An Essay on the Evils of Popular IgnoranceFoster, John
Philosophy
An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance
Foster, John
Education; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Literacy; Missions -- India; Religious education
The economy of states _shall_ not be modified in favor of the great body
of those who constitute them.--And are, then, the higher and privileged
portions of the national communities to have, henceforward, just this one
grand object of their existence, this chief employment for their
knowledge, means, and power, namely, to keep down the lower orders of
their fellow-citizens by stress of coercion? Are they resolved and
prepared for a rancorous, interminable hostility in prosecution of such a
benign purpose; with a continual exhaustion upon it of the resources which
might be applied to diminish that wretchedness of the people, which is the
grand inflamer of those principles that have caused an earthquake under
the foundations of the old social systems? But, "interminable" is no
proper epithet to be applied to such a course. This policy of a bare
uncompromising rigor, exerted to keep the people just where they are, in
preference to adjustments formed on a calculation of a material change,
and adapted to prepare them for it--how long could it be successful--not
to ask what would be the value or the glory of that success? With the
light of recent history to aid the prognostication, by what superstitious
mode of estimating the self-preserving, and self-avenging competence of
any artificial form of social order, can we believe in its power to throw
back the general opinions, determinations, and efforts, of the mass of
mankind in endless recoil on themselves? That must be a very firm
structure, must be of gigantic mass or most excellent basis and
conformation, against which the ocean shall unremittingly wear and foam in
vain. And it does not appear what there can be of such impregnable
consistence in any particular construction of the social economy which is,
by the supposition, resolved to be maintained in sovereign immutability,
in permanent frustration of the persevering, ever-growing aim and impulse
of the great majority, pressing on to achieve important innovations in
their favor; innovations in those systems of institution and usage, under
which they will never cease to think they have had far less happiness, or
means of happiness, than they ought to have had. We cannot see how this
impulse can be so repelled or diverted that it shall not prevail at
length, to the effect of either bearing down, or wearing away, a portion
of the order of things which the ascendant classes in every part of Europe
would have fondly wished to maintain in perpetuity, without one particle
of surrender.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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