Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1899: Volume LVI, No. 1Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1899: Volume LVI, No. 1
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
But this _régime_ of equity in the distribution of property implies, as
I have already said, the possession of a high degree of self-control.
Not only must all persons have such a keen sense of their own rights
as will never permit them to submit to infringement, but they must
have such a keen sense of the rights of others that they will not be
guilty themselves of infringement. Not only will they refrain from the
commission of those acts of aggression whose ill effects are immediate
and obvious; they will refrain from those acts whose ill effects are
remote and obscure. Although they will not, for example, deceive or
steal or commit personal assaults, they will not urge the adoption of
a policy that will injure the unknown members of other communities,
like the Welsh tin-plate makers and the Vienna pearl-button makers that
the McKinley Bill deprived of employment. Realizing the vice of the
plea of the opponents of international copyright that cheap literature
for a people is better than scrupulous honesty, they will not refuse
to foreign authors the same protection to property that they demand.
They will not, finally, allow themselves to take by compulsion or by
persuasion the property of neighbors to be used to alleviate suffering
or to disseminate knowledge in a way to weaken the moral and physical
strength of their fellows. But the possession of a sense of justice
so scrupulous assumes the possession of a fellow-feeling so vivid
that it will allow no man to refuse all needful aid to the victims of
misfortune. As suffering to others will mean suffering to himself,
he will be as powerfully moved to go to their rescue as he would to
protect himself against the same misfortune. Indeed, he will be moved,
as all others will be moved, to undertake without compulsion all the
benevolent work, be it charitable or educational, that may be necessary
to aid those persons less fortunate than himself to obtain the greatest
possible satisfaction out of life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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