Читать книгу The Reign of Gilt онлайн

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Freedom is not the American’s because constitutions or statutes assert it. The constitutions, the statutes are merely written records of a truth no more dependent upon them than the proportions in which elements combine are dependent upon the text-books of chemistry. Besides, constitutions and laws avail only through their interpreters. And interpretation varies with the honesty or open-mindedness of official interpreters, with the spirit of the time, with the caprice of the moment even—a popular outburst, an impulse of bad courage in the public administrations, a greedy fear or desire in some powerful class. Legal enactments affect the surface of a society more or less and for periods of varying brevity; but the society itself is formed by conditions over which man has no greater control than he has over his heart-action. Those conditions constitute what the religious call “God in history” and the unreligious call fate or destiny or natural evolution.

America will remain in the highway to freedom because printing presses are whirling, because railway trains are moving, because news is streaming along the telegraph wires, because schools and colleges and libraries are open—because intelligence is diffused and is ever more widely diffusing. Rights may be and constantly are assailed in isolated instances. But each instance remains and must remain isolated. None has become or can become a precedent. And there must be precedent or there can be no tyranny. Prejudice, even wilful prejudice, still thrives; truth and error have not yet been divorced from their unholy alliance which seduces honest men to the purposes of rascals; passion still rules the heart and the heart still rules the reason. But America must be free, however hard it may struggle against freedom; Intelligence is striking off the shackles. It can no more be stopped or stayed than the law of gravitation can be suspended.