previous next
[81]

This matter of abstention — from voting or violence or anything else-suggests the two opposite ways of regarding any cause directed against any evil. I may have an overwhelming interest in the cause itself, so that I quite forget myself in it. My one effort is to put an end to the evil. Or I may simply try to wash my hands of it — to clear my skirts of it-and in my efforts to maintain my personal purity I may neglect altogether the question of the progress of the cause. Which is the better vegetarian — the one who starves himself to death by sticking to his diet under unfavorable circumstances, thus making himself a living, or rather a dying argument against his principles; or the one who is willing to eat meat for the sake of the cause? There is a good deal to be said for the latter individual. And so the non-resistant who votes in the direction of less force may argue that he is doing more for the cause than if he abstained. He would be right; and the man who had risen to a higher plane and abjured voting would also be right. At any rate it is difficult to see how Garrison's scruples about voting affected his influence. As a matter of fact, they kept him clear of the bootless embarrassments of third-party politics, and those who separated from him on this issue were soon lost in the crowd

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
William Lloyd Garrison (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: