The Workingman's Paradise: An Australian Labour NovelMiller, John
Philosophy
The Workingman's Paradise: An Australian Labour Novel
Miller, John
Australia -- Fiction; Working class -- Fiction
"It is all change, universal change. Our religions, our civilisations,
our ideas, our laws, change as do the nebulae and the shifting continents
we build on. Yet through all changes a thread of continuity runs. It is
all changing and no ending. Always Law and always, so far as we can see,
what we call progression. A man is a fool who cares for his life. He is
the true madman who wastes his years in vain and selfish ambition.
"Listen, Ned," he pursued, turning round. "There, ages ago, millions and
millions of years ago, in the warm waters yonder, what we call Life on
this earth began. Minute specks of Life appeared, born of the sunshine
and the waters some say, coming in the fitness of Time from the All-Life
others. And those specks of Life have changed and passed, and come and
gone, unending, reproducing after their kind in modes and ways that
changed and passed and still are as all things change and pass and are.
And from them you and I and all the forms of Life that breathe to-day
have ascended. We struggled up, obedient to the Law around us and we
still struggle. That is the Past, or part of it. What is the Future, as
yet no man knows. We do more than know--we feel and dream, and struggle
on to our dreaming. And Life itself to the dreamer is as nothing only the
struggling on.
"And this has raised us, Ned, this has made us men and opened to us the
Future, that we learned slowly and sadly to care for each other. From the
mother instinct in us all good comes. This is the highest good as yet,
that all men should live their life and lay down their life when need is
for their fellows. With all our blindness we can see that. With all our
weakness we can strive to reach nearer that ideal. It is but Just that we
should live so for others since happiness is only possible where others
live so for us."
He turned again and gazed intently across the sail-dotted harbour.
"There is one thing I would like to say." He spoke without turning. "Man
without Woman is not complete. They two are but one being, complete and
life-giving. Love when it comes is the keystone of this brief span of
Life of ours. They who have loved have tasted truly of the best that Life
can give to them. And this is the great wrong of civilisation to-day,
that it takes Love from most and leaves in us only a feverish, degrading
Lust. It is when we lust that Woman drags us down to the level of that
Lust and blackens our souls with the blackness of hell. When we love
Woman raises us to the level of Love and girds on us the armour that
wards our own weakness from us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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