But all the same moral law is the law of humanity, and the exclusive
civilization which thrives upon others who are barred from its benefit
carries its own death-sentence in its moral limitations. The slavery
that it gives rise to unconsciously drains its own love of freedom dry.
The helplessness with which it weighs down its world of victims exerts
its force of gravitation every moment upon the power that creates it.
And the greater part of the world which is being denuded of its
self-sustaining life by the Nation will one day become the most terrible
of all its burdens, ready to drag it down into the bottom of
destruction. Whenever Power removes all checks from its path to make its
career easy, it triumphantly rides into its ultimate crash of death. Its
moral brake becomes slacker every day without its knowing it, and its
slippery path of ease becomes its path of doom.
Of all things in Western civilization, those which this Western Nation
has given us in a most generous measure are law and order. While the
small feeding-bottle of our education is nearly dry, and sanitation
sucks its own thumb in despair, the military organization, the
magisterial offices, the police, the Criminal Investigation Department,
the secret spy system, attain to an abnormal girth in their waists,
occupying every inch of our country. This is to maintain order. But is
not this order merely a negative good? Is it not for giving people's
life greater opportunities for the freedom of development? Its
perfection is the perfection of an egg-shell, whose true value lies in
the security it affords to the chick and its nourishment and not in the
convenience it offers to the person at the breakfast table. Mere
administration is unproductive, it is not creative, not being a living
thing. It is a steam-roller, formidable in its weight and power, having
its uses, but it does not help the soil to become fertile. When after
its enormous toil it comes to offer us its boon of peace we can but
murmur under our breath that "peace is good, but not more so than life,
which is God's own great boon."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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