Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/39

Rh same holds good through all human relations, parental, marital, social, racial: it is ignoble to claim loyalty or devotion from those whom you have not first made free. Gratitude—even filial gratitude—has no moral value save if it comes from a free agent. If it comes from one trained to be not free it partakes of servility. And it is better for parents to forgo gratitude than to exact its imitation or substitute, by the imposition of any restrictive conditions or claims after the years of tutelage are over. It may well be that gratitude has far too small a place in the human heart; but I am quite sure that the claim for gratitude has too large a one, and that this in excess brings the very reverse of a remedy when the other is lacking. And what is true in relation to parents and their children is true also in every other human relationship where the claim to possess intrudes to the hindrance of self-realization and self-development. The possessor, in claiming restrictive possession of others, loses possession of himself.

That is what made slavery as an institution so doubly impoverishing to the human race. It impoverished the mind of the slave, but it impoverished quite as much the mind of the slave-owner.

Wherever man has tried to possess others he has lost possession of himself. That is the price inevitably paid by any class or section of the community which seeks to dominate the lives and restrict the liberty of its fellows.