Proceedings of the Indignation Meeting Held in Faneuil Hall, Thursday Evening, August 1, 1878: To Protest Against the Injury Done to the Freedom of the Press by the Conviction and Imprisonment of Ezra H. Heywood
Proceedings of the Indignation Meeting Held in Faneuil Hall, Thursday Evening, August 1, 1878: To Protest Against the Injury Done to the Freedom of the Press by the Conviction and Imprisonment of Ezra H. Heywood
Excerpt from Proceedings of the Indignation Meeting Held in Faneuil Hall, Thursday Evening, August 1, 1878 But how can involuntary virtue be its own reward? One hundred and two years ago a heavy blow was delivered in the face and eyes of this notion that virtue is to be manufactured by law; that total depravity is the raw material out of which all that is good in the world is made by the joint government of priests and kings. It was the Declaration of American Independence. This remarkable docu ment presupposes that virtue ...
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Excerpt from Proceedings of the Indignation Meeting Held in Faneuil Hall, Thursday Evening, August 1, 1878 But how can involuntary virtue be its own reward? One hundred and two years ago a heavy blow was delivered in the face and eyes of this notion that virtue is to be manufactured by law; that total depravity is the raw material out of which all that is good in the world is made by the joint government of priests and kings. It was the Declaration of American Independence. This remarkable docu ment presupposes that virtue, honor, conscience, religion, are in digenous in the human race. In itself, and as interpreted by the Constitution of the United States, it restricts law to the defence of human rights, leaving all theoretical rights of superhuman beings to their own care, thus striking off at one blow all the old fetters of the soul, rusty with age and smeared with blood. The world - I mean the old one - stood aghast. It looked to see American soci ety swallowed up in an ocean of vice, corruption, and crime. Now, for rather more than half of the one hundred and two years of this audacious experiment I have watched society to see the effect upon it of leaving Speech, printing, and all sorts of Opinion free, so far as they have been left free; have watched and compared it with the past and with the other side of the Atlantic: and I say to you I have seen society as a whole growing cleaner, sweeter, wiser, purer, nobler, happier, every year I have lived, and it is here now far bet ter than what I saw on the other side of the Atlantic. Too well I know there are deplorable rottenness and falsehood, and too much of them in regard to the vital and naturally holy relation of the sexes, by which society perpetuates itself, and by the refinement of which it rises above the level of the brute beasts., But I do not believe the disease is growing worse, or-that it affects the great body of the peo ple, or that it can be in the least degree diminished by visiting with pains and penalties either the scientific or religious opinions that may be supposed to engender it. That the newspapers are now, every day, filled, as never before, with crimes, scandals, rascally failures and fast life, luxury, extravagance, and folly, is no proof that people are growing worse. These, like all abnormal things, are news and it is to be noticed that any newspaper now collects news from an area at least one hundred times greater than it could fifty years ago. Hence, supposing the crimes and scandals in a given population to be only half as rife as they were then, by the news papers they would seem to be fifty times more so. Still, better and better as society grows, its sexual vices are too bad, to be sure. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at ... This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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