The Prodigal Village: A Christmas TaleBacheller, Irving
General
The Prodigal Village: A Christmas Tale
Bacheller, Irving
Christmas stories; Fiction
"That, sir, does not relieve you of the liabilities of a neighbor and a
human being, in my view. If your business has turned you into a shaft or
a cog-wheel, it has done you a great injustice. I fear that it has been
your master--that it has practised upon you a kind of despotism. You
would better get along with less--far less business than suffer such a
fate. I don't want to hurt you. We are looking for the cause of a
certain result and I can help you only by being frank. With all your
generosity you have never given your heart to this village. Some unkind
people have gone so far as to say that you have no heart. You can not
prove it with money that you do not miss. Money is good but it must be
warmed with sympathy and some degree of sacrifice. Has it never occurred
to you that the warm hand and the cheering word in season are more,
vastly more, than money in the important matter of making good-will?
Unconsciously, you have established a line and placed yourself on one
side of it and the people on the other. Broadly speaking, you are
capital and the rest are labor. Whereas, in fact, you are all working
men. Some of the rest have come to regard you as their natural enemy.
They ought to regard you as their natural friend. Two kinds of
despotism have prevented it. First, there is the despotism of your
business in making you a slave--so much of a slave that you haven't time
to be human; second, there is the despotism of the labor union in
discouraging individual excellence, in demanding equal pay for the
faithful man and the slacker, and in denying the right of free men to
labor when and where they will. All this is tyranny as gross and
un-American as that of George the Third in trying to force his will upon
the colonies. If America is to survive, we must set our faces against
every form of tyranny. The remedy for all our trouble and bitterness is
real democracy which is nothing more or less than the love of men--the
love of justice and fair play for each and all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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