Suggestive programs for special day exercises/Washington and Lowell Day/Wider and Wiser Humanity

by James Russell Lowell

 

A WIDER AND WISER HUMANITY.

I do not believe in violent changes, nor do I expect them. Things in possession have a very firm grip. One of the strongest cements of society is the conviction of mankind that the state of things into which they are born is a part of the order of the universe, as natural, let us say, as that the sun should go round the earth. It is a conviction that they will not surrender except on compulsion, and a wise society should look to it that this compulsion be not put upon them. For the individual man there is no radical cure, outside of human nature itself, for the evils to which human nature is heir. The rule will always hold good that you must

“ Be your own palace or the world’s your gaol.”

But for artificial evils, for evils that spring from want of thought, thought must find a remedy somewhere. There has been no period of time in which wealth has been more sensible of its duties than now; it builds hospitals, it establishes missions among the poor, it endows schools. It is one of the advantages of accumulated wealth and of the leisure it renders possible, that people have time to think of the grants and sorrows of their fellows; but all these remedies are partial and palliative

merely. It is as if we should apply plasters to a single pustule of the small-pox with a view of driving out the disease. The true way is to discover and to extirpate the germs. As society is now constituted, these are in the air it breathes, in the water it drinks, in things that seem and which it has always believed to be the most innocent and healthful. The evil elements it neglects corrupt these in their springs and pollute them in their courses.

Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come. The world has outlived much and will outlive a great deal more, and men have contrived to be happy in it. It has shown the strength of its constitution in nothing more than in surviving the quack medicines it has tried. In the scales of the destinies brawn will never weigh so much as brain. Our healing is not in the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in monarchies or aristocracies or democracies, but will be revealed by the still small voice that speaks to the conscience and the heart, prompting us to a wider and wiser humanity.—Lowell.