Social evil

“ Destroy the cave, Ignorance, and you destroy the mole, Crime. Let us condense in a few words a portion of what we have just written. The sole social evil is darkness; humanity is identity, for all men are of the same clay, and in this nether world, at least, there is no difference in predestination; we are the same shadow before, the same flesh during, and the same ashes afterwards: but ignorance, mixed with the human paste, blackens it, and this incurable blackness enters man and becomes Evil there. ”

“ It was necessary to exhibit the whole misery, the last extreme of that social evil, to which a creature so naturally frail and ignorant is liable, under those coarse, fortuitous, inartistic, unscientific social conglomerations, which ignorant and barbarous ages build, and under the tyranny of those wild, barbaric social evils, which our fine social institutions, notwithstanding the universality of their terms, and the transcendant nature of the forces which they are understood to have at their disposal, for some fatal reason or other, do not yet succeed in reducing. ”

“ And so, for example, to apply the idea in detail, in the region which you yourself selected, all that we regret, or hate, or fear in our social system—poverty, disease, starvation and the rest—is not really evil at all, does not in fact exist, but is merely what appears to us? There is, in fact, no social evil? ”

“ What could be worse? That which (for lack of a better term to apply to it) we call the social evil is not confined to the scarlet woman of the streets. It often exists in the best families of the land! ”

“ So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or [29] moral degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements. And to assert as a mitigation of the evil that those who thus suffer are the weaker members of the community, morally or physically, is to add insult to misfortune. Is weakness a justification of suffering? ”

“ Unless the contemporaries of such unhappy individuals are touched to tenderness or stirred to indignation by the actual embodiments of the old wrong in their own generation, effective action cannot be secured.
The social evil has, on the whole, received less philanthropic effort than any other well-recognized menace to the community, largely because there is something peculiarly distasteful and distressing in personal acquaintance with its victims ”

“ But if it be true—as we believe it to be—that the working and producing classes of the community are suffering unexampled hardship, and that not of a temporary and exceptional kind, but from the operation of some vicious and baneful element which has crept into our social system, it then becomes our duty to attempt to discover the actual nature of the evil ”

“ The prudish and hypocritical attitude of society is universally regarded as the main cause of all-pervading diffusion of the social evil, furthered by a most flagrant ignorance on one hand and a morbid curiosity produced by this attitude on the other. ”

“ This ancient evil is indeed social in the sense of community responsibility and can only be understood and at length remedied when we face the fact and measure the resources which may at length be massed against it. Perhaps the most striking indication that our generation has become the bearer of a new moral consciousness in regard to the existence of commercialized vice is the fact that the mere contemplation of it throws the more sensitive men and women among our contemporaries into a state of indignant revolt. ”

“ To rebel against social compulsion may be heroism, and again it may be merely bad judgment. For my part, the world's greatest evil is poverty, the cause of crime, prostitution and war. I concentrate my energies upon the abolishing of that evil, and I let other problems wait. ”

“ It is because of each and all of these imperfect realisations of our civic life, that the evils of life sink down, or flame out, into these complex eruptions of social evils with which our human aggregations are as yet cursed.
Hence, to those who are struggling with disease and pain, with ignorance and defect, with vice, and with crime, but for the most part too separately, it is time to say that all these four evils are capable of being viewed together, and largely even treated together. ”

“ The disease inherent in her being, that deadly outcome of social tyranny which perverts the generous elements of youth into mere seeds of destruction, developed day by day, blighting her heart, corrupting her moral sense, even setting marks of evil upon the beauty of her countenance. ”

“ To the community it is equally an enemy—producing vice, demoralization, and wickedness; its places of sale being resorts of gaming, lewdness, and debauchery, and the hiding-place of those who prey upon society; counteracting the efficacy of religious effort, and of all means of intellectual elevation, moral purity, social happiness, and the eternal good of mankind, without rendering any counteracting or compensating benefits; being in its influence and effect evil and only evil, and that continually. ”

“ This lowering of the level of general morality causes the most immoral part of society to come more and more to the top ; and an immoral public opinion is formed which not only permits, but even approves crimes, robberies, debauchery, and murder itself. Thus a vicious circle is set up: the evil elements of society, evoked by the social struggle, throw themselves hotly into public activity corresponding to the low level of their morality, and this activity again attracts to itself yet worse elements of society. ”

“ It is seen also that the last system gradually destroys individual responsibility; little by little it produces cynicism, corruption, and a deep-seated moral degradation in all classes of society, which at last kills the sense of evil in the individual conscience, and thus destroys both the will and the power of a nation to regenerate itself. ”

“ Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. ”

“ But when, on the contrary, a man comes to the conclusion that the products of Society as constituted have in them more of evil than of good, he may quite creditably, in a strict sense of the word, start an attack upon Society, or upon great social institutions, and seek to bring them to dissolution. ”

“ While we earnestly strive to control and repress every kind of moral evil, we feel that society itself is responsible for sin and crime, and that social and political conditions and constitutions must change, until the weak and the heavy-laden are protected from the heartlessness of the strong and fortunate. ”

“ But these evils that are deeply rooted in our social conditions, cannot be removed by moralizing or by resorting to palliative measures, such as social and religious quacks always have in readiness. It is necessary to strike the root of the evil. ”

“ Hence it has become one of the most fruitful sources of human misery and human degradation, and the satisfaction of its imperious cravings in civilised countries lies at the root of our worst social evils. ”

“ There are certain evils of a social character, that may exist in combination with the essential elements of social life—to destroy which, by hasty and violent measures, is a far greater evil; and, in such cases, the existing and lesser evil is under the protection of Heaven. ”

“ Volumes after volumes have been written on the subject, denouncing in an unmistakable manner the monstrous perversity of the existing system, but the evil has taken such a deep root in the social economy of the people that the utmost exertions must be put forth before it can be wholly eradicated. ”

“ No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. ”

“ Only after political, religious and social restraints have produced a stable community can there be sufficient experience of the pains, positive and negative, sensational and emotional, which crimes of aggression cause, as to145 generate that moral aversion to them constituted by consciousness of their intrinsically evil results. ”

“ This prejudice is based on the ground that bad economic conditions and an unwholesome environment are the source of all social evils, and that a better distribution of wealth, or a vast scheme of social welfare, is the one thing necessary, when that is achieved all other things being added unto us, without any further trouble on our part. ”

“ Selfcriticism, cruel, unsparing criticim that goes to the very root of the evil is life and breath for the proletarian movement. ”

“ After some commonplace and laborious replies, exchanged apropos of trivial topics then current, the conversation gradually became general, and finally settled down upon the subject of correctness in society life.
All these poor devils, all these poor wretches, male and female, forgetting their own social irregularities, showed a strangely implacable severity toward persons whom it was allowable to suspect, not even of stains or blemishes, but simply of some formal lack of respect for society laws,—the only ones that ought to be obeyed. ”

“ The root of all your evils is in the sinfulness of the nation. The principle of duty is weakened among you; that of moral obligation is loosened; that of religious obedience is destroyed. Look at the worldliness of all classes—the greediness of the rich, the misery of the poor, and the appalling depravity which is spreading among the lower classes through town and country; a depravity which proceeds unchecked because of the total want of discipline, and for which there is no other corrective than what may be supplied by fanaticism, which is itself an evil. ”

“ In fact, there is scarce any moral evil by which Society is afflicted—the mind debauched—the virtuous parent and master distressed, and the ruin of families and individuals affected, which is not generated in Public-houses. ”

“ Granting the social phenomenon of crime, we ought to ask ourselves: where does the fault lie? If we are to acquit the individual criminal of responsibility, it falls back necessarily upon the social community through which the causes of degeneration and disease have filtered. Accordingly, it is we, every one of us, who are at fault: or rather, we are beginning to awaken to a consciousness that it is a sin to foster or to tolerate such social conditions as make possible the suffering, the vices, the errors that lead to physiological pauperism, to pathology, to the degeneration of posterity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In this mood he totally disregards the laws of society and seizes every opportunity that presents itself to prey upon it and he thus becomes an anti-social being. Through all ages up to the present, society has at the cost of much effort and suffering been progressing, stage by stage, towards a higher order. ”

“ Again gloom has brooded over the dwellings of the poor, and evil passions have wrought there, in proportion 144to the pressure of want,—the main spring of the vast machinery of moral evil by which society is harrowed and torn. ”

“ Whether the quantity of vice 383and misery necessary to keep population down to the level of the means of subsistence, being left quite undetermined by the author, the old barriers between vice and virtue, good and evil, were not broken down, and a perfect latitude of choice allowed between forms of government and modes of society, according to the temper of the times, or the taste of individuals; only that vice and misery being always the safe side, the presumption would naturally be in favour of the most barbarous, ignorant, enslaved, and profligate? ”

“ At the other end of the scale, we have the parasitic class of the beggars or thieves. They, too, are not personally responsible for the conditions into which they are born. But they are not only to be pitied individually, but to be regarded, in the mass, as involving social disease and danger. ”

“ If in many instances he is degraded, by moral and political slavery to the practice of the basest vices it engenders, and that below the level of ordinary degradation; let us reflect that the corruption of the best produces the worst, and that habits which subsist only in relation to a peculiar state of social institution may be expected to cease so soon as that relation is dissolved. ”

“ It is enough, it seems, that all the disorderly classes of mankind, prompted as they are by their worst passions to trample on the public welfare, should know that they are, what every one else is convinced they are, the pests of society, and the evil is remedied. ”

“ Surely we are only fit to be less than human, to be slave to conditions that we ourselves might govern if we would, to be criminal accomplices in the sins of social castes, to be sad victims of inhuman laws or still sadder defenders of inhumanity! ”

“ Impropriety of conduct, disobedience, immorality and rude pleasure-seeking, such as is especially noticeable among the youth of our higher educational institutions—the gymnasia, polytechnics, universities, etc.—vices that are incited and promoted by the existing demoralization and unrest of domestic life, by the poisonous influence of social life such as the immoral literature that wealth procures—all these will likewise have vanished. ”

“ We need to bear in mind constantly, in considering this question, that society is a whole, and that an evil in one class of our citizenship cannot help but have its vicious influence, in a greater or less degree, upon every other portion of society. ”