Moderately prosperous society

“ It is not prosperity so much as adversity, not wealth so much as poverty, that stimulates the perseverance of strong and healthy natures, rouses their energy, and develops their character. Indeed, misfortune and poverty have frequently converted the indolent votary of society into a useful member of the community, and made him a moving power in the great workshop of the world, teaching men, and developing the powers which nature has bestowed on them. ”

“ How It Has Met Its Responsibility.—This problem of prosperity which is both economic and social, is the concern of all the people of the nation, and any attempt to solve it in the interest of one section or a single group cannot bring success. That is one reason for many of the social weaknesses everywhere visible. ”

“ Until the education, moral and intellectual, of the average man is on a higher plane, it will be well for the surplus wealth to be in the safer hands of those who have proved their capacity for avoiding waste. The evolution of society is not fitted at present for a wealthy middle-class, or a proletariat domination. ”

“ Industry, navigation, commerce, have so much developed, they have formed so many ties by which every citizen is linked to his country's fate, that your own material interest is a security to your country's future.
In loving your own selves you love your country, and in loving your country you love your own selves. This community of public and private interest will make you avoid the stumbling-block over which others fell. Prosperity is, of course, a great benefit; it is one of the aims of human society; but when prosperity becomes too material, it does not always guarantee the future. ”

“ All the power and dignity that wealth can bestow is a mere shadow, the substance is found in the bone and sinew of the toiling millions. Well directed labor is the true power that supplies our wants. It gives regal grandeur to potentates, education and supplies to religious and political ministers, and supplies the wants of the thousands of millions of earth's sons and daughters. There are conditions and panics in society that all the power of earthly wealth cannot avert.
How happy, how secure that nation or people would be who knew how to sustain themselves for ever and for ever. ”

“ And will not the community gain by thus refusing to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs; by thus refraining from muzzling the ox that treadeth out the corn; by thus leaning to industry, and thrift, and skill, their natural reward, full and unimpaired? For there is to the community also a natural reward. The law of society is each for all as well as all for each. No one can keep to himself the good he may do, any more than he can keep the bad. Every productive enterprise, besides its return to those who undertake it, yields collateral advantages to others. ”

“ It is rapidly increasing, and I am not sure that the indefinite growth of the dilettante spirit, in connection with large and lavishly expended wealth, is an unmixed good, even in a society in which freedom of development has obtained so many interesting triumphs. The fact that this body is not represented in the governing class, is perhaps as much the result of the jealousy with which it is viewed by the more earnest workers as of its own—I dare not, perhaps, apply a harsher term than—levity. ”

“ This personal responsibility makes the question of consumption of wealth a question of morals as well as of wisdom. The whole discussion here turns upon the wisdom or unwisdom of certain personal uses or social uses of what the world has accumulated. We can ask what use of wealth is prudent, what imprudent; then what social organization best develops the wisdom which secures a prudent use of wealth; and finally, how far and in what ways society can act as a unit in the place of individuals. ”

“ Use of wealth individual.—It is necessary to realize that the social organization is maintained solely for the sake of individuals. All study of welfare and illfare is a study of individual human beings. The mutual relations of these human beings in society are means to individual life, growth and enjoyment. Even the total power of a generation in society is dependent upon how the individual wants of individual members of that society are met. ”

“ The science of education deals with ways and means of securing public wisdom. The science of government includes all facts relative to public virtue. So the facts by which we know the nature and uses of accumulated wealth in any community make a distinct study under the name economic science; it deals with certain definite groups of facts. To call everything good “wealth” and everything evil “ilth” adds nothing but confusion to our thoughts.
Mutual welfare.—Every human being in society is directly interested in the study of wealth as related to his own and his neighbors' welfare. ”

“ Society cannot, through any one institution, bring itself to perfection; many elements enter into the making of prosperity. It depends on individual ability and training for industry, on an understanding of the laws of health and keeping the body and brain in a state of efficiency, on peaceful relations between groups, on the successful balancing of supply and demand, and of wages and the cost of living, on personal integrity and group co-operation. All that the government can do is to instruct and stimulate. ”

“ What, for example, are the qualities in the citizens individually which conduce most to keep up the amount of good conduct, of good management, of success and prosperity, which already exist in society? Every body will agree that those qualities are industry, integrity, justice, and prudence. But are not these, of all qualities, the most conducive to improvement? and is not any growth of these virtues in the community in itself the greatest of improvements? ”

“ We have social welfare as the result of wealth consumed, or used up. Society is interested in all the wealth accumulated, and the methods of its accumulation and its fair distribution are a part of social machinery; yet these have their chief significance in the final consumption. It is not what we have, but what we do with it, that makes society interested in our possessions. It is not what society has, but how it uses it, that settles the chief questions of welfare or illfare. ”

“ If the minds and feelings of the prosperous were in a right state, would they accept their prosperity if for the sake of it even one person near them was, for any other cause than voluntary fault, excluded from obtaining a desirable existence? ”

“ He held that individual effort needed to be restrained and guided by the conscience of the community acting through the organisation of the state; and that economic well-being could be secured by moralising the existing order of society without greatly altering the basis of political power. ”

“ Put social conditions on a sound basis, the people on this side often say, let all receive an adequate economic return for their work and be recognised as having a claim for an adequate share in the products of society, and there is no need to worry about the race or about the need for birth-control, all will go well of itself. ”

“ Today we count among our national blessing a time of unprecedented prosperity, with expanding economy, low rates of poverty and unemployment among our people, limitless opportunities for our children and the future. ”

“ Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society. ”

“ This is helping our Families, our Dependants, our Tenants and Fellow-Citizens, the present and future Generations. Every Acre the Society would by this means improve (and they would improve Millions) would be so much additional Wealth to the Kingdom; every Art they set up; every manual Trade they encourage, will be a new strength to us, and will spread themselves as fast thro' the Kingdom as our Rivers do their vital Juices thro' our Plains. ”

“ What constitutes a good life? What is necessary to human flourishing? What kinds of human capabilities do particular societies value, encourage, genuinely enable, or block? What conceptions of human nature and the good society underpin our contemporary economic discourse? Can we, as ordinary citizens, enter the discourse on economic policy issues, or are we too economically illiterate for that? ”

“ Between these two principles, so similar that the difference in the statement would hardly attract a moment's attention unless it were specially insisted upon, lies the essential difference between the present most unsatisfactory condition of society, and the reign of equity, the just remuneration of labour, and the independence and elevation of all mankind. ”

“ Consider how by a thousand actions and interactions the members of every community are linked together and how, in the present condition of things, even the fortunate few who stand upon the apex of the social pyramid must suffer, though they know it not, from the want, ignorance and degradation that are underneath. The change I propose would be for the benefit of everyone, even the greatest landholder. Would he not be safer of the future of his children in leaving them penniless in such a state of society than in leaving them the largest fortune in this? ”

“ Every influence conspired to drive men into making desperate attempts to break away from the stigma and thraldom of poverty, and gain economic independence and social prestige by the ownership of wealth. ”

“ For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people.
The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization. ”

“ But if these common advantages, these public means of society, offering so many important agents to the individual for the gratification of his wants, alone are worth more to him than all the precarious power of the savage state—how incomparably greater are his advantages when we consider the wonderful accumulations, in the form of private wealth, which are ready to be exchanged with the labour of all those who are in a condition to add to the store. ”

“ But, to make her prosperity more than superficial, her moral and intellectual development should keep pace with her material growth. I feel most deeply, therefore, that it is the duty and privilege of the more favored and wealthy portions of our nation to assist those who are less fortunate. ”

“ It was for philosophy also to discover the connection between good government and the national prosperity, and that a community will have the most industry, skill and thrift, where property is best protected—where every one can freely exercise his talents or his capital, and securely enjoy the fruits they have yielded. ”

“ Import into the society the law of the family, and let the life-sustaining supplies be inversely proportioned to the life-sustaining labors, and the society decays from the increase of its least worthy members, and disappearance of its most worthy members: it must fail to hold its own in the struggle with other societies, which allow play to the natural law that prosperity shall vary as efficiency. ”

“ In the days of which I write, taking society round, the rich were all powerful, and the poor had none to help. It was a great and patient population that rose up early and worked hard all day, that ate the bread of carefulness and saved every groat which their poor lives could spare in order that milady and other ladies like her should fulfil no one single useful or grand purpose in life. ”

“ Does an idea expand middle class incomes and opportunities? Does it promote values like family and work, responsibility and community? Does it contribute to strengthening the new economy and to building a better future for all of us? ”

“ Thus, not even the material well-being of the population is secured by that condition of things which is defined by political economists as "National Prosperity." And so long as the moral elements of the question are ignored, this kind of "prosperity" is, we believe, calculated to produce far more mischievous results than good. It is knowledge and virtue alone that can confer dignity on a man's life; and the growth of such qualities in a nation are the only true marks of its real prosperity ”

“ The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.
The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. ”

“ Still we have insisted that, since the end of society is to make men better, the chief good that society can possess is virtue. Nevertheless, in all well-constituted States it is in no wise a matter of small moment to provide those bodily and external commodities the use of which is necessary to virtuous action. [26] And in order to provide such material well-being, the labor of the poor—the exercise of their skill, and the employment of their strength, in the culture of the land and in the workshops of trade—is of great account and quite indispensable. ”