Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/56

 48 THE LAND QUESTION.

thing in the world to say that a man's son was more closely related to him than his nephew? Are there not states of society in which it woiild be considered disreputable for a man to carry a burden while a woman who could stagger under it was around? states of society in which the husband who did not occasionally beat his wife would be deemed by both sexes a weak-minded, low-spirited fellow ? What would Chinese fashionable society consider more outrageous than to be told that mothers should not be permitted to squeeze their daughters' feet, or Flathead women than being restrained from tying a board on their infants' skulls ? How long has it been since the monstrous doctrine of the divine right of kings was taught through all Christendom ?

What is the slave-trade but piracy of the worst kind ? Yet it is not long since the slave-trade was looked upon as a perfectly respectable business, affording as legitimate an opening for the investment of capital and the display of enterprise as any other. The proposition to prohibit it was first looked upon as ridiculous, then as fanatical, then as wicked. It was only slowly and by hard fighting that the truth in regard to it gained ground. Does not our very Constitution bear witness to what I say ? Does not the fundamental law of the nation, adopted twelve years after the enunciation of the Declaration of Inde- pendence, declare that for twenty years the slave-trade shall not be prohibited nor restricted? Such dominion had the idea of vested interests over the minds of those who had already proclaimed the inalienable right of man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness !

Is it not but yesterday that in the freest and greatest republic on earth, among the people who boast that they lead the very van of civilization, this doctrine of vested rights was deemed a sufficient justification for all the cruel wrongs of human slavery T Is it not but yesterday

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