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Show i ' lis Political EcfltoOHmiy EDITORIALS By O. N. L.CNO The Way to Be gin to Make Changes "Would you fain do something to relieve distress, to extirpate extir-pate vice? You must turn to political economy to know their causes, that you may lay the axe to the root of the evil tree. If charity could eradicate want, if preaching could make men moral, if printing books and building schools could destroy ignorance, l one of these things would be known today. Where wealth most abounds, there poverty is deepest; where luxury is most profuse, , the gauntest want jostles it. In cities which arethe storehouses store-houses of nations, starvation annually claims its victims. Where the costliest churches rear the tallest spires towards to-wards heaven, there is needed a standing army of policemen; police-men; as we build new schools, we build new prisons. "Whence this dark shadow that thus attends that which we used to call "material progress," that nhich current philosophy teaches us to hope for and to work for? Here ,is the question of all questions for us. We must answer it or be destroyed, as preceding civilizations have been destroved. For no chain is stronger than its weakest weak-est link, and our glorious statue with its head of gold and its shoulders of brass has as yet but feet of clay. "Political economy alone can give the answer. And if you trace out the laws of the production and exchange of wealth, you will seethe causes of social weakness and disease. dis-ease. "And you will see the remedies.' Not in wild dreams or red destruction nor weak projects of putting men in leading strings to the state,' but in simple measures sanctioned sanc-tioned by justice. You wid see in light the great remedy, in freedom the great solvent. You will see that the true law of lovej the iaw-of liberty, the law-of each, for-all and all for each; that the golden rule of morals is also the golden rule of the science of wealth; that the highest expressions ex-pressions of religious truth include the widest generalizations generaliza-tions of political economy." Henry George. |