The unsolved riddle of social justice / by Stephen Leacock.

  • Stephen Leacock
Date:
1920
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The unsolved riddle of social justice / by Stephen Leacock. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    needs of human kind. It is not so now. We live in an age that is at best about a century and a half old—the age of machinery and power. Our common reading of history has obscured this fact. Its pages are filled with the purple gowms of kings and the scarlet trappings of the warrior. Its record is largely that of battles and sieges, of the brave ad- venture of discovery and the vexed slaughter of the nations. It has long since dismissed as too short and simple for its pages, the short and simple annals of the poor. And the record is right enough. Of the poor what is there to say ? They were born ; they lived ; they died. They followed their leaders, and their names are forgotten. But written thus our history has obscured the greatest fact that ever came into it—^the colossal change that separates our little era of a century and a half from all the preceding history of man- kind—separates it so completely that a great gulf lies between, across which comparison can scarcely pass, and on the other side of which a new world begins. It has been the custom of our history to use the phrase the new world ” to mark the discoveries of Columbus and the treasure-hunt of a Cortes or a Pizarro. But what of that ? The America that
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