The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit by Ralph Waldo Trine online

XIV THE WORLD'S BALANCE-WHEEL

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That Jesus to whom we ultimately go for our moral leadership, not only sanctioned, but used and advocated the use of righteous force, when malignant evil in the form of self-seeking sought domination, either intellectual or physical, for its own selfish gain and aggrandizement, is clearly evidenced by many of his own sayings and his own acts.

So within the nation during this great reconstruction period, these are times that call for heroic men and women. In a Democracy or in any representative form of government an alert citizenship is its only safety. With a vastly increased voting population, in that many millions of women citizens are now admitted to full citizenship, the need for intelligent action and attention to matters of government was never so great. Great numbers will be herded and voted by organizations as well as by machines. As these will comprise the most ignorant and therefore the herdable ones, it is especially incumbent upon the great rank and file of intelligent women to see that they take and maintain an active interest in public affairs.

Politics is something that we cannot evade except to the detriment of our country and thereby to our own detriment. Politics is but another word for government. And in a sense we the individual voter are the government and unless we make matters of government our own concern, there are organizations and there are groups of designing men who will steal in and get possession for their own selfish aggrandizement and gain. This takes sometimes the form of power, to be traded for other power, or concessions; but always if you will trace far enough, eventual money gain. Or again it takes the form of graft and even direct loot. The losses that are sustained through a lowered citizenship, through inefficient service, through a general debauchery of public institutions, through increased taxation to make up for the amounts that are drawn off in graft and loot are well nigh incalculable--and for the sole reason that you and I, average citizens, do not take the active personal interest in our own matters of government that we should take.

Clericalism, Tammanyism, Bolshevism, Syndicalism--and all in the guise of interest in the people--get their holds and their profits in this way. It is essential that we be locally wise and history wise. Any class or section or organization that is less than the nation itself must be watched and be made to keep its own place, or it becomes a menace to the free and larger life of the nation. Even in the case of a great national crisis a superior patriotism is affected and paraded in order that it may camouflage its other and real activities.

When at times we forget ourselves and speak of rights rather than duties in connection with our country, it were well to recall and to repeat the words of Franklin: "The sun never repents of the good he does nor does he ever demand a recompense."

Not only is constant vigilance incumbent upon us, but realising the fact that the boys and the girls of today are the citizens of tomorrow--the nation's voters and law-makers--it is incumbent upon us to see that American free education through American free public schools, is advanced to and maintained at its highest possibilities, and kept free from any agencies that will make for a divided or anything less than a whole-hearted and intelligent citizenship. The motto on the Shakespeare statue at Leicester Square in London: "There is no darkness but ignorance," might well be reproduced in every city and every hamlet in the nation.

Late revelations have shown how even education can be manipulated and prostituted for ulterior purposes. Parochial schools whether Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, or Oriental, have no place in American institutions--and whether their work is carried on in English or in a foreign language. They are absolutely foreign to the spirit of our institutions. They are purely for the sake of something less than the nation itself. Blind indeed are we if we are not history-wise. Criminal indeed are we to allow any boys or girls to be diverted to them and to be deprived of the advantages of a better schooling and being brought under the influences of agencies that are thoroughly and wholly American.

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