Social problems; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
You may search through history page by page, line by line, and you
will find no trace of the doings of this alleged “unruly class.” The
more you read the more you will be struck by the universal and most
tenacious love of quiet and order in the masses of mankind. You will
see them robbed, oppressed, murdered wholesale upon mere caprice, the
victims of all manner of misery. Your cheeks will burn and your blood
run hot as you read. And you will note with wonder that they endured
with seemingly limitless patience until they were eating grass by the
wayside. Then, once in a while, but only once in a while, they “rose.”
All the machinery of law and order was in the hands of the oppressors,
so they were compelled to resort to violence. But even then they
established new machinery or patched up the old as quickly as possible.
_Every society that has been overturned from, within has been
overturned by misrule; never by the unruly._
No; the real “unruly classes” are these “respectabilities” with the
“pulls,” and these governmental officers who are “pulled”;--they
violate the laws; they purchase or enact or enforce unjust legislation;
they abuse the confidence and the tolerant good nature of the people;
they misuse the machinery of justice.
Turn to your history again. You find that every once in a while the
dominant element has begun to talk about the “unruly class,” to express
fear of “risings,” of mob violence. And in every instance you find
that the real reason for this denunciation and dread was that the
dominant element had begun to be acutely conscious of its own misdeeds.
It feared that its own weapons of injustice would be turned against
itself by outraged justice. It feared that its punishment would be in
proportion to its crimes.
Gladstone said that the Nineteenth century was summed up in the phrase,
“Unhand me!” Its science struck off the shackles of ignorance upon the
intellect--shackles of error, of false reverence, of superstitions
about the causes of the inequalities of men. Thus, the Nineteenth
century made it possible for this to be the Age of the Common Man. Not
to states, not to institutions, not to class-made law, not to castes
and orders and rank belongs the Twentieth century. It belongs to the
Common Man--to you. You with your stout heart and your willing and
capable hands. You with your active, intelligent brain, impatient of
traditional nonsense, however poetically or plausibly englamoured.
You with your enlightened sense of the equal rights of all men. You
with your passionate resolve scientifically to correct the stupid and
cruel inequalities of opportunity, that are as intolerable in an era of
science as a cannibal feast in the temple of the Most High.
What is the watchword of this new day? From lip to lip, from land to
land, from race to race, flies the “password eternal”--Democracy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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