Social failure

“ If social evils increase among us in spite of churches and schools and a free press and lectures, how could we expect them to decrease when no power was exerted to bring them into disrepute, and when the general tone of society was infinitely lower than in the worst capitals of modern times? ”

“ The average mind is slow in grasping a truth, but when the most thoroughly organized, centralized institution, maintained at an excessive national expense, has proven a complete social failure, the dullest must begin to question its right to exist. The time is past when we can be content with our social fabric merely because it is "ordained by divine right," or by the majesty of the law. ”

“ The problem of abnormality—crime, vagabondage, prostitution, alcoholism, etc. How far is abnormality the unavoidable manifestation of inborn tendencies of the individual, and how far is it a matter of deficient social organization,—the failure of institutional influences? There is a quantitative difference of efficiency between individuals, but if there is hardly a human attitude which if properly controlled and directed could not be used in a socially useful and productive way, must there remain a permanent qualitative difference between socially normal and anti-social actions? ”

“ For a man who, seeing the want and misery, the ignorance and brutishness caused by unjust social institutions, sets himself to right them in so far as he has strength, there is disappointment and bitterness. ”

“ Yet let me offer as yet another explanation of civic evils, this more general one—distinguished from the preceding by including them all and more—that not only is our "Town" in itself imperfect, but the other three elements we have been characterising as school, cloister and city, are yet more imperfect, since disordered, decayed, or undeveloped anew. 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. ”

“ But in society the rancorous contention which jarring interests daily create, the heavy yoke which subordination is continually imposing, “the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,” and the shocks which reason and good sense hourly receive from fools in power, and insolent superiors, spread torrents of misery over human life, embitter the happiness of their more worthy though inferior fellow-creatures, poison all pleasure, break through social order, spread thorns in the paths of virtue, and render the world a vale of tears. ”

“ He who sees in the struggle something artificial, produced by bad men, may perhaps attribute to the creator of the disturbance bad motives for this knavery, for this frivolous and malicious upsetting of social rest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These are extreme instances, but they are also in a measure representative of a frightfully general social evil.
Is it any wonder if asylums for the insane gape for such men? There comes to them at last a season of business embarrassment; or, when they get to be fifty or thereabouts, the brain begins to feel the strain, and just as they are thinking, "Now we will stop and enjoy ourselves," the brain, which, slave-like, never murmurs until it breaks out into open insurrection, suddenly refuses to work, and the mischief is done. ”

“ In a primitive state of society, the enjoyments of life, though few and simple, are spread over a great extent, and are unalloyed; but Civilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve;—the heart-burnings, the jealousies, the social rivalries, the family dissentions, and the thousand self-inflicted discomforts of refined life, which make up in units the swelling aggregate of human misery, are unknown among these unsophisticated people. ”

“ It is the fact that our misfortunes have come because of our own faults. If they had come when we were doing our best, there would be no hope for us.” Now the evils of our own social system which result from mistakes or faults are just such a ground of hope. Every such evil which can be cited describes one possible reform, and the longer the list of evils, the greater is the sum total of gain which we can make by doing away with them. ”

“ We are the inevitable. We are the culmination of industrial and social wrong. We turn upon the society that has created us. We are the successful failures of the age, the scourges of a degraded civilization. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That is why when in a social aggregate the impulse of self-preservation becomes limited, inhibited, and lowered by tyranny of social commandments, society is sure to decline, degenerate, and finally dissolve ”

“ Society is doomed to an ignominious death as soon as the connective tissue of institutions and the ossified material of officialdom with its rank growth of unyielding red tape and formalism begin to spread, choking, and strangling the free, personal life of the individual. ”

“ He raises the cry of the miserable and the despised, and in a masterly arraignment of commercialism, protests against social conditions, against the grinding of the faces of the poor and weak, and the self-pollution of the rich and strong, in their mad lust for place and power. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the particularly flagrant wrongs of our day have to do with the getting and spending of money; and the peril of the near future which looms now most menacingly on the horizon is the irritation of the wronged classes to the point of civil warfare and revolution. Such a calamity might, of course, be ultimately a means of great social advance; but it is a highly dangerous and uncertain method, involving great moral damage as well as great individual suffering, and to be averted by every possible means. ”

“ But there are others, on the contrary, who think, who study, and who, looking about them, discover social iniquities. Is it their fault if they see clearly and suffer at seeing others suffer? Then they throw themselves into the struggle, and make themselves the bearers of the popular claims.
"Gentlemen, I am one of these last. Wherever I have gone, I have seen unfortunates bent beneath the yoke of capital. ”

“ He sinks lower and lower until, overcome by circumstances, he is at the bottom of the social ladder,—at once a menace and a disgrace to the city. Instead of blaming and condemning him, poor fellow, we should look at the circumstances that made him what he is, and endeavor to remedy them. ”

“ Wherever this impulse of social or political reform darts up its rill through the crusts of selfishness, scoff and dread also arise, and hang like a heavy mist above it. But the voice of the rill penetrates far enough for those who have ears to hear. ”

“ Nevertheless, the embarrassments that have obstructed our progress, in the obscurity which we have lived, and the prevailing indifference to our welfare, we have gradually overcame many of the evils inherent in our social system, and raised ourselves to a degree of prosperity. ”

“ No agitators, no clubs, no epidemical errors, ever were, or will be, fatal to social order in any nation. Nothing but the guilt of the upper classes, wanton, accumulated, reckless, and merciless, ever overthrows them Of such guilt they have now much to answer for—let them look to it in time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ah! the want that shivers with the bitter cold—therein lies the excess of social injustice, the most terrible of schools, where the poor learn to realise their sufferings, where they are roused to indignation, and swear to make those sufferings cease, even if in doing so they annihilate all olden society! ”

“ What a power to intoxicate his crude brains, just muddlingly awake, to perceive that something is wrong in the social system!-what a hellish faculty above gunpowder!
Now the rich and poor are fairly pitted; we shall see who can hang or burn fastest. It is not always revenge that stimulates these kindlings. ”

“ These evils, then—great poverty, and that poverty very little connected with desert—are the first grand failure of the existing arrangements of society. The second is human misconduct; crime, vice, and folly, with all the sufferings which follow in their train. For, nearly all the forms of misconduct, whether committed towards ourselves or towards others, may be traced to one of three causes: Poverty and its temptations in the many; Idleness and desœuvrement in the few whose circumstances do not compel them to work ”

“ Thus uninstructed to apprehend the considerations adapted to impose a moral restraint, thus unmodified by principles of mitigation, there is a large proportion of human strength and feeling not in vital combination with the social system, but aloof from it, looking at it with "gloomy and malign regard;" in a state progressive towards a fitness to be impelled against it with a dreadful shock, in the event of any great convulsion, that should set loose the legion of daring, desperate, and powerful spirits, to fire and lead the masses to its demolition. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such, for example, are the progress of ``statism,'' the diminution of the power of the bourgeoisie, the increasing activity of financiers, the conflict of the classes, the vanishing of the old social constraints, and the degradation of morality.
All these effects are displayed in a general insubordination and anarchy. The son revolts against the father, the employee against his patron, the soldier against his officers. Discontent, hatred, and envy reign throughout.
A social movement which continues is necessarily like a machine in movement which accelerates its motion. ”

“ In every panic period there is a huge dislocation of business enterprises, vast multitudes of men are thrown out of employment, there is grave social and political disorder; but in the end, so far, things have an air of having recovered. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Into our nation also has come the disturbing vision. Ours is called an age of unrest. We hear much about social discontent. Beneath all the outer activity and bustle there is an undertone of profound sadness. ”

“ If we consider what are the chief centres of discontent throughout the civilised world, we shall find that they are the great aggregations of population in wealthy industrial countries. Social unrest is a disease of town-life. Wherever the conditions which create the great modern city exist, we find revolutionary agitation. ”

“ We put the emphasis on the peculiar aggravation of that circumstance in this part of the world in this and recent times, by the adventitious effect of some dreadful disorder of the social economy, in consequence of which the utmost exertions of the body and mind together but barely suffice in so many cases, in some hardly do suffice, for the mere protraction of life; comfortable life being altogether out of the question. ”

“ You must, at least, have realized that the widespread industrial and social troubles, and the underlying dissatisfaction of all classes with the inequalities of society, and the general misery of mankind, were portents of great changes of some sort. ”

“ Greater than all, however, is the social poison that effects society with pernicious anaemia through cutting man off from his natural social group and making of him an undistinguishable particle in a sliding stream of grain. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have long had a notion that many of the heart-burnings that run through the Social Whole spring not so much from the distinctiveness of classes as their mutual ignorance of each other. The miserably rich look upon the miserably poor with distrust and dread, scarcely giving them credit for sensibility sufficient to feel their own sorrows. ”

“ I have not personally suffered from the deprivations, the bitterness and sorrow which bring so many men and women to a realisation of social injustice. ”