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Page 24
The second factor in the situation was the intellectual and spiritual
nature of the society which these inventions entered. It was, as we
have seen, essentially humanistic. It believed much in the natural
rights of man. The individual was justified, by the natural order, in
seeking his separate good. If he only sought it hard enough and well
enough the result would be for the general welfare of society. Thus at
the moment when mechanical invention offered unheard-of opportunities
for material expansion and lucrative business, the thought and feeling
of the community pretty generally sanctioned an individualistic
philosophy of life. The result was tragic if inevitable. The new
industrial order offered both the practical incentive and the
theoretical justification for institutional declension from humane
to primitive standards. It is not to be supposed that men slipped
deliberately into paganism; the human mind is not so sinister as it
is stupid nor so cruel as it is unimaginative nor so brutal as it
is complacent. For the most part we do not really understand, in
our daily lives, what we are about. Hence society degenerated, as
it always does, in the confident and stubborn belief that it was
improving the time and doing God's service. But He that sitteth in the
heavens must have laughed, He must have had us in derision!
For upon what law, natural, human, divine, has this new empire been
founded? That it has produced great humanists is gratefully
conceded; that real spiritual progress has issued from its incidental
cosmopolitanism is manifest; but which way has it fronted, what have
been its characteristic emphases and its controlling tendencies?
Let its own works testify. It has created a world of new and extreme
inequality, both in the distribution of material, of intellectual
and of spiritual goods. Here is a small group who own the land, the
houses, the factories, machinery and the tools. Here is a very large
group, without houses, without tools, without land or goods. At this
moment only 7 per cent of our 110,000,000 of American people have an
income of $3,000 or more; only 1� per cent have an income of $5,000
or more! What law produced and justifies such a society? The unwritten
law of heaven? No. The law of humanism, of Confucius and Buddha and
Epictetus and Aurelius? No. The law of naked individualism; of might;
force; cunning? Yes.
Here in our American cities are the overwealthy and the insolently
worldly people. They have their palatial town house, their broad
inland acres; some of them have their seaside homes, their fish and
game preserves as well. Here in our American cities are the alien, the
ignorant, the helpless, crowded into unclean and indecent tenements,
sometimes 1,000 human beings to the acre. What justifies a
pseudo-civilization which permits such tragic inequality of fortune?
Inequality of endowment? No. First, because there is no natural
inequality so extreme as that; secondly, because no one would dare
assert that these cleavages in the industrial state even remotely
parallel the corresponding cleavages in the distribution of ability
among mankind. What justifies it, then? The unwritten law of heaven?
No. The law of humanism? No. The law of the jungle? Yes.
Now for our second question. By what law, admitting many exceptions,
are men on the whole trying to change this situation at once indecent
and impious? This is a yet more important query. Our world has
obviously awakened to the rottenness in Denmark. But where are we
turning for our remedy? Is it to the penitence and confession, the
public-mindedness, the identification of the fate of the individual
with the fate of the whole group which is the religious impulse? Is it
to a disinterested and even-handed justice, the high legalism of the
Golden Rule, which would be the humanist's way? Or is it to the old
law of aggression and might transferring the gain thereof from the
present exploiters to the recently exploited?
It would appear to be generally true that society at this moment is
not chiefly concerned with either love or justice, renunciation
or discipline, not with the supplanting of the old order, but
with perpetuating the naturalistic principle by means of a partial
redivision of the spoils, a series of compromises, designed to make it
more tolerable for one class of its former victims. Thus in capital we
have the autocratic corporation, atoning for past outrages on humanity
by a well-advertised benevolent paternalism, calculated to make men
comfortable so that they may not struggle to be free, or by huge gifts
to education, to philanthropy, to religion. In labor we see men rising
in brute fury against both employer and society. They deny the basic
necessities of life to their fellow citizens; they bring the bludgeon
of the picket down upon the head of the scab; by means of the closed
shop they refuse the right to work to their brother craftsmen; they
level the incapable men up and the capable men down by insisting upon
uniformity of production and wage. Thus they replace the artificial
inequality of the aristocrat with the artificial equality of the
proletariat, striving to organize a new tyranny for the old. It is
significant that our society believes that this is the only way by
which it can gain its rights. That betrays our real infidelity. For
between the two, associated capital and associated labor, what is
there to choose today? By what law, depending upon what sort of power,
is each seeking its respective ends? By the unwritten law of heaven?
No. By the humane law, some objective standard of common rights and
inclusive justice? No! By the ancient law that the only effectual
appeal is to might and that opportunity therefore justifies the deed?
On the whole it is to this question that we must answer, yes!
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