Man, the social creator / by Henry Demarest Lloyd.

  • Henry Demarest Lloyd
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Man, the social creator / by Henry Demarest Lloyd. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    know what the law means. It means not destruction but salvation. The destruction of the martyr has come, not from their self-sacrifice but from the failure of the others to adopt the law of self-sacrifice, which means safety and joy for all. Self-sacrifice is a law of universal jurisdic¬ tion which must be obeyed universally to produce its fruits. To give is to ‘‘sacrifice,” and when all give to all where is the “ sacrifice” in the popular sense? There is none, unless it is a “ sacrifice” to have a home or a club where you are always welcome, or a country which will send its fleets to the ends of the earth to protect you, or will educate all your children for you, or will carry your letter five thousand miles for a copper. To consecrate oneself to the right is always to move on a little in advance. The same spirit of progress which creates an institution hastens the next instant to displace it by something better. “We must follow what is right,” Aristotle teaches, “not what is established.” But early man, conscious above everything of the extreme difficulty of effecting any working arrangement of men and things— a difficulty we all demonstrate afresh the moment we attempt to do anything new in house, shop or state— could hardly help looking upon the innovator as a de¬ stroyer. We of latter days did not treat Jonas Han way and William Lloyd Garrison so well that we can affect to be greatly superior to the aboriginal conservator. But the nearer the people were to the primitive institu¬ tionalisations the more vivid was their sense of the difficulty of getting any institutions to work, and the more savage was their treatment of the sacrificers who proposed a change in institutions and urged them to follow not what is established but what is right. Thus self-sacrifice has been made one of the most repellent words to the multitude, because encrusted with cruel
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