Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/113

 TRUE CONSERVATISM. 106

What I fear is that dogged resistance on the one side may kindle a passionate sense of wrong on the other. What I fear are the demagogues and the accidents.

The present condition of all civilized countries is that of increasing unstable equilibrium. In steam and elec- tricity, and all the countless inventions which they typify, mighty forces have entered the world. If rightly used, they are our servants, more potent to do our bidding than the genii of Arabian story. If wrongly used, they, too, must turn to monsters of destruction. They require and will compel great social changes. That we may already see. Operating under social institutions which are based on natural justice, which acknowledge the equal rights of all to the material and opportunities of nature, their elevating power will be equally exerted, and indus- trial organization will pass naturally into that of a vast cooperative society. Operating under social institutions which deny natural justice by treating land as private property, their power is unequally exerted, and tends, by producing inequality, to engender forces that will tear and rend and shatter. The old bottles cannot hold the new wine. This is the ferment which throughout the civilized world is everywhere beginning.

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