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
I am not a socialist. I do not preach riot. I do not preach the
destruction of property. I regard property as one of the sacred things.
The real property established by a man's own intelligence and labor is
the crystallized man himself. It is the fruit of what his life-work has
done; and not in vain, society makes crime against it amongst the most
punishable. But nevertheless, I warn these men in a country like ours,
where every man votes, whether he came from Hungary, or from Russia, or
from Germany, or from France or Italy, or Spain or Portugal, or from the
Orient,--from Japan and China, because they too are going to vote! On
the Niagara River, logs come floating down and strike an island, and
there they lodge and accumulate for a little while, and won't go over.
But the rains come, the snows melt, the river rises, and the logs are
lifted up and down, and they go swinging over the falls. The stream of
suffrage of free men, having all the privileges of the State, is this
great stream. The figure is defective in this, that the log goes over
the Niagara Falls, but that is not the way the country is going or will
go.... There is a certain river of political life, and everything has to
go into it first or last; and if, in days to come, a man separates
himself from his fellows without sympathy, if his wealth and power make
poverty feel itself more poor and men's misery more miserable, and set
against him the whole stream of popular feeling, that man is in danger.
He may not know who dynamites him, but there is danger; and let him take
heed who is in peril. There is nothing easier in the world than for rich
men to ingratiate themselves with the whole community in which they
live, and so secure themselves. It is not selfishness that will do it;
it is not by increasing the load of misfortune, it is not by wasting
substance in riotous living upon appetites and passions. It is by
recognizing that every man is a brother. It is by recognizing the
essential spirit of the gospel, "Love thy neighbor as thyself." It is by
using some of their vast power and riches so as to diffuse joy in every
section of the community.
Here then I close this discourse. How much it enrolls! How very simple
it is! It is the whole gospel. When you make an application of it to all
the phases of organization and classification of human interests and
developments, it seems as though it were as big as the universe. Yet
when you condense it, it all comes back to the one simple creed: "Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as
thyself." Who is my neighbor? A certain man went down to Jericho, and so
on. That tells you who your neighbor is. Whosoever has been attacked by
robbers, has been beaten, has been thrown down--by liquor, by gambling,
or by any form of wickedness; whosoever has been cast into distress, and
you are called on to raise him up--that is your neighbor. Love your
neighbor as yourself. That is the gospel.
A NEW ENGLAND SUNDAY
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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