Kansas agitator. [volume] (Garnett, Kan.) 1890-1905, 1895-02-01
ONLY THE GOLDEN RULE CAN BRING
THE GOLDEN AGE.
BY FRANCES E. WILLARD.

The free and off-hand rendering Of the Gold
en- Rule in Our nineteenth-century vernacular
would be, "Put yourself in his place" TO DO
this requires imagination, that angel OF the
mind, and l believe that we have among us no
end of people who would put themselves in the
place of others if they only had the power.
The man at the club, delighting himself with
a good dinner, enjoying his canvas-back and
wine, would put himself in the place of the
shivering street-sweeper, but the shape of his
head forbids him to do this; he is not built that
way.
The woman who turns her wedding-ring upon
her finger, saying, 81 have all the rights
want" would put herself in the place of the
weary seamstress in the garret, except that she
has niggardly fitting out in that high poetic
quality that gives color and perspective to the
mind
The man inside the cab, wrapped in furs and
sheltered from the storm, would be more con-
siderate of the cabman on the box who drives
through storm and sleet, except that through
lack of imagination he never thinks about the
cabman any more than he does about the horses,
and he thinks of these animate fellow creatures
of his as much as he does of the tire of the
wheel or the straps of the harness.
1t is not that they are actively bad these
friends of ours who do not think but perhaps
it may be said without offense that they are not
actively good. Now what we want is SO to
stamp the impress of the Golden Rule as to
work into law the imaginative faculty of those
i'll he tn r,ttt
selves in another's place, that those people who
lack this "vision and faculty divine" shall still,
by the very constitution and course of govern
ment be obliged to carry out the Golden Rule
in the dealings of man with man.
"Her faith and works are bells of full accord. "
In this line from Tennyson is embodied the
knowledge that three years of almost constant
association in Christian work has given me
concerning the guest whom we are met to honor
LADY Henry Somerset). That what l say is
true is proved perhaps most potently in the fact
that ''the common people hear her gladly"
Many time at the close OF meeting where
thousands upon thousands have assembled, they
have surrounded her carriage as we went away,
with cheer upon cheer from voices that have
not been wont to praise the class she represents,
but whose curses for that class have been not
loud, but deep.
In the temperance demonstration over yeai
ago, when procession five miles long moved
into Hyde Park, and from a dozen different
platforms the leading temperance speakers Of
Great Britain addressed the multitude, the to-
kens of loving affection and confidence that
came to her were incomparably beyond those
received by any other advocate of our holy
cause, even by those who have served it the
longest, and the sturdy workingmen were over
heard saying to one another as she passed,
"There goes Lady Henry Somerset; we can
trust her. she is for us every time"
To my mind, this faith has been borne IN
upon the spirits of the people for the reason
that they perceive that our English leader /:
not content with the simple idea of the Colder
Rule in action as the ideal Of individual life
but that she has staked all upon its application
to the common customs of society and the ev
ery-day laws of the land This is the keynote
of the present conflict, where countless armies
are marshalling under the white flag OF peace