“Yes; we pay twice as much as the goods are worth, but it is patriotic and humane, because we thereby enable millions of American wage-earners to get big wages.”
Fine, isn’t it?
If the man who repeats that little lesson, and believes it, would go into the districts where Protection is and where the system has been at work longest he will find himself in precisely the places where wages are lowest, where Capitalists are harshest, where squalor and vice are rankest, and where the maddened victims of our soulless wage-system are nursing in their hearts the passions of hell.
The Highest Office
Let seasons come and go, let the sunlight and shadows fall where God’s pleasure puts them—do your duty as conscience and reason reveal it to you. Let no other man measure your work or your responsibilities; let no artful sophistry, in favor of the expedient, veil from your steadfast eyes the summits of Right. Let parties rise and fall; let time-servers flop and flounder, let the heedless praise of the hour lay its withering garlands at the feet of him who will purchase them by bending to every passing breeze, every popular whim, every local prejudice.
Do thou look higher if joy and strength and peace and pride are to be thine. In this brief life (hardly worth the living) know this one thing: that a man’s honor should be just as dear to him as a woman’s virtue is to her. Did the Roman girls not go gladly to the lions, to the bloody death in the arena, rather than to recant their Christian faith, or to accept a lawless lover? Did not the Armenian woman, a few years ago, leap to death over the precipice, rather than to apostatize or to be violated? Isn’t the ground still wet with the life-drops of poor Else Kroegler, who let her white throat be gashed, and gashed, and gashed, by the black devil who assailed her, till her life was gone, rather than to live dishonored? And shall a man be less heroic than a woman? Is there nothing within us that cannot be bought? Is there no Holy of Holies of conviction and principle, into which the corruptor shall not enter? Is there nothing that we hold sacred as the citadel of proud, fearless, upright manhood?
Once upon a time a barbarous peasant worked his way upward and onward, until he wore the imperial purple of Rome; and he said: “I have gained all the honors and none of them have value.” Did not Cæsar, himself, grow sick at heart of the eminence he had wickedly won, and say that he had lived long enough?
If we must bow to what is wrong, flatter what we despise, preach what we disbelieve, and deny what we feel to be true, is success thus won anything but a gilded dishonor?
To be a man, such a man as you know God would have you be—manly, truthful, honest—scorning meanness, hating lies, loathing deceit, meeting the plain duties of life, and shirking none of its plain responsibilities—is not that the highest office you can fill?