Editorials from the Hearst NewspapersBrisbane, Arthur
Philosophy
Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers
Brisbane, Arthur
Editorials; Essays
So it will be some day with us who are now engaged in the
detailed organization of the little home which we call the earth.
We are fixing up our moral plumbing--fighting poverty, injustice,
and, above all, ignorance. We are fighting the meanness that
comes of competition and the greater meanness that is based upon
the dread of poverty in the future. Some of us are piling up
millions that we can never use, while others suffer for lack of
that which could be abundantly supplied.
All these little earthly questions that seem so big will be
settled in time.
But a few years in the sight of Time--a few hundred centuries,
perhaps, as we count them--and our earthly habitation will have
been made fit to live in. We shall have eliminated the
unfit--not by killing them off, but by educating them. We shall
have solved the question of poverty by solving the question of
production, and especially of distribution. We shall have
developed a citizenship capable of earnest work, of sobriety and
of moral decency, without the spur of want, imprisonment or the
scaffold as necessary adjuncts.
In time the human race will have solved its little problems
here--the problems that seem so vast to-day.
When that time comes we shall be like the man who has put his
house in order, and our thoughts will not be confined to this
little piece of ground. Then we shall appreciate the cosmic
wisdom which has divided our day into darkness and light--the
light for the enjoyment of the material beauties of our earthly
home; THE NIGHT FOR THE STUDY AND ENJOYMENT OF THE VAST,
MYSTERIOUS UNIVERSE SPREAD OUT AROUND US.
Everybody knows that the aged require less sleep than the young.
In the future, this will make old age what it ought to be, a
blessing, because it will give to the old more hours of the night
for contemplation of the Infinite and all its wonders.
Those of us who now think themselves very abstract when they
speculate on the North Pole, or when they discuss the possibility
of reclaiming the Desert of Sahara, will have their minds many
millions of miles away from this earth a great deal of the time.
We shall communicate, perhaps, with our sister-planet, Venus--the
planet most like ours in physical arrangement. We shall be
intensely interested in that world, where it is always night on
one side of the planet, and always day on the other.
We shall realize with deepest envy the fact that the constant,
terrific currents of air whirling around Venus, in consequence of
the extreme heat and the extreme cold on opposite sides of the
planet, have developed a race as far superior to us as the trout
in the swift-flowing brook is superior to the heavy-eyed catfish
in the bottom of the pond. ----
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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