Editorial November 14, 1903 Issue

Principle Greater than Numbers

As we scan the daily papers or read the magazine articles which deal with topics that concern all, we cannot help being saddened by the seeming hopelessness of many of the problems of human existence, and the utter inadequacy of ordinary means for the amelioration of prevailing sin and misery.

When a city or a nation is threatened with disaster, thought turns irresistibly to some man whose character and deeds warrant the hope that he may be found equal to the occasion, and by the force of his genius draw to him such numbers of his fellow-men as may be needed to strike and stand for Right, till it prevail over the menacing evil.

And yet how slender does this hope seem, when we realize how few there are that can really be counted on, that are not only honest and faithful, but intelligent enough to be more than a match for the entrenched wrong. It requires so much less effort to drift with the current than to face it and turn the tide of public sentiment by the power of an appeal to Principle, hence we often find the masses enslaved by indolence, ignorance, and fear, and actuated chiefly by self-interest; yet in spite of all this, wrongs are righted and the world moves toward the inevitable triumph of Right. Were this not true, the race would long since have been annihilated. Even in an hour of seeming chaos, the thinker knows that the power which governs the world is neither represented nor affected by numbers, though when the demands of Principle are strongly felt, multitudes are roused from the lethargy which submission to wrong always induces, and are led to accept and to follow a higher ideal.

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