One
of the sovereign virtues of this famous law is its simplicity, which is
such that all hearing must understand; and obedience is so easy that
any nation refusing is unfit to exist except in the turbulence and
adversity that will surely come to it. When a people would avert want
and strife, or, having them, would restore plenty and peace, this noble
commandment offers the only means--all other plans for safety or relief
are as vain as dreams, as empty as the crooning of hags. And behold,
here is it: "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you,
do ye even so to them."
What! you unappeasable rich, coining the sweat and blood of your workmen
into drachmas, understanding the law of supply and demand as mandatory
and justifying your cruel greed by the senseless dictum that "business
is business"; you lazy workmen, railing at the capitalist by whose
desertion, when you have frightened away his capital, you
starve--rioting and shedding blood and torturing and poisoning by way of
answer to exaction and by way of exaction; you foul anarchists,
applauding with untidy palms when one of your coward kind hurls a bomb
amongst powerless and helpless women and children; you imbecile
politicians with a plague of remedial legislation for the irremediable;
you writers and thinkers unread in history, with as many "solutions to
the labor problem" as there are among you those who can not coherently
define it--do you really think yourselves wiser than Jesus of Nazareth?
Do you seriously suppose yourselves competent to amend his plan for
dealing with evils besetting nations and souls? Have you the effrontery
to believe that those who spurn his Golden Rule you can bind to
obedience of an act entitled an act to amend an act? Bah! you fatigue
the spirit.
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