It must be
a spirit of broad humanity; of brotherly kindness; of acceptance of
responsibility, one for each and each for all; and at the same time a
spirit as remote as the poles from every form of weakness and
sentimentality. As in war to pardon the coward is to do cruel wrong to
the brave man whose life his cowardice jeopardizes, so in civil
affairs it is revolting to every principle of justice to give to the
lazy, the vicious, or even the feeble or dull-witted, a reward which
is really the robbery of what braver, wiser, abler men have earned.
The only effective way to help any man is to help him to help himself;
and the worst lesson to teach him is that he can be permanently helped
at the expense of some one else. True liberty shows itself to best
advantage in protecting the rights of others, and especially of
minorities. Privilege should not be tolerated because it is to the
advantage of a minority; nor yet because it is to the advantage of a
majority. No doctrinaire theories of vested rights or freedom of
contract can stand in the way of our cutting out abuses from the body
politic. Just as little can we afford to follow the doctrinaires of an
impossible--and incidentally of a highly undesirable--social
revolution, which in destroying individual rights--including property
rights--and the family, would destroy the two chief agents in the
advance of mankind, and the two chief reasons why either the advance
or the preservation of mankind is worth while.
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