The Pack-Asses of Privilege (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

Excerpt from The Pack-Asses of Privilege

This is the true optimism, that sees the good which is, and strives with might and main to better that good, as well as the bad which also is. A cheerful acquiescence in. All that society is and does - in all its traditions, law's, customs and habits - is as stupid and harmful as the unreasonable discontent which can see no good nor any happiness in the world. The ultra-conservative and the ultra-radical are both fools after their degree.

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Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Excerpt from The Pack-Asses of Privilege

It is doubtless true that the contrasts of society today are neither so bold nor so distressing as the contrasts of society in other times. Nowhere in the United States, certainly, is there such ignorance or such poverty as we know to have been common to the working masses during the many centuries that elapsed from the fall of the Roman civilization to the destruction of feudalism by the beneficent invention of gunpowder. That the conditions of human life, in the mass, have steadily grown easier and happier, and with constantly accelerated rapidity during the last hundred years or so, is, I think, undeniable. That this happy progress has been, and will continue to be, the work of evolutionary, and not of revolutionary forces is, I think, also undeniable. If I read history aright, evolution is no less the fixed law of social progress than of physical progress. The common good steadily moves forward to the common better, impelled by a multitude of interacting forces. We cannot ever all at once obtain the common best by suddenly turning social conditions upside down. The law of substantial betterment is the law of growth, of ripening, of infinite small graftings on the elder trunk. Seed-time and harvest will not be coerced to fall on a day.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.