The Mainspring Of Human Progress

Author Henry Grady Weaver was convinced that human liberty is the mainspring of progress, and that government tends always to tyranny. In this book, first published in 1947, Weaver popularizes these themes for the American people. This is the Revised Edition first published in 1953, containing Weaver’s revisions discussed and agreed prior to his untimely death in 1949.

Excerpt from Mainspring: The Grassroots Story of Human Progress, What Is Means to You and Me and How Not to Prevent It The modern world is an intricate network of living human energies linking all persons in cooperative effort and in one common fate. The Turk has bread because the Ameri can smokes cigarettes. New Yorkers eat pineapple ripened in Hawan because the Burmese mine tin. We drink coffee at breakfast because Brazilians need our iron, machinery and wheat. And Japanese babies grow strong and healthy when American women buy silk lingerie. This is the kind of world that men and women naturally want to live in. And it is the kind of world they begin to create when they are free to use their individual energies and free to cooperate among themselves voluntarily. Thus the brotherhood of man is not an ideal of selfless ness which human beings are too sinful to achieve. It is stern reality. All persons are bound together in the one impera tive desire to survive on this earth. DO unto others as you would have them do unto you is not only a sound moral precept it is the hardheaded advice of practical self-interest. Whoever injures another, Injures himself because he decreases the opportunity for gains that come through cooperation and exchange. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.