Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 04
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Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 04
Literature -- Collections
But besides these external reasons of poverty, there are certain great
primary and fundamental reasons. Ignorance breeds poverty. What is
property? It is the product of intelligence, of skill, of thought
applied to material substances. All property is raw material that has
been shaped to uses by intelligent skill. Where intelligence is low, the
power of producing property is low. It is the husbandman who thinks,
foresees, plans, and calls on all natural laws to serve him, whose farm
brings forth forty, fifty, and a hundred fold. The ignorant peasant
grubs and groans, and reaps but one handful where he has sown two. It is
knowledge that is the gold mine; for although every knowing man may not
be able to be a rich man, yet out of ignorance riches do not spring
anywhere. Ignorant men may be made the factors of wealth when they are
guided and governed by superior intelligence. Slave labor produced
gigantic plantations and estates. The slave was always poor, but his
master was rich, because the master had the intelligence and the
knowledge, and the slave gave the work. All through human society, men
who represent simple ignorance will be tools, and the men who represent
intelligence will be the master mechanics, the capitalists. All society
to-day is agitated with this question of justice as between the laborer
and the thinker. Now, it is no use to kick against the pricks. A man who
can only work and not think is not the equal in any regard of the man
who can think, who can plan, who can combine, and who can live not for
to-day alone, but for to-morrow, for next month, for the next year, for
ten years. This is the man whose volume will just as surely weigh down
that of the unthinking man as a ton will weigh down a pound in the
scale. Avoirdupois is moral, industrial, as well as material, in this
respect; and the primary, most usual cause of unprosperity in industrial
callings therefore lies in the want of intelligence,--either in the
slender endowment of the man, or more likely the want of education in
his ordinary and average endowment. Any class of men who live for
to-day, and do not care whether they know anything more than they did
yesterday or last year--those men may have a temporary and transient
prosperity, but they are the children of poverty just as surely as the
decrees of God stand. Ignorance enslaves men among men; knowledge is the
creator of liberty and wealth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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