The Power of Truth: Individual Problems and Possibilities — John Shaqi
The Power of Truth: Individual Problems and PossibilitiesJordan, William George
Philosophy
The Power of Truth: Individual Problems and Possibilities
Jordan, William George
Conduct of life
Poverty has no necessary place in life. It is a disease that results
from the weakness, sin, and selfishness of humanity. Nature is
boundless in her generosity; the world produces sufficient to
give food, clothing, and comfort to every individual. Poverty is
preventable. Poverty may result from the shiftlessness, idleness,
intemperance, improvidence, lack of purpose or evil-doing of the
individual himself.
If the causes do not exist in the individual, they may be found in the
second class, in the wrong-doing of those around him, in the oppression
of labor by capital, in the grinding process by which corporations seek
to crush the individual. The individual may be the victim of any of a
thousand phases of the wrong of others. The poverty caused by the third
class, the weakness and injustice of human laws and human institutions,
is also preventable, but to reach the cause requires time and united
heroic effort of all individuals.
In the battle against poverty, those writers who seek to inflame the
poor against the rich, to foment discontent between labor and capital,
do grievous wrong to both. What the world needs is to have the two
brought closer together in the bonds of human brotherhood. The poor
should learn more of the cares, responsibilities, unrecorded charities,
and absorbing worries of the rich; the rich should learn more
intimately the sorrows, privations, struggles, and despair of poverty.
The world is learning the great truth, that the best way to prevent
crime is to study the sociologic conditions in which it flourishes,
to seek to give each man a better chance of living his real life by
removing, if possible, the elements that make wrong easy, and to him,
almost necessary, and by inspiring him to fight life's battle bravely
with all the help others can give him. Science is coöperating with
religion in striving to conquer the evil at the root instead of the
evil manifest as crime in the fruit of the branches. It is so much
wiser to prevent than to cure; to keep some one from being burned is so
much better than inventing new poultices for unnecessary hurts.
It is ever the little things that make up the sum of human misery. All
the wild animals of the world combined do but trifling damage, when
compared with the ravages of insect pests. The crimes of humanity, the
sins that make us start back affrighted, do not cause as much sorrow
and unhappiness in life as the multitude of little sins, of omission
and commission, that the individual, and millions like him, must
meet every day. They are not the evil deeds that the law can reach
or punish, they are but the infinity of petty wrongs for which man
can never be tried until he stands with bowed head before the bar of
justice of his own conscience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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