Causes of Discontent | Page 6

promoted over
the trees?'
"And the trees said to the fig-tree, 'Come thou and reign over us.'
"But the fig-tree said unto them, 'Should I forsake my sweetness and
my good fruit, and go to be promoted over the trees?'
"Then said the trees unto the vine, 'Come thou and reign over us.'
"And the vine said unto them, 'Should I leave my wine, which cheereth
God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees?'
"Then said the trees unto the bramble, 'Come thou and reign over us.'
"And the bramble said to the trees, 'If in truth ye anoint me king over
you, then come and put your trust in my shadow; and if not, let fire
come out of the bramble, and devour the cedars of Lebanon.'"
In our day a conflagration of the cedars of Lebanon has been the only
result of the kingship of the bramble.
In the opinion of many, our universal education is one of the chief
causes of the discontent. This might be true and not be an argument
against education, for a certain amount of discontent is essential to

self-development and if, as we believe, the development of the best
powers of every human being is a good in itself, education ought not to
be held responsible for the evils attending a transitional period. Yet we
cannot ignore the danger, in the present stage, of an education that is
necessarily superficial, that engenders conceit of knowledge and power,
rather than real knowledge and power, and that breeds in two- thirds of
those who have it a distaste for useful labor. We believe in education;
but there must be something wrong in an education that sets so many
people at odds with the facts of life, and, above all, does not furnish
them with any protection against the wildest illusions. There is
something wanting in the education that only half educates people.
Whether there is the relation of cause and effect between the two I do
not pretend to say, but universal and superficial education in this
country has been accompanied with the most extraordinary delusions
and the evolution of the wildest theories. It is only necessary to refer,
by way of illustration, to the greenback illusion, and to the whole group
of spiritualistic disturbances and psychological epidemics. It sometimes
seems as if half the American people were losing the power to apply
logical processes to the ordinary affairs of life.
In studying the discontent in this country which takes the form of a
labor movement, one is at first struck by its illogical aspects. So far as
it is an organized attempt to better the condition of men by association
of interests it is consistent. But it seems strange that the doctrine of
individualism should so speedily have an outcome in a personal slavery,
only better in the sense that it is voluntary, than that which it protested
against. The revolt from authority, the assertion of the right of private
judgment, has been pushed forward into a socialism which destroys
individual liberty of action, or to a state of anarchy in which the weak
would have no protection. I do not imagine that the leaders who preach
socialism, who live by agitation and not by labor, really desire to
overturn the social order and bring chaos. If social chaos came, their
occupation would be gone, for if all men were reduced to a level, they
would be compelled to scratch about with the rest for a living. They
live by agitation, and they are confident that government will be strong
enough to hold things together, so that they can continue agitation.
The strange thing is that their followers who live by labor and expect to
live by it, and believe in the doctrine of individualism, and love liberty

of action, should be willing to surrender their discretion to an arbitrary
committee, and should expect that liberty of action would be preserved
if all property were handed over to the State, which should undertake to
regulate every man's time, occupation, wages, and so on. The central
committee or authority, or whatever it might be called, would be an
extraordinary despotism, tempered only by the idea that it could be
overturned every twenty-four hours. But what security would there be
for any calculations in life in a state of things in expectation of a
revolution any moment? Compared with the freedom of action in such
a government as ours, any form of communism is an iniquitous and
meddlesome despotism. In a less degree an association to which a man
surrenders the right to say when, where, and for how much he shall
work, is a despotism, and when it goes further and attempts to put a
pressure on all men outside of the association,