Cæsar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth CenturyDonnelly, Ignatius
Science
Cæsar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century
Donnelly, Ignatius
Dystopias -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Social problems -- Fiction; Twentieth century -- Fiction
Human misery is the correlative and equivalent of
injustice somewhere else in society.
"What the world needs is a new organization--a great world-wide
Brotherhood of Justice. It should be composed of all men who desire
to lift up the oppressed and save civilization and society. It should
work through governmental instrumentalities. Its altars should be the
schools and the ballot-boxes. It should combine the good, who are not
yet, I hope, in a minority, against the wicked. It should take one
wrong after another, concentrate the battle of the world upon them,
and wipe them out of existence. It should be sworn to a perpetual
crusade against every evil. It is not enough to heal the wounds
caused by the talons of the wild beasts of injustice; it should
pursue them to their bone-huddled dens and slay them." [Great
applause.] "It should labor not alone to relieve starvation, but to
make starvation impossible;--_to kill it in its causes_.
"With the widest toleration toward those who address themselves to
the future life, even to the neglect of this, the sole dogma of our
society should be justice. If there is an elysium in the next world,
and not a continuation of the troubled existence through which we are
now passing, we will be all the better fitted to enjoy it if we have
helped to make this world a heaven. And he who has labored to make
earth a hell should enjoy his workmanship in another and more
dreadful world, forever and forever.
"And oh, ye churches! Will ye not come up to the help of the people
against the mighty? Will ye not help us break the jaws of the spoiler
and drag the prey from between his teeth? Think what you could do if
all your congregation were massed together to crush the horrid wrongs
that abound in society! To save the world _you must fight corruption
and take possession of government_. Turn your thoughts away from
Moses and his ragged cohorts, and all the petty beliefs and blunders
of the ancient world. Here is a world greater than Moses ever dreamed
of. Here is a population infinitely vaster in numbers, more
enlightened, more capable of exquisite enjoyment, and exquisite
suffering, than all the children of Israel and all the subjects of
imperial Rome combined. Come out of the past into the present. God is
as much God to-day as he was in the time of the Pharaohs. If God
loved man then he loves him now. Surely the cultured denizen of this
enlightened century, in the midst of all the splendors of his
transcendent civilization, is as worthy of the tender regard of his
Creator as the half-fed and ignorant savage of the Arabian desert
five thousand years ago. God lives yet, and he lives for us."
Here I paused. Although the vast audience had listened patiently to
my address, and had, occasionally, even applauded some of its
utterances, yet it was evident that what I said did not touch their
hearts. In fact, a stout man, with a dark, stubbly beard, dressed
like a workingman, rose on one of the side benches and said:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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