of adversity, scorning all bodily anguish, or struggling with those feelings of nature, which, like a beating stream, will off times burst through the artificial barriers of pride. ”

“ They offer the conventional picture, only in extenso, of original poverty and self-abnegation, coupled with devotion and valor, changed to arrogance, treason, abandonment of purpose, unbridled lawlessness leading to crime and cruelty, all brought about because of affluence, acquired power, selfishness, cupidity and every debasing human weakness. ”

“ With such a predisposition in individuals, a feeling in common can scarcely arise at all, at most only the rudest form of it: so that everywhere that this conception of good and evil prevails, the destruction of the individuals, their race and nation, is imminent.—Our existing morality has developed upon the foundation laid by ruling races and castes. ”

“ What imperious reasons for penetrating the lowest depths of the masses with instruction and with light—to enable unfortunate creatures to defend themselves from so many stupid prejudices, so many fatal superstitions, so much implacable fanaticism!—How can we ask for calmness, reflection, self-control, or the sentiment of justice from abandoned beings, whom ignorance has brutalized, and misery depraved, and suffering made ferocious, and of whom society takes no thought, except when it chains them to the galleys, or binds them ready for the executioner! ”

“ By an ingenious system of psychology he played upon their nature, calling out the primitive barbarism which has been overlaid by civilized restraints, liberating the brute which has been long chained up by law and the social code of gentle life, but lurks always in the secret lairs of the human heart. ”

“ No, no, no; truth, honesty, teaching the crowds, human liberty, manly virtue, conscience, are not things to disdain. Indignation and emotion are but one faculty turned toward the two sides of mournful human slavery; and those who are capable of anger are capable of love. ”

“ Has the Man of to-day, still living by bloodshed, still striving to grow rich at the expense of his neighbour, still using torture in punishment, still seeking sport in destruction, still waging fratricidal wars, and, while making a hell on earth, claiming for himself an eternal heaven hereafter—has this selfish, predatory being arrived at a state of “civilization”? ”

“ Not that of life; for while some possess every means of a pleasurable bodily and mental existence—free in thought, free in action—others are the victims of a detestable, heaven-insulting system of slavery, which debases the soul, destroys the intellect, unmans and deteriorates the whole being. ”

“ It has been the consideration of our wonderful atmosphere in its various relations to human life, and to all life, which has compelled me to this cry for the children and for outraged humanity. Will no body of humane men and women band themselves together, and take no rest till this crying evil is abolished, and with it nine-tenths of all the other evils that now afflict us? ”

“ This dark veil, which enshrouds nearly the whole human race, can be penetrated and removed with much greater certainty and facility, by the mild but invincible rays of intellectual light, than by opposing violence with violence, and evil to evil. ”

“ When we complain of the turbulent state of society there we mistake the nature of the case if we ascribe the whole evil exclusively to the traditions of slavery or the usual irregularities of life in thinly settled countries. ”