The Road To Freedom,
And What Lies Beyond
PREFACE
Josiah and Ethel Wedgwood
[Published in London by C.W. Daniel, Ltd., 1913]
It is the purpose of this book to show that modern civilisation is
built upon slave labour; that land monopoly is the cause of this slave
labour; that when the land is freed, slave labour must cease, and with
it so-called civilisation; and that if the unreal civilisation be thus
ended, the real will have a chance to begin, and true development take
the place of spurious progress.
PREFACE
…There come times to men and
communities when they are impelled to look into themselves and examine
the basis of their whole existence and the truth of their most
unquestioned axioms -- when they are driven back and back behind the
assorted maxims which have served them as a political or religious
creed, to hunt out in its lurking-place that first principle to which
they cannot but assent and by which all the rest stand or fall.
… The men of action are driven to
the examination empirically, by the logic of facts, because experience
shows them that the approved methods are useless; and others by that
mental honesty, which like a gadfly urges philosophers along the
lonely £ path of reasoning.
… Such a time came to religious
thought towards the end of last century; it is being followed now by a
similar crisis in our political and social thought. Reforms once
cherished have so failed in practice to remedy even superficial evils;
the methods of reform involve so much that is uncertain or contrary to
a deeper sense of right ; the aims of reformers are often so
insufficient and questionable, that society is being forced at last to
ask itself what it really believes and really wants. The inquiry is an
unpleasant one ; and many, when they are brought face to face with it,
shrink back (like many religious free-thinkers) and prefer to wander
in a limbo of hazy aspiration and vague sympathies. Those who go
forward, bent on getting an answer to their own questioning, embark on
a perilous voyage, for there are numberless possibilities of
shipwreck, and no pilot save the internal one ; but if they push on,
undismayed by the bogeys of this world or any other, they reach at
last -- not absolute truth -- but some firm land where their mind can
be in unison with itself.
… Independent thought has been made
easier for the most timid of us by the great original thinkers of the
last fifty years, who have shown the way and borne the brunt of the
hostility that departure from tradition often arouses. Giants like Leo
Tolstoy, Henry George, Pierre Kropotkin, and others whose names are
little known, have made free thought on social matters possible to our
generation. The only service that men of smaller stature can hope to
render is to clear away still more of the mental and material rubbish
that obstructs the road to a true civilisation.
… We have tried to express in this
book our personal answer to the question : " What's wrong with
the world ? " Our thanks are due to all our argumenta- tive
friends, who by their disputations have helped us to form and to
clarify our own opinions. We also offer our sincere thanks to the
Editor of The Open Road, in which most of these chapters were first
published.
THE AUTHORS / November 1912
CONTENTS
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