Ethics of Democracy: A Series of Optimistic Essays on the Natural Laws of Human Society

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Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1916 - Political ethics - 374 pages
 

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Page 252 - Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.
Page 257 - ... faces. But the remedy is, not to remand him into his dungeon, but to accustom him to the rays of the sun. The blaze of truth and liberty may at first dazzle and bewilder nations which have become half blind in the house of bondage.
Page 145 - Properly speaking, the Land belongs to these two : To the Almighty God ; and to all His Children. of Men that have ever worked well on it, or that shall ever work well on it. No generation of men can or could, with never such solemnity and effort, sell Land on any other principle : it is not the property of any generation, we say, but that of all the past generations that have worked on it, and of all the future ones that shall work on it. Again, we hear it said, The soil of England, or of any country,...
Page 321 - Polk, you know, he is our country. An' the angel thet writes all our sins in a book Puts the debit to him, an' to us the per contry; An' John P. Robinson he Sez this is his view o
Page 22 - But for those who see Truth and would follow her; for those who recognize Justice and would stand for her, success is not the only thing. Success! Why, Falsehood has often that to give; and Injustice often has that to give.
Page 317 - Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.
Page 350 - REFORMER. ilEFORE the monstrous wrong he sets him down — One man against a stone-walled city of sin. For centuries those walls have been a-building ; Smooth porphyry, they slope and coldly glass The flying storm and wheeling sun. No chink, No crevice lets the thinnest arrow in. He fights alone, and from the cloudy ramparts A thousand evil faces gibe and jeer him. Let him lie down and die : what is the right, And where is justice, in a world like this...
Page 298 - If there be one lesson which history clearly teaches, it is this, that free • nations cannot govern subject provinces. If they are unable or unwilling to admit their dependencies to share their own constitution, the constitution itself will fall in pieces from mere incompetence for its duties.
Page 338 - The master-minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nation, and from the mass of the nation only — not from its privileged classes; and so, no matter what the nation's intellectual grade was, whether high or low, the bulk of its ability was in the long ranks of its nameless and its poor, and so * "A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur,

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