|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: of a slave can be free. It is like saying to a laborer brought up on
a family income of thirteen shillings a week, "Here is one hundred
thousand pounds: now you are wealthy." Nothing can make such a man
really wealthy. Freedom and wealth are difficult and responsible
conditions to which men must be accustomed and socially trained from
birth. A nation that is free at twenty-one is not free at all; just
as a man first enriched at fifty remains poor all his life, even if he
does not curtail it by drinking himself to death in the first wild
ecstasy of being able to swallow as much as he likes for the first
time. You cannot govern men brought up as slaves otherwise than as
slaves are governed. You may pile Bills of Right and Habeas Corpus
|
