Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook: Ten Lectures on Social Subjects

Or take the very salient instance of Florence Nightingale. When she volunteered to go out and nurse our soldiers in the Crimea, the opposition to a woman’s invasion of a departm...

Set against the witness of all that misguidance of the past that wise and lovely saying of Christ, so unlikely in its first seeming: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall posses...

I remember, in this connection, a Quaker acquaintance whose friends descended upon him at the time of his marriage with certain household monstrosities which he was expected the...

There, then, is a great authority, Edmund Burke, maintaining that governments are more liable to wilful error than those whom they govern--and the main value of majority rule is...

How can we fight? Best of all, I believe, by establishing a standard of honour toward manual labour; and, quite definitely, wherever we have Art schools, by training all student...

Less than a century and a half ago a girl of fourteen was sentenced in this country to be burned alive for counterfeit coining; only eighty-five years ago a boy of nine was sent...

Now the conscientious objectors have been trying to do us the service, which we have ignored, of pointing out from the very beginning that war is not and cannot be Christian, an...

One of the most perfectly decorative objects that I have ever seen in the animal world (you will find it in still-life form in our Natural History Museum) is the device by which...

But what are we to say if that other school, which admits that the State can do wrong; but is not going to allow the State to be punished for doing wrong if that State happens t...

Has life convinced us that we are all self-contained persons? Through social contact we have undergone many changes, many damages, and many repairs. Parts of us have gone to oth...

But when, on the contrary, a man comes to the conclusion that the products of Society as constituted have in them more of evil than of good, he may quite creditably, in a strict...

Man (the most conscious prey of death) has also his compensations; but, wishing to eat his cake and have it, he insists that his increased self-consciousness is the hall-mark of...

These papers, originally given as lectures, make no pretence to the solution of the social or political problems with which they are concerned. They indicate rather a certain st...

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd-- A host of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Flutterin...

These two ideals, or social practices, make mutually discrediting claims the one against the other. I am not concerned to say which I think is right. But on one side or the othe...