When employers talk about the freedom of labor, it may be that some of them are really worried over the hostility of most unions to exceptional rewards for exceptional workers. But in the main that isn't what worries them...
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A Key to the Labor Movement — > Chapter 1
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The Rock of Ages — > Chapter 2
I happened to be in Dublin some time ago during what was undoubtedly a crisis in Irish history: Home Rule in sight, Ulster arming itself for rebellion, Dublin torn by a bitter strike. No one felt any assurance as to the...
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The Compulsion to Make Mistakes — > Chapter II. The Malady of Democratic States
The errors of public opinion in these matters have a common characteristic. The movement of opinion is slower than the movement of events. Because of that, the cycle of subjective sentiments on war and peace is usually...
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What Modernism Leaves Out — > Chapter III. The Loss of Certainty
Many reasons have been adduced to explain why people do not go to church as much as they once did. Surely the most important reason is that they are not so certain that they are going to meet God when they go to church....
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The Kingly Pattern — > Chapter IV. The Acids of Modernity
What I have said thus far can be reduced to the statement that it is difficult for modern men to conceive a God whom they can worship. Yet it would be a crude misunderstanding of religious experience to assume that it...
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The Doctrine of the Keys — > Chapter V. The Breakdown of Authority
The theory of divine government has always presented some difficulties to human reason, as we can see even in St. Augustine, who never clearly made up his mind whether the City of God was the actual church presided over...
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Art (d) The Artist as Prophet — > Chapter VI. Lost Provinces
Whether the necessity of creating his own tradition is a good or a bad thing for the artist, there can be no doubt that it is a novel thing and a burdensome one. Artists have responded to it by proclaiming one of two...
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Theocracy and Humanism — > Chapter VII. The Drama of Destiny
There is a revolution here in the realm of the spirit. We may describe it briefly by saying that whereas men once felt they were living under the eye of an all-powerful spectator, to-day they are watched only by their...
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The Passage Into Maturity — > Chapter IX. The Insight of Humanism
The critical phase of human experience, then, is the passage from childhood to maturity; the critical question is whether childish habits and expectations are to persist or to be transformed.
We grow older. But it...
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Superstition and Self-Consciousness — > Chapter XI. The Cure of Souls
This change of attitude toward evil is not, as at first perhaps it may seem, merely a new way of talking about the same thing. It alters radically the nature of evil, itself. For evil is not a quality of things as such....
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Naive Capitalism — > Chapter XII. The Business of the Great Society
The application of science to the daily affairs of men was acclaimed at first with more enthusiasm than understanding. "That early people," said Buffon, speaking of the Babylonians, "was very happy, because it was very...
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The Diffusion of the Acquisitive Instinct — > Chapter XII. The Business of the Great Society
While both the bolshevists and the fascists look upon themselves as pathfinders of progress, it is fairly clear, I think, that they are, in the literal meaning of the term, reactionary. They have won their victories among...
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The Coronation of a Queen — > Today and Tomorrow
Many men who live far beyond the Commonwealth and Empire have come to feel, as the coronation of the Queen drew near, that though they have no part in the gorgeous ceremony, they do participate in the solemn rite. For the...
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Amelia Earhart — > Today and Tomorrow
I cannot quite remember whether Miss Earhart undertook her flight with some practical purpose in mind, say, to demonstrate something or other about aviation which will make it a little easier for commercial passengers to...
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Life Is Cheap — >
When a military expert wishes to be very technical and professional he refers to the killed, wounded, and missing as the wastage of an army. To those who do not share his preoccupation with the problems of grand strategy...
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Minimum Wage — > The New Republic
The opposition to a minimum wage law for women is curiously compounded of interested employers, abstract theorists and conservative and radical unionists. It presents a picture of the I.W.W., department store managers,...
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Law and Order — > Metropolitan
Our statute books are cluttered with legislation that represents somebody's good intention, rather than a real insight into what is possible. And these laws cannot be enforced in a country where the sense of democracy is...
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The Distribution of Power — > Public Opinion
On all but a very few matters for short stretches in our lives, the utmost independence that we can exercise is to multiply the authorities to whom we give a friendly hearing. As congenital amateurs our quest for truth...
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Disentangling Ideas — > Public Opinion
On many subjects of great public importance, and in varying degree among different people for more personal matters, the threads of memory and emotion are in a snarl. The same word will connote any number of different...
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The World Outside and the Pictures In Our Heads — > Public Opinion
There is an island in the ocean where in 1914 a few Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans lived. No cable reaches that island, and the British mail steamer comes but once in sixty days. In September it had not yet come, and...
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Free Collectivism — > The Method of Freedom
It is often assumed in current discussion that all the nations must make an exclusive choice between the old theoretically neutral state on the one hand and some form of absolute collectivism and a directed economy on the...
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Making the Perfect Citizen — > The Phantom Public
I have tried to imagine how the perfect citizen could be produced. Some say he will have to be born of the conjunction of the right germ plasms, and, in the pages of books written by Madison Grant, Lothtop Stoddard, and...
