Page:Olive Malmberg Johnson - Woman and the Socialist Movement (1908).djvu/28

 26 market has exactly the same standing as the industrial proletariat.

But for all that, even poor education is a step in advance of no education. Capitalism has in this as in many other respects proven itself a great equalizer. While the mass of students and scholars to-day are in learning far below the students and learned men of yesterday, they are however in knowledge and education infinitely above the mass of people, even the wealthy and economically favored people, of every previous stage of history. At the same time, while the supercilious lament the decline in the status of learning because of generalization and specialization, there can be no doubt that the world to-day has its ample quota of eminent scholars in every branch of learning, and that science, art and literature are on a higher plane than ever before.

Capitalism is a transition period to a higher status of society. Equality is a corollary of high development. By throwing the educational institutions open, on the one hand, to the working class, and on the other hand to both sexes alike, capitalism has fulfilled a great mission to the human race. Knowledge breeds thirst for knowledge. Thorough and sound education must follow poor and specialized education. Once the human race has learned enough to realize how infinitely little it really knows and how many grand and wonderful things there are to learn, then the greatest avenue to knowledge has been opened. Once the women have entered this avenue with equal opportunities with the men they will be quite sure to try to keep up the pace. In women of science and knowledge and determination the rising generation will find quite different educators and companions than in the supercilious, society-hunting, flighty and ignorantly egotistic women of to-day. The child will acquire almost as his birth-right, principles of knowledge and science and rules of health that to-day are difficult to inculcate even in the best of people.

Once such people are on the earth there is little room for slavery and oppression! Freedom and equality of all humanity, must at last prevail!