In a world filled with millions and millions of acres of land waiting to be tilled, where one man can raise the food for hundreds, millions are on the edge of famine. Who can comprehend the stupidity at the bottom of this truth?
Is there to be no change? Are "the law of supply and demand," invention and science, monopoly and competition, capital and legislation always to be the enemies of those who toil?
Will the workers always be ignorant enough and stupid enough to give their earnings for the useless? Will they support millions of soldiers to kill the sons of other workingmen? Will they always build temples for ghosts and phantoms, and live in huts and dens themselves? Will they forever allow parasites with crowns, and vampires with mitres, to live upon their blood? Will they remain the slaves of the beggars they support? How long will they be controlled by friends who seek favors, and by reformers who want office? Will they always prefer famine in the city to a feast in the fields? Will they ever feel and know that they have no right to bring children into this world that they cannot support? Will they use their intelligence for themselves, or for others? Will they become wise enough to know that they cannot obtain their own liberty by destroying that of others? Will they finally see that every man has a right to choose his trade, his profession, his employment, and has the right to work when, and for whom, and for what he will? Will they finally say that the man who has had equal privileges with all others has no right to complain, or will they follow the example that has been set by their oppressors? Will they learn that force, to succeed, must have a thought behind it, and that anything done, in order that it may endure, must rest upon the corner-stone of justice?
Will they, at the command of priests, forever extinguish the spark that sheds a little light in every brain? Will they ever recognize the fact that labor, above all things, is honorable—that it is the foundation of virtue? Will they understand that beggars cannot be generous, and that every healthy man must earn the right to live? Will honest men stop taking off their hats to successful fraud? Will industry, in the presence of crowned idleness, forever fall upon its knees, and will the lips unstained by lies forever kiss the robed impostor's hand?—North American Review, March, 1887.
ART AND MORALITY.
ART is the highest form of expression, and exists for the sake of expression. Through art thoughts become visible. Back of forms are the desire, the longing, the brooding creative instinct, the maternity of mind and the passion that give pose and swell, outline and color.
Of course there is no such thing as absolute beauty or absolute morality. We now clearly perceive that beauty and conduct are relative. We have outgrown the provincialism that thought is back of substance, as well as the old Platonic absurdity, that ideas existed before the subjects of thought. So far, at least, as man is concerned, his thoughts have been produced by his surroundings, by the action and interaction of things upon his mind; and so far as man is concerned, things have preceded thoughts. The impressions that these things make upon us are what we know of them. The absolute is beyond the human mind. Our knowledge is confined to the relations that exist between the totality of things that we call the universe, and the effect upon ourselves.
Actions are deemed right or wrong, according to experience and the conclusions of reason. Things are beautiful by the relation that certain forms, colors, and modes of expression bear to us. At the foundation of the beautiful will be found the fact of happiness, the gratification of the senses, the delight of intellectual discovery and the surprise and thrill of appreciation. That which we call the beautiful, wakens into life through the association of ideas, of memories, of experiences, of suggestions of pleasure past and the perception that the prophecies of the ideal have been and will be fulfilled.