Orestes Brownson

thumb|right|There is no question that education has been more generally diffused than it was in the middle ages, but it is doubtful if the number of thinkers has been increased. Orestes Brownson (1803–1876) was an American intellectual, activist, preacher, labor organizer, and writer. Quotes Wages is a cunning device of the devil, for the benefit of tender consciences, who would retain all the advantages of the slave system, without the expense, trouble, and odium of being slave-holders. The Laboring Classes, Boston Quarterly Review, July 1840, https://archive.org/details/labouringclasses00browrich/page/11 The middle class is always a firm champion of equality, when it concerns humbling a class above it; but it is its inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it. The Laboring Classes, Boston Quarterly Review, July 1840, https://archive.org/details/labouringclasses00browrich/page/11 There is no country in Europe, in which the condition of the labouring classes seems to us so hopeless as in that of England. This is not owing to the fact, that the aristocracy is less enlightened, more powerful, or more oppressive in England than elsewhere. The English labourer does not find his worst enemy in the nobility, but in the middling class. [...] Manfully have the British Commoners struggled against the old feudal aristocracy, and so successfully that they now constitute the dominant power in the state. To their struggles against the throne and the nobility is the English nation indebted for the liberty it so loudly boasts, and which, during the lasl half of the last century, so enraptured the friends of Humanity throughout Europe. But this class has done nothing for the labouring population, the real proletarii. The Laboring Classes, Boston Quarterly Review, July 1840, https://archive.org/details/labouringclasses00browrich/page/11 If you would make a man happy, study not to augment his goods; but to diminish his wants. One of the greatest services Christianity has rendered the world has been its consecration of poverty, and its elevation of labor to the dignity of a moral duty. The tendency of modern society is in the opposite direction. England and the United States, the most modern of all nations, and the best exponents the world has of the tendencies of modern civilization, treat poverty as a crime, and hold honest labor should be endured by none who can escape it. Liberalism and Progress (1864) http://orestesbrownson.org/liberalism-and-progress-oct.-1864-dr.-brownson-refutes-the-liberalism-of-general-croaker-the-beginnings-of-liberalism.html There is no question that education has been more generally diffused than it was in the middle ages, but it is doubtful if the number of thinkers has been increased, or real mental culture extended. Education loses in thoroughness and depth what it gains in surface. Liberalism and Progress (1864) http://orestesbrownson.org/liberalism-and-progress-oct.-1864-dr.-brownson-refutes-the-liberalism-of-general-croaker-the-beginnings-of-liberalism.html External links