The Anti-Revolutionist position, on the other hand, is that it is not the
State's duty to provide school or any other education, all education being
a matter of private concern for the individual family, and not a public
business at all; though they allow that where parents are unable to
maintain them schools may be erected by the taxpayers' money. They also
deprecate legislation against intemperance, immorality, and prostitution,
because they think such laws do not remove the evils themselves, but
merely attack their visible signs, and relieve moral trespassers of part
of their responsibility by protecting them against certain consequences of
their acts. They are opposed to the legal and compulsory observance of the
Sabbath, holding this to be an affair of the churches and of individuals;
but they support laws to compel employers to allow their men a sufficient
weekly rest on Sundays. They admit a limited State interference in social
matters, but contend that it must not discourage individual effort, or
create a host of officials, inspectors, and controllers. The franchise
must, according to them, never enable one section of the nation to
supersede the other by sheer force of numbers; they do not admit that the
majority System is the ultimate and only criterion of legality and
justice; moreover, the family being the unit from which the commonwealth
has grown into existence, they contend that heads of families are the
natural electors. Where the Old Liberals say that the financial test is
the right one for voters, the Anti-Revolutionists hold that no one has a
real stake in the country who has not a family and knows nothing of the
responsibilities involved thereby. Dr. Kuyper is the democratic leader of
what he calls, in classical but antiquated Dutch, the 'Kleine luyden' (the
'Little people') amongst the Anti-Revolutionists. He knows that the
'double-named' Free Anti-Revolutionists have little sympathy with his
social programme, but this does not matter, since they are perfectly well
aware of the fact that they owe everything, as far as political power
goes, to the 'Little people.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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