[Looking Backwards from 2000 to 1887 by Edward Bellamy]@TWC D-Link book
Looking Backwards from 2000 to 1887

CHAPTER 12
15/17

The only coin current is the image of God, and that is good for all we have.
"I think there is no feature of the civilization of your epoch so repugnant to modern ideas as the neglect with which you treated your dependent classes.

Even if you had no pity, no feeling of brotherhood, how was it that you did not see that you were robbing the incapable class of their plain right in leaving them unprovided for ?" "I don't quite follow you there," I said.

"I admit the claim of this class to our pity, but how could they who produced nothing claim a share of the product as a right ?" "How happened it," was Dr.Leete's reply, "that your workers were able to produce more than so many savages would have done?
Was it not wholly on account of the heritage of the past knowledge and achievements of the race, the machinery of society, thousands of years in contriving, found by you ready-made to your hand?
How did you come to be possessors of this knowledge and this machinery, which represent nine parts to one contributed by yourself in the value of your product?
You inherited it, did you not?
And were not these others, these unfortunate and crippled brothers whom you cast out, joint inheritors, co-heirs with you?
What did you do with their share?
Did you not rob them when you put them off with crusts, who were entitled to sit with the heirs, and did you not add insult to robbery when you called the crusts charity?
"Ah, Mr.West," Dr.Leete continued, as I did not respond, "what I do not understand is, setting aside all considerations either of justice or brotherly feeling toward the crippled and defective, how the workers of your day could have had any heart for their work, knowing that their children, or grand-children, if unfortunate, would be deprived of the comforts and even necessities of life.

It is a mystery how men with children could favor a system under which they were rewarded beyond those less endowed with bodily strength or mental power.

For, by the same discrimination by which the father profited, the son, for whom he would give his life, being perchance weaker than others, might be reduced to crusts and beggary.


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