Common-Sense CountryBevington, L. S. (Louisa Sarah)
Philosophy
Common-Sense Country
Bevington, L. S. (Louisa Sarah)
Anarchism; Utopias
Common-sense citizens never said “Time is money.” They said that
money-minting, money-managing, and money-protecting entail endless waste
of time and trouble; that they are an abuse of human faculty, resulting
in a great deal of death—bodily, intellectual, moral, and spiritual.
Also it was said these and like employments were as nonsensical in their
objects as they were vicious in their effects. Money in Common-sense
Country had no meaning, any more than it has in a beehive. No one said
“Money is power.” Sometimes it was said “Money is weakness.” That was
when Common-senseites were speaking of the doings and miseries of the
inhabitants of Lunatic Land. (By the way, the word used was not _money_
but _mammon_.) One objection they had to money, beyond its
nonsensicalness, was its tendency—in proportion to the degree of its
accumulation in a man’s hand—to sap away his “soul,” his moral
individuality, his character. They said, “What can it profit a man to
lose his soul, and become a moral paralytic?” They observed also that
wherever in Lunatic Land mammon had accumulated in a man’s hand, it had
a tendency to put into his other hand a sceptre, a truncheon, a gatling
gun, or some other preposterous implement, making of that moral
paralytic a lord over two, or five, or ten cities, or markets, or
communities—as the case might be.
[Illustration: -ooo-]
As there was no mammon, there were none of those dismal things which are
eternal essentials where mammon reigns. There were no arsenals, no
armies, no police, no spies: no banks, no prisons, no poorhouses: no
brothels, no divorce courts, no nunneries, no confessionals: no “rings,”
no strikes, no infernal machines, no gallows. Common-sense found no sort
of use in any of these queer things. Common-sense knew by hearsay that
mammon could not reign without them; but then common sense found no
reason whatever for putting up with mammon, or paying its expenses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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