LOVING THE WORLD
There is a difference between loving the world for the world’s wealth’s sake, and loving the world for the sake of humanity. There is often this difference between the patriotism of men. Some patriots love the surface of the world where they are located far more than they love the people who share it with them. Some patriots love the wealthy of their neighboring countries, while they are totally indifferent towards the toiling poor of that same country. In America the people who love humanity for humanity’s sake, give their sympathies to the plundered and outraged peasantry of Russia, while those who love the world for wealth’s sake give their sympathies to Emperor Nicholas and the parasitical royalty of that unhappy country.
This is why the United States are not unanimously in sympathy with the oppressed people of all other countries—the reason why the people of this country are not unanimously in sympathy with the toilers of our own land—the difference between loving the world’s wealth, and the world’s people. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” is possible only where worldly interests are mutual and agreeable. Where two men are striving for the dirty dollar in sight, love is sure to dodge out of sight and silently steal away.
Even where men love the world for humanity’s sake, there is a difference in the intensity of that love. Some men love with a hopeful optimistical fervor, dreaming of a day when there shall be no oppression or plundering of the weak by the powerful. They see the millennium of earthly tranquillity and peace in the near future, when all men shall be brothers, and co-operation shall take the place of bitter competition, and motherhood and childhood shall be the great care and protection of the nation, and no one shall go to bed and cry themselves to sleep to forget the pangs of hunger and drown the memory of personal wrongs.
In most cases these hopeful altruists never suffered real hunger or bitter wrongs. They have always had enough of the world’s material wealth to drive the wolf of hunger away from their door, and only see the real poor through their dreams. Once in my life I cried for bread when there was not a crumb in my mother’s house, nor even a single penny to buy bread. It was only for one day, but the horror of that one day pictured poverty to my youthful mind in all its horrible and unrelenting want and squalor. And the old gloom-blistered memory of that one day of unsatisfied hunger haunts me still, like the recollections of the most poignant pain.
I firmly believe that that recollection of absolute poverty in my childhood days is what makes my love for humanity so hopeless and moist with despondent tears. I can not even dream of a day when love and justice will rule the world. Greed, greater than all else, human greed predominates over all the world. “For what will a man not give in exchange for his own life?” This can be carried still lower and made to read, “For what will a man not sacrifice for his own comfort?” And when it comes to a sacrifice, who so easy to offer up as the “helpless poor?”
Abraham hadn’t the remotest idea of offering himself up on the altar he had built. Helpless Isaac would have been the victim, had not the more helpless ram appeared tangled in the bushes, and was substituted for the lad.
The primitive originators of the sacrificial altar had only the weak and helpless and defenseless in mind as the intended sacrifice to their God. The innocence of the lamb and the dove did not appeal to their calloused hearts. They were intent on saving themselves, even though the whole world must be sacrificed.
That spirit is still prevailing where the weak and the strong meet in the struggle for existence, and the weak and innocent do not appeal to sympathetic hearts when they ask for mercy. The business and commercial altars must have a sacrifice for the benefit of the strong. This picture is always before me. My love for the world is like the love of a despondent mother for her sick child.