The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and PoliticalLane, Franklin K.
History
The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political
Lane, Franklin K.
United States -- Politics and government -- 1913-1921; World War, 1914-1918 -- United States
To feel acutely that things are badly ordered, and to feel that
you know what opportunities men and women and boys and girls
should have, is not a program of salvation, it is only the impulse
toward finding one. Why then, because we do feel so, should we
harness ourselves to a word that implies methods that we would not
countenance, and give character to a movement that is at absolute
defiance with America's spirit and purpose? There is danger, grave
danger, in doing this. For we can upset our own apple-cart very
easily these days. I have no more of this world's goods than the
humblest workingman. No man is poorer than I am, measured by bank
account standards. The education that I have, I fought for.
Therefore I do not speak for a class. To defend the methods by
which some men have made their money is not at all to my fancy. I
see as clearly, I think, as one can, the necessity for the strong
arm of society asserting itself, thrusting itself in where it has
not been supposed to have any business. Yet I know that a
Bolshevik movement, a capturing of what others have gained under
the system which has obtained, and the brutal satisfaction of
"getting even with the wage-masters" and making them feel to the
depths of their souls and in the pain of their flesh every
humiliation and torture, will permanently set nothing right.
America is fair play. Is it a failure? Have you tried it long
enough to know that it will not serve the world, as you think the
world should be served? Is there any experiment that we cannot
make? Are our hands tied? True, our feet may lag, our eyes may not
see far ahead, but who should say that for this reason man should
throw aside all the firmness and strength and solidity of order,
forget all that he has passed through, and start afresh from the
bottom rung of the ladder--from the muck of the primitive brute?
There are things that we would not hold, that we think unworthy of
our philosophy, that must be changed or else our sympathies and
abiding hopes will be forever offended. And this would be to live
right on under the pointing finger of shame. So we know it cannot
last, this thing that offends, the badness and brutality of
injustice, of unfairness to the weak, their inability to get a
squarer chance.
Yet this does not compel us to forsake the hopeful thing we have,
for which all men have striven, these centuries through. Must we
confess that revolution is still necessary? Are we no further
ahead for all that Pym and Hampden and Sam Adams and Washington
and all the rest of the glorified ones have done? This land is
truly a land of promise because it may be a land of fulfilment. It
shows the way by which without murder and robbery and class hatred
and the burning up of what has been, men may go right on making
experiments, and failing, making others and failing, and learning
something all the time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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