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This text has been proofread but is not guaranteed to be free from errors. Corrections to the original text have been left in place.
Title: Our Greatest Want, an electronic edition
Author: Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 1825-1911
Publisher: 
Place published: 
Date: [18--?]
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Our Greatest Want. Leading ideas impress themselves upon communities and countries.  A
thought is evolved and thrown out among the masses, they receive it
and it becomes inter-woven with their mental and moral life--if the
thought be good the receivers are benefited, and helped onward to the
truer life; if it is not, the reception of the idea is a detriment.  A
few earnest thinkers, and workers in-fuse into the mind of Great
Britain, a sentiment of human brotherhood.  The hue and cry of
opposition is raised against it.  Avarice and cupidity oppose it, but
the great heart of the people throbs for it.  A healthy public opinion
dashes and surges against the British throne, the idea gains ground
and progresses till hundreds of thousands of men, women and children
arise, redeemed from bondage, and freed from chains, and the nation
gains moral power by the act.  Visions of dominion, proud dreams of
conquest fill the soul of Napoleon Bonaparte, and he infuses them into
the mind of France, and the peace of Europe is invaded.  His
bloodstained armies dazzled and misled, follow him through carnage and
blood, to shake earth's proudest kingdoms to their base, and the march
of a true progression is stayed by a river of blood.  In America,
where public opinion exerts such a sway, a leading is success. The
politician who chooses for his candidate not the best man but the most
available one.--The money getter, who virtually says let me make
money, though I coin it from blood and extract it from tears-- The
minister, who stoops from his high position to the slave power, and in
a word all who barter principle for expediency, the true and right for
the available and convenient, are worshipers at the shrine of success.
And we, or at least some of us, upon whose faculties the rust of
centuries has lain, are beginning to awake and worship at the same
altar, and bow to the idols.  The idea if I understand it aright, that
is interweaving itself with our thoughts, is that the greatest need of
our people at present is money, and that as money is a symbol of
power, the possession of it will gain for us the rights which power
and prejudice now deny us.--And it may be true that the richer we are
the nearer we are to social and political equality; but somehow, (and
I may not fully comprehend the idea,) it does not seem to me that
money, as little as we possess of it, is our greatest want.  Neither
do I think that the possession of intelligence and talent is our
greatest want.  If I under-stand our greatest wants aright they strike
deeper than any want that gold or know-ledge can supply.  We want more
soul, a higher cultivation of all our spiritual faculties.  We need
more unselfishness, earnestness and integrity.  Our greatest need is
not gold or silver, talent or genius, but true men and true women.  We
have millions of our race in the prison house of slavery, but have we
yet a single Moses in freedom.  And if we had who among us would be
led by him?I like the character of Moses.  He is the first disunionist we read
of in the Jewish Scriptures.  The magnificence of Pharaoh's throne
loomed up before his vision, its oriental splendors glittered before
his eyes; but he turned from them all and chose rather to suffer with
the enslaved, than rejoice with the free.  He would have no union with
the slave power of Egypt.  When we have a race of men whom this blood
stained government can-not tempt or flatter, who would sternly refuse
every office in the nation's gift, from a president down to a
tide-waiter, until she shook her hands from complicity in the guilt of
cradle plundering and man stealing, then for us the foundations of an
historic character will have been laid.  We need men and women whose
hearts are the homes of a high and lofty enthusiasm, and a noble
devotion to the cause of emancipation, who are ready and willing to
lay time, talent and money on the altar of universal freedom.  We have
money among us, but how much of it is spent to bring deliverance to
our captive brethren?  Are our wealthiest men the most liberal
sustainers of the Anti-slavery enterprise?  Or does the bare fact of
their having money, really help mould public opinion and reverse its
sentiments?  We need what money cannot buy and what affluence is too
beggarly to purchase.  Earnest, self sacrificing souls that will stamp
themselves not only on the present but the future.  Let us not then
defer all our noble opportunities till we get rich.  And here I am,
not aiming to enlist a fanatical crusade against the desire for
riches, but I do protest against chaining down the soul, with its
Heaven endowed faculties and God given attributes to the one idea of
get-ting money as stepping into power or even gaining our rights in
common with others.  The respect that is only bought by gold is not
worth much.  It is no honor to shake hands politically with men who
whip women and steal babies.  If this government has no call for our
services, no aim for your children, we have the greater need of them
to build up a true manhood and womanhood for ourselves.  The important
lesson we should learn and be able to teach, is how to make every
gift, whether gold or talent, fortune or genius, subserve the cause of
crushed humanity and carry out the greatest idea of the present age,
the glorious idea of human brotherhood.