The Investment of Influence: A Study of Social Sympathy and ServiceHillis, Newell Dwight
Philosophy
The Investment of Influence: A Study of Social Sympathy and Service
Hillis, Newell Dwight
Conduct of life
Multitudes are abroad trying to settle the labor problem. The labor
problem will never be settled until the last man lies in the graveyard.
Each new inventor reopens the labor problem. Men were contented with
their wages until Gutenberg invented his type and made books possible;
then straightway every laborer asked an increased wage, that though he
died ignorant his children might be intelligent. When society had
readjusted things and man had obtained the larger wage, Arkwright came,
inventing his new loom, Goodyear came with the use of rubber, and
straightway men asked a new wage to advantage themselves of woolen
garments and rubber goods for miners and sailors. On the morrow
15,000,000 children will enter the schoolroom; before noon the teacher
has given them a new outlook upon some book, some picture, some
convenience, some custom. Each child registers the purpose to go home
immediately and cry to his parent for that book or picture; that tool
or comfort. When the parents return that night the labor question has
been reopened in millions of homes.
Intelligence is emancipating man. Ignorance is a constant invitation
to oppression. So long as workmen are ignorant, governments will
oppress them; wealth will oppress them; religious machinery will
oppress them. Education can make man's wrists too large to be holden
of fetters. In the autumn the forest trees tighten the bark, but when
April sap runs through the trees the trunk swells, the bark is strained
and despite all protests it splits and cracks. The splitting of the
bark saves the life of the tree. The soft, balmy air of April is
passing over the world and succeeding to the winter of man's
discontent. Old ideas are being rent asunder and old institutions are
being succeeded by new ones. God is abroad destroying that he may
save. In every age he makes the discontent of the present to be the
prophecy of the higher civilization. Despite all the pessimists and
the croakers, the ideas of manhood were never so high as to-day, and
the number of those whose hearts are knitted in with their kind was
never so large nor so noble. The movement may be slow, but it is
because the social organs are complex and intricate. With long
patience man must work and also wait.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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