Then there ensues a savage struggle in which wits are matched against
wits and force against force. Families are divided; the community is
split into factions; civil war rages; society is torn to its
foundations. At times the struggle reaches the military phase, but for
the most part it instills itself into the lives of the people until it
becomes an accepted part of the day's work.
Then it is that the real test comes between the old world and the new.
The old world holds power--economic, social, political. It holds in
its hands income, respectability and preferment, with which it seeks
first to buy, and later to destroy all who oppose its will.
Buying is the easiest, the safest, and in the long run the cheapest
method of gaining the desired end.
Each generation contains some men and women possessed of unusual
endowments--as organizers and enterprisers, as spokesmen, as singers,
as seers and prophets. These gifted ones the old order sets out to
win--lavishing upon them gratitudes, favors, rewards; filling their
lives out of the horn of economic and social plenty; teasing their
vanities and gratifying their ambitions; soothing, cajoling,
flattering. By these means the rulers succeed in bringing under their
control the strong thinkers, the capable executives, the sensitive,
the talented--all in fact who are worth buying, and who can be bought
for income and for social preferment, even though they may have been
born into the families of the humblest and most oppressed of the
workers.
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