Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems
These are two very fatal deficits;--the remedy of either of which would
be the remedy of both, could we but find it! For indeed they are vitally
connected: one of them is sure to produce the other; and both once in
action together, the advent of darkness, certain enough to issue in
anarchy by and by, goes on with frightful acceleration. If Governments
neglect to invite what noble intellect there is, then too surely all
intellect, not omnipotent to resist bad influences, will tend to become
beaverish ignoble intellect; and quitting high aims, which seem shut up
from it, will help itself forward in the way of making money and such
like; or will even sink to be sham intellect, helping itself by methods
which are not only beaverish but vulpine, and so "ignoble" as not
to have common honesty. The Government, taking no thought to choose
intellect for itself, will gradually find that there is less and less
of a good quality to choose from: thus, as in all impieties it does,
bad grows worse at a frightful _double_ rate of progression; and your
impiety is twice cursed. If you are impious enough to tolerate darkness,
you will get ever more darkness to tolerate; and at that inevitable
stage of the account (inevitable in all such accounts) when actual light
or else destruction is the alternative, you will call to the Heavens and
the Earth for light, and none will come!
Certainly this evil, for one, has _not_ "wrought its own cure;" but
has wrought precisely the reverse, and has been hourly eating away what
possibilities of cure there were. And so, I fear, in spite of rumors to
the contrary, it always is with evils, with solecisms against Nature,
and contradictions to the divine fact of things: not an evil of them has
ever wrought its own cure in my experience;--but has continually grown
worse and wider and uglier, till some _good_ (generally a good _man_)
not able to endure the abomination longer, rose upon it and cured or
else extinguished it. Evil Governments, divested of God's light because
they have loved darkness rather, are not likelier than other evils to
work their own cure out of that bad plight.
It is urgent upon all Governments to pause in this fatal course;
persisted in, the goal is fearfully evident; every hour's persistence in
it is making return more difficult. Intellect exists in all countries;
and the function appointed it by Heaven,--Governments had better not
attempt to contradict that, for they cannot! Intellect _has_ to
govern in this world and will do it, if not in alliance with so-called
"Governments" of red-tape and routine, then in divine hostility to such,
and sometimes alas in diabolic hostility to such; and in the end, as
sure as Heaven is higher than Downing Street, and the Laws of Nature are
tougher than red-tape, with entire victory over them and entire ruin to
them. If there is one thinking man among the Politicians of England, I
consider these things extremely well worth his attention just now.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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