Freedom! Equality!! Justice!!! These Three; but the Greatest of These Is Justice: A Speech on the Impending Revolution, Delivered in Music Hall, Boston, Thursday, Feb. 1, 1872, and the Academy of Music, New York, Feb. 20, 1872Woodhull, Victoria C. (Victoria Claflin)
Philosophy
Freedom! Equality!! Justice!!! These Three; but the Greatest of These Is Justice: A Speech on the Impending Revolution, Delivered in Music Hall, Boston, Thursday, Feb. 1, 1872, and the Academy of Music, New York, Feb. 20, 1872
Woodhull, Victoria C. (Victoria Claflin)
Social problems; Speeches, addresses, etc.
The people must appoint all their officers, heads of departments and
bureaus at regular intervals, and all under assistants, during faithful
performance of duty. We want no Civil Service Commissions. Every person
who shall be eligible to office under the new government will be
competent; and when once familiar with the duties, will not be removed
to give room for the friend of some politician belonging to the party in
power, since it would be the people in power at all times.
Another matter which must have attention is the sweeping away of that
_jeu d’esprit_, our courts of justice, by making all kinds of contracts
stand upon the honor and capacity of the contracting parties. All
individual matters must be settled by the individuals themselves without
appeal to the public. Our present system of enforced collection of debts
costs every year more than is realized, and besides maintains a vast
army of lawyers, constables and court officers in unproductive employ.
All this is wrong, entailing almost untold exactions upon the producing
community, who in the end are made to pay all these things.
Further, our system of oaths and bonds must be abolished. This swearing
people to tell the truth, and binding them to perform their duty,
presupposes that they will lie and neglect their duty. People are always
placed upon the side of force and compulsion—never upon that of personal
rectitude and honor. The results are what might be expected. It plunges
us into the very things we would avoid. There is a philosophy, too, in
all these things; since in freedom only can purity exist. Anything that
is not free is not pure. Anything that is accompanied by compulsion is
no proof of individual honesty.
The new government must also take immediate steps for the abolition of
pauperism and beggary. It is an infamous reproach upon this country that
there are hundreds of thousands of people who subsist themselves upon
individual charity. I do not care whether this is from choice or
necessity. I say it is a burning shame, requiring immediate curative
steps. The indigent and helpless classes are just as much a part of our
social body as the protected and the rich are, and they are entitled to
its recognition. Society must no longer punish and compel suffering and
death for its own wrongs. It must evolve such a social system as shall
leave no single member of the common body to suffer. When one member of
the body suffers, the whole body sympathizes. So, also, when a member of
the social body suffers, does the whole body suffer. And yet we have
pretended philanthropists and Christians who have never grasped that
truth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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