MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR Ctfccr Sjenrp JDemarest WEALTH AGAINST COMMONWEALTH A STRIKE OF MILLIONAIRES AGAINST MINERS LABOUR COPARTNERSHIP A COUNTRY WITHOUT STRIKES NEWEST ENGLAND Copyright, 1903, by J. E. Purdy, Boston. Man, the Social Creator BY HENRY DEMAREST LLOYD " It is pleasant to see before otheri what is coming, but it is hard to wait until enough of the others tee it to make the coming possible." H. D. LLOYD. NEW YORK Doubleday, Page & Company 1906 Copyright, 1906, by William Bross Lloyd Published March, 1906 AU rights reserved 1 , including that of traniiaiiau into foreign languaftt, including the Scandinavian. HM TUB WORLD'S WORK PRESS, NBW YORK EDITORS' NOTE FOR ten years before his death, in 1903, Mr. Lloyd had contem' plated a book upon religion, and had gradually prepared a large amount of material toward its publication. During this same period he investigated various governmental and co-operative experiments, largely because he regarded them as the most significant and tangible evidence of a coming religion. He made a careful examination of the co-operative movement in England, which he embodied in his "Labour Copartnership"; also a detailed study of the advanced legislation of New Zealand and Australia, which he described in "A Country Without Strikes" and "Newest Eng- and"; and yet again he went to Switzerland for the material of his 'Swiss Sovereign," upon which he was working at the time of his death. These newer phases of the democratic spirit which he discovered in various quarters of the globe, whither he journeyed with unabated enthusiasm, he held precious chiefly because they confirmed and illustrated his maturing convictions, although he hoped much from their suggestiveness for our growing institutions in America. Almost simultaneously with this painstaking portrayal of these "experiments in living," his notebooks, from which much of the material contained in this volume was taken, record a sus- tained speculative philosophy, reminding one of Emerson in its power of synthesis as well as in its style of expression. Mr. Lloyd naturally turned to these notebooks for the preparation of the many addresses which he delivered during this same period the last decade of his life. Two of these, " The New Conscience- and the greater part of Chapter X., although they have already been published, are included in this book. The rest of the material familiar to Mr. Lloyd's many friends as characteristic of his strongest convictions here appears in print for the first time. The editors are conscious of many defects in argument and lucidity which Mr. Lloyd would certainly have remedied before publication, EDITORS' NOTE but it seemed wiser to confine their efforts to arrangement and selection rather than to venture upon elucidation. A certain lack of definiteness is inherent in the nature of the subject itself. It is quite impossible to be exact in the effort to trace the source and growth of religious motives in contemporaneous society. The editors believe, however, that the lack of logical sequence which the book presents is more than balanced by the accumulation of proof, the constructive insight and the knowledge of social forces which it exhibits, and that in such an undertaking vagueness of expression is preferable to dogmatism. JANE ADDAMS. ANNE WITHINGTON. August, 1905. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. THE DISCOVERY OF SOCIAL LOVE .... 3 II. SOCIAL PROGRESS ALWAYS RELIGIOUS ... 29 III. MERE CONTACT MAKING FOR SRIRITUAL UNION . 52 IV. SOCIAL LOVE CREATING NEW FORMS OF SOCIAL LIFE 75 V. THE NEW CONSCIENCE 100 VI. NEW CONSCIENCE IN INDUSTRY . . . .128 VII. NEW CONSCIENCE TRANSFORMING POLITICS KILLING THE PARTY SPIRIT 153 VIII. THE NEW CONSCIENCE MANIFESTING ITSELF IN EDUCATIONAL METHODS AND AIMS . . .178 IX. A NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY PREDICTING A NEW WEALTH 203 X. THE CHURCH OF THE DEED 232 - XL THE RELIGION OF LABOUR . . . . .250 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR CHAPTER I DISCOVERY OF SOCIAL LOVE MAN is a creator, and in his province is the creator and redeemer of himself and society. He has now reached a point in his experience in which certain methods and forces used by him with progressive success in the work of social creation have attained definite recogni- tion. Of the enduring social institutions which man has created one after the other the Family, Tribe, Friendship, the Church, the Brotherhood, the State- Love is the motive power, and Reciprocity the law. The progressive discovery of new applications of this force and its law, and the creation of new social organs for its use, is civilisation. In this work the creator, Man, has followed the evolutionary line of least resistance and greatest attraction, making one institution succeed another in the order indicated by the needs of the people. After the family, the tribe; after the tribe, the nation. After slavery, the wage system. After monarchy, the republic. A variety of circumstances reveals that the historic moment has struck for another creative act in this series of progressive harmonisations established laws as calculable in their effects and as trustworthy as any of the laws of mechanical application or chemical combination. The chief of these forces is love, a natural force which the science of society proves to develop as certainly by the contact of men with each other as heat or electricity by the friction of matter, and points to the world of business and industry as the place where 3 4 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR new multitudes have been brought into contact, and Social love has already well under way its work of making this contact lasting by converting it into association, or organised friendliness. It is making brothers out of competitors, republi- canising private wealth and power become too vast for private management, and forcing recognition as a public function, democratising common labour for common welfare, giving peace to economic anarchy, applying to these industrial multitudes the results of past social achievements in making human intercourse possible, proclaiming that in the labour world, as everywhere, love is the law. This is the Social Movement. For this work the Social Movement has inherited from the previous institutions of applied social love their accumu- lated momentum, and it will bequeath an increased energy which will give the Family, the Church, the Brotherhood and the State a new life. There has never been in all history a successful society or government, not even an institution, that sprang full-orbed out of some creative head. All has been growth, adaptation, ceaseless experiments, countless failures. As the present has never been disconnected with the past, the future could be found in the present, had we the eyes to see. " If we separate it from the past, the present is silent as to the future," says Lamennais. What we need is not to attempt to strike out a complete scheme of social reconstruction but by patient observa- tion see whether the lines along which men have been moving are not the lines along which they are still moving, and whether these are not lines of hope and progress. If we find all this to be true, the gathering of the evidence and the discovery to the people, not out of the dreams of Utopians but out of their own record, that they are DISCOVERY OF SOCIAL LOVE 5 moving forward, and how, and by what law, can nave no less effect on the science of society than the similar methods of physical investigations have had on the natural sciences. The fusion of men into families and multitudes into societies is the work of a natural force. The force is called love. Love is a word almost spoiled for use, and demanding to be redeemed. New words have to be created as well as old words to be redeemed. Twenty- three hundred years ago the Greek physicist, Empedocles, guessed that the whole universe was to be explained by the play upon its elements of two forces, love the com- bining force, and hate the separating force. Love is a universal, most matter of fact, natural force, but it has been distorted into a poetic, supernatural phantasy by the vapours of its ecstatic reporters. Love is not defined by its singers ; it has been so much written around and about, it has been made by the almost Bacchanalian hyperbolism even of religious writers to seem something far beyond common men and common use. Not to attempt a definition where these great men have feared to tread, we might frame as a working hypothesis that love is neither more nor less than one of the natural forces. Its field is the world of life, as gravitation and electricity have theirs in the world of matter. It has its good conductors in sympathetic people and free institutions. It has its cataclysmal manifestations, the outburst of affectional passion, like the discharges of a thunderstorm or the cyclonic patriotism with which the French met the Allies in 1793. It has its steady magnetic flow in the ever-rising tide of the average good will among men; it has its opposite, or negative, hate. Its laws are being discovered and codified into maxims of universal and practical use. It can be 6 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR gathered, concentrated, stored, made to do routine work. It needs tools, machinery, a place, as much as any of the other mechanical forces. The social forms embodied in good manners and the constitutions of great States are some of these tools, machinery. It exists in the natural reservoirs of life in inexhaustible quantities, and its applications are limited only by the progress man makes in providing taps and vessels. It flows between all forms of life, between man and the lower animals, between man and man, between group and group. It is animal, human, individual, social, national, international. Perhaps, like the phlogiston, or fire principle of the ancient philosophers, it is composite, a bunch of forces, not as we are presenting it, something elemental. But for our present purpose we can describe it as definitely proved by the experience of mankind to be a force, always present with life, always available for work, and with laws of its own which make it possible to use it with practical precision. Love flows from creature to creature, as electricity from iron to iron. The effects of heat, individually, in cheering our cold bodies and, collectively, in such organ- ised results as transportation and manufactures, ara not more agreeable and momentous than the heat of hope love gives on such installations of love as we see in the Church, the Republic, International Arbitration. Scientists hint at an ether which pervades all matter, and a force which is the original of all the forces we call by different names. Love appears to be the original of all social forces. It is the self-interest of the individual ; and, more, it is the self-interest of the community; and, more, it is the loves and self-interests of the individuals and communities harmonised. It is the creator and reconciler of all. DISCOVERY OF SOCIAL LOVE 7 Love is a force which does not require either momentary exaltation or habitual elevation in order to manifest itself though in these it shows itself at its best. It is a force which discloses itself whenever people come together, and it is at work every day and everywhere in society, as steadily and as usefully as any of the grosser forces which man hitches to his wagon. The whole outward face of our life together is made up of the visible apparatus through which this social steam or magnetism is conjured to do its work. The home is a love engine; the ballot box is another. The capitol is a power house. One of the ways to develop heat or electricity is by friction; a sure way to set in motion currents of love is by bringing man into contact with man. Always, says Renan, unity is achieved rudely. The Russian peasant stands in his field with tears of joyful worship on his cheeks as his " Little White Father," the Czar, wheels by. The peasant is a Russian, the Czar is a foreign Tartar, and the family ties are the sword and knout, but the peasant loves this Father. Over and above and behind the janissaries, and standing armies, and anathemas, stands love as the main current of society. The horrors of our Reigns of Terrors and Armenian massacres evidence the price men are willing to pay for more and better love. How pregnant with proof of the part of love is the historic fact that emancipa- tion has never been done by the slaves for themselves but for them by others. The amount of love lying latent in humanity, like the amount of heat in the ocean or electricity in the globe, is not to be calculated. Enough to know that it is inexhaustible, and that a survey of all human institutions, from the first emergence until now, reveals this force broadening out in its flow like the widening dawn of a 8 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR midsummer day. One does not need to be a poet or a prophet or a martyr to seize this force and use it only just a common man. All of us common people are using it, every day, as part of the commonplace routine of our lives, though many of us are as unconscious of our secret as Holier e's Jourdain that he was talking prose. This love is one of the greatest of forces so far discovered. None other has wrought changes, re- arrangements, constructions and reconstructions more palpable and visible in the physical and political life of man; and none other reaches up to his spiritual level with so rousing and quickening a reveille to resume every day the higher marches of the soul. "It is better that joy should be spread all over the day in the form of strength than that it should be con- centrated into ecstasies full of danger and followed by reactions." The truth is that joy comes to us in both ways, and probably always will do so. Thus with love. It has its ecstatic and its steady manifestations; its statics and dynamics. The function of heat is to over- come cold, to apply power ; of love, to banish hate, fear, selfishness, anger, and to unite men for good. It is a curious compensation that as the world and we lose heat, the spiritual tie of a social love, not needing the stimulating warmth of animal passion, takes its place. Love is but one of the forces. It is great, but not the greatest. There can be none which is dispensable, but none can be greatest. Creation cannot be summed up in the phrases of any one thing. In the court of consciousness all the forces are judged, that is, classified and appraised, and in the office of the will they are all used as rapidly as they are understood. Love is the heat of society. There are those that go through all the motions of love for the form's sake, but they are DISCOVERY OF SOCIAL LOVE 9 mannikins, not men. Love therefore is undefinable, incalculable, but none the less real, none the less usable. Like light, heat, music, it defies definition, but like them it serves. Whether we are to love, no matter whether we are not loved in return, is not a practical question. It is the law of love that it calls forth love in return. The law on which society is built is that love creates love. It is as safe to love as to plant seeds in the garden. No politics are true or real except the politics of love. They are based on the primal social force love which underlies all social institutions. We get the community by love; we can run it only by love. The love is not love if it is love with only the Good-will side perfect. Love must be right on all sides, it must have Good- will, and it must have science and conscience. That which seems to be love from one point of view, but produces from another point of view waste of wealth, or from another suffering, or from another social dis- order, is not true love. The constant fear of slave insurrection proved that the relations of master and slave in the South were not those of love; the terror of industrial revolution disclosed in American society by the Debs episode gave the same information about the relations of employer and employed. We have known about love a long time. Men knew about heat and electricity from the remotest antiquity. But our present civilisation may almost be said to be built on the discoveries of heat and electricity. In one century we have learned more and done more than in all the time before. Humanity has always known about love, even in its most animal days. It is already thousands of years since we have known of the supreme importance of love in personal and social life. But is it not being made clear that all this preliminary inspiration is now io MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR to be consummated by the discovery of love in some- thing of the way heat, light and electricity have been recently discovered and applied? Men are at last becoming conscious of love till now a blind force. They are seeing that the socialisations they have ac- complished in their homes, their brotherhoods, their States, have been motived by this greatest of all the forces. Love has been one of the arts ; it is now passing into the domain of conscious science. Men have advanced in the arts of social love by groping forward from one result to another, comprehending little of the cause of the effects. But now, like the ancient philosopher, they are beginning to see the cause. They are crying "Eureka, I have found it." They are discovering that this force has been the source of energy of all those social inventions they call civilisation. They are learning its laws, and, from that knowledge, are endowing them- selves with the conscious creative power with which they can guide it to new uses and into new combinations. They see that they may rest in their scientific ability to predict and compel results instead of having, as before, to wait to stumble into them. Just before us are as great inventions, discoveries, prosperity, growth, happi- ness, in the moral domain of this social force, as have lately come to us in the material domain of mechanical force. He is not the leader who tells us that love is enough, is ' all, is the law, is life, is God. He is the leader who guides us to the next application of these thousands-of- years-old truisms in the affairs of to-day. He is the wise man who can tell us what answer this law of love makes to the special problem, the social life of our time. ' He is the statesman who will contrive the institution by which the love latent in the people can be set to work DISCOVERY OF SOCIAL LOVE n in the regions of contact where now hate rules, and he the saviour who can persuade the people to enter it. We have understood for a long, long time that God was love. What we want now to know is how to get this God at work doing the chore of to-day putting an end to the war, waste, anarchy, grief, of the business world. Human and social love has always expanded to the full dimensions of the territory of contact. It as easily fills the continent of America with the love of country as the little cabin with love of home. This love of man for man is foredestined to crown and consummate the apprenticeship in the family, the guild, the city, the nation, the Church, by widening into the love of all for all men the love of Humanity. This is guaranteed to it by all the words that have become sacred in the history of association Brother, Patriot, Friend. These are but tests of the ability of love to expand like the magic tent in the "Arabian Nights" to any size necessary to contain whatever number of men there be seeking shelter. Man is not to be a loving animal; but is one. From the simple hearthstone up to the magnificent Capitol man has always organised his love. This he is about to do now in the new territories of contact opened by the industrial revolution. This special task is the Labour movement. The present hatreds, anarchies, waste of good-will and waste of wealth are but passing phenomena of the transition into a new social order. In its previous creations of organised love to rule men in the territories of contact mankind has been doing laboratory work. The family, the nation, have been experiments on a small scale with the forces which are now to be applied universally. The family, the nation, are true facts and will be eternal; but they are members 12 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR of a series which will express its highest term in a still greater fact. The mission of the individual and the race is to create. Individuality and association are means; each of equal dignity, each indispensable. Once man and men see the grandeur of the destiny before them, life will never again seem cold or narrow, dis- couraging or uninspired. This is an aim which makes life divine. Infinite are the allurements, the joys, the problems, the solutions, the prizes of life thus lived. Ours is the era of the new Newton who will work out the attraction of men for each other as the gravitating force which explains the position, motion and relations of the social atoms and the social masses. New Galileos will show that it is Humanity moves, not that which has seemed to be the centre of its revolutions. A new Jenner, a new Harvey, will show a circulation of the blood of all Humanity from a common heart. Men need no kings, no priests, no lords, no landlords. You stand at last revealed to yourselves. The works of thousands of years have at last brought you out of the childhood into the manhood of the race. The youth now knows that he is to be a man the man called Million, the Son of Man, the Man of Man and his prime still lies before him. The law to love one another is the law of service, and service calls for service. The Golden Rule cannot be applied to human life in any other way than to call upon everyone who receives the results of labour to labour in his turn. Mazzini said, "Let labour be the basis of civil society." It must also be the basis of religion. It is such ; what remains is that we so recognise it. The labourer is the creator; the labourer is the lover. He is the re-maker of man, nature and society; he is the one who comes to serve, who does the things that he would DISCOVERY OF SOCIAL LOVE 13 have done to him, who makes possible life which is love incarnated,, who is the Prince of Peace. As labour is creation, by labour men are divine and become godlike. As labour is service, by labour men do unto each other as they ought and enter heaven. Love for the people has one of its roots, though not the greatest root, in the fact that the body of the common people is the reservoir in which is gathered up the creative energy of society, and that out of it flow the streams of power and progress. All the great, beautiful and brilliant ones have their roots in that deep, rich mother soil of humanity, and draw from the common source that which makes them different for the moment from the commonalty. It is not from themselves but from all that they get their distinction. They are the efflores- cence of the common genius. All that they have they owe. In the very act of struggling to discriminate them- selves from the mass they pay their debt, when some of them think to repudiate it, for it is their function to move forward the goals which later the mass will reach. Even the luxury of the Oriental tyrant and the modern monopolist serves the cause by illustrating the opulence within the reach of co-operated service. The world has been growing an Eye which watches and notes that co-operation is the secret of opulence; and a spreading wit is apprehending that the tyrant and monopolist could be taken and the co-operation left, and that when the compulsion and selfishness were less the opulence would be more. All all the individuals in their private life, and all the groups in their social life are shutting themselves out of vast Elysian fields of felicity by denying Brother- hood, Humanity, the People, Equality, Fraternity Liberty, in the world of labour, where the multitude are i 4 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR as yet co-operating blindly. Here treasures incalculable are waiting to be divided, and unless we divide we need not take the trouble to discover, for they are treasures only if divided. The inspiring belief, the idea that shines with the light of truth; the school of thought which makes the social movement an affirmation, not a negation; a ferment, not a remnant; an evolution of social progress, not a mere constitutional opposition, is this, that the people in industry are destined to achieve social order. The world in the last two or three hundred years has had a great pull of material progress. Now is to come the compensating moral hitch forward. The picture Wordsworth saw and sung in the Highlands: "The maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom, sat blithe and happy," was a picture which had been seen and sung by the poets for thousands of years back to the Egyptian dawn, but now to be seen by poets and others no more. Our century has swallowed up the tools, habits, institutions, which had descended through hundreds of centuries almost unchanged. Now, in the century to come, it is the turn of the moral, social Watts, Arkwrights, Stephensons, Franklins, Morses, who will save this wealth by inventing the forms of political Christianity, organised love, economic patriotism, in- dustrial religion. The steam horse, on which the few Captains of Industry have ridden into unheard of power, like its predecessor, the horse on which the strong men of the Middle Ages rode over the people and into the castles of chivalry, will finally pass into the service of all fortunate if, like chivalry, it commemorates itself by adding to the language of men a word of noble sense, impelling men forever along lines of tender helpfulness. The Labour movement i the travail of the international multitudes now in industrial contact to make the contact DISCOVERY OF SOCIAL LOVE 15 a society. There have been achieved many imperfect societies. The history of the evolution of the family shows a number of variations, as polyandry, before our form was adopted. So slavery, the guilds, the wage system, have broken down. Industrial contact has still to find the forms in which it can rest. Everything is in flight, as all the thinkers from Aristotle to Emerson have told us, but withal we do reach finalities. The spirit of man, after thousands of variations during millions of years, has achieved a physical investiture which our evolutionists tell us is final as to its general outlines. Development marks off its eras by the types it produces. It does not seem rash to believe that the family of husband and wife, the state of a self-governing republic, are as surely finalities in social forms as the figure of man in physical forms. But our tumults show that the industrial form of society is manifestly yet to be created. The Labour movement is the belief that there is to be such a final form, and that people who have established so many pacifications of intercourse will find a way to perform in peace the reciprocities by which we serve each other's material needs. One assurance that they will do this is that they are now trying to do it. The aspiration for this peace, the loathing for stupidities and cruelties which convert a struggle for life into a struggle for death, is the clearest note in the literature of our times. The word that needs to be spoken now is a reassuring word of true conservatism. There is so much loose talk of Revolution and Anarchy in society, literature and politics that the people shake themselves every morning when they wake up to see if their heads will roll off. Another Reign of Terror is not before us. It is here in this state of mind. It does not take many cries of "Fire!" to start a panic 16 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR in a theatre. Some of the people are becoming so hysterical that they" hear the drop of the guillotine in every slamming door, and think every workingman is a revolutionist at heart. All this is unnecessary. Our civilisation is not a failure ; it does not have to be turned back; it needs only to be carried further along its own path. We need no revolution, only the next step in evolution and historic development. We do not need to retrace, unlearn, destroy, but to go on, do more, study the same things, but harder. The strings in our hands by which we have felt our way along so far through our labyrinth are the leading-strings of progress, and we have but to follow the same strings farther on. Our schools, our churches, our states, our corporations, our families, these great achievements of the genius of the past that has died for us are right; not wrong, only not right enough. But they are starting points, not resting places. We have but to carry along their increasing purpose. These institutions have been created; that work is done. We start from that. Our work is not to create but to continue one or two simple principles of sympathy and self-interest. Love and hate have been at work creating and recreating society as far back as we can see society. These principles we ought now to be able to look upon with as familiar and friendly eyes as upon the tides, or the winds, or fire. We may believe we know that the furthest progress of the race will still be contained within the forms of the school, the capitol, the church, the home, the club, the market enlarged, enriched, not revolutionised. The future any future within our contemplation will not uproot them. It will seek to express through them more perfectly the realities they were formed to express. It will preserve these forms, as the science of health preserves our bodies, DISCOVERY OF SOCIAL LOVE 17 by not holding the form more sacred than the purpose, and by making the body serve the soul. The old theologians spoke in every accent of suffering and joyless despair. Even a prophet of the people like Lamennais, writing as late as 1833, sends up cry upon cry to the Lord, in the name of the misery of the world. The bottomless melancholy of the old music is a strain of the same sadness of mankind struggling and not yet certain of itself. But there is a gospel of glad tidings. Evil is being overcome with good. An American can travel six thousand miles across the earth's surface and find brothers, and none but brothers and fellow citizens and fellow defenders all along the line. The Republic has not ceased to spread for twenty-five hundred years. Since it began in the hearts of those Greeks, who thought slavery must be wrong because it held one man to another by force, the abolition of slavery has gone on for nearly three thousand years. Now the lash is heard in only one or two corners. The secret of the joy of life which made existence an ecstasy for the Athenians of the days of Pericles, it is beginning to be seen, is one which all men can guess. The joy of the hundred thousand freemen of Athens was always bitter with fear, for washing at its foundation were the tears of five hundred thousand slaves. It has now been found that the slaves and the freemen can have the same social joys, and the tears and the fears cease forever. We can travel from smile to smile all the way around the globe. Music is growing gay, armour is thrown off, leprosy has disappeared from Europe. There has been a Conference of Inter- national Arbitration. The flagellants ride the bicycle and bask on the countryside. Terror after terror disappears. Anti-toxin abolishes the terror of diptheria; the Pasteur treatment that of hydrophobia, The terror 1 8 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR of being found reading the Bible, of having your child torn away from your arms to be sold into slavery a whole brood of terrors have evacuated the human mind forever. Many good souls are distressed by the question : What will keep men straight when this terror of starvation, of bankruptcy, of the poorhouse, is taken away. Every terror that has been abolished, once it is gone is seen to have become superfluous, however it may have been needed. Our school children behave better and learn more without the whip than with it. The labourer does not need the lash and slave pen that Plato thought he did. Now we know that war, slavery, tyranny, poverty, disease, are doomed. Every foot bruises their heads. We know that if we see misery it is because we are looking back. Looking forward, we see the certainties of myriads of joy. We cannot go so far back as to find a time that was not better than the times before it. We can not go forward to an ideal beyond which there will not be something better. The was is bad; the is is good; the will be is better. The best will never defeat itself by surrendering to be caught. We who have been capable of the love of brother for brother can fly the flag of a Patriotism of the great globe itself. We have learned to say American to each other we, the Ethiopian of Alabama and South Carolina ; the French of Louisiana; the Spaniard of Florida and California ; the Onondagas and the Cherokees, the Dutch, the Germans, the English, the Slavs, the Italians. This is the augury of the day when all the nations, whose members find it possible to call each other here by one name, will create some word of association which will make one Home of America and Europe, Asia and Africa. The material unification in this direction has DISCOVERY OF SOCIAL LOVE 19 gone far. The spiritual union must follow, and is on the point of striking its tents. Unless universal extinction is conceivable, we shall always have struggle, competition, war; never unity, rest, peace. Always movement forward, always one force or goal playing against another; always a strength to overcome to give us strength. But as man has become wiser and tenderer, competition has been changing before our eyes. It has become the competition of a universal trade which is taking the place, and rapidly, of the competition of war once universal. War was destructive; trade is much more constructive. A co- operative political economy will not banish competition, but will make it progressively more a competition to create livelihood, property, opportunity for all in the best ways. The strong man still seeks command, but his Power gets its mate Rule, not by the rape of the Sabines but by courtship. At this moment, and in the social world, the need is to emphasise love, the force which unites. The opposite, the force that separates, self-interest, individualism, competition, is as eternal, as necessary, as beneficent as the other, but it has had too long a day. It has swung the world of labour to one side. For our tasks and for our times, even if we, re- acting, exaggerate love, we shall be right. This pendula- tion is as much the mode of social progress as it is of the individual to walk by falling first to the right, then to the left. The age of the glowing geniuses who first saw and reported love has past. It cannot be that we shall ever again have the fire of its first teachers. The Christ to-day is not the incarnation who is repeating the Golden Rule but the incarnation of those who are living it. We have come to know that the Bible is the condensa- 20 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR tion of a vast literature, itself condensing vast volumes of human experience. Jesus we know gave a new art and a new sweetness of note to the prayers, parables and golden rules which had been waiting for centuries for the master who would mould them to their last perfection of form the Shakespeare of Ethics. He generalised countless scrolls of vellum and papyri and tradition into a few sentences to shine forever. A new modern literature of compassion, progress, emancipation, is pouring out of the hearts and minds of all Christendom, and waits for the genius who can so distill its essence, for those to follow who have to live it in the more difficult synthesis the synthesis of deeds. The deed of saying has been done, and done with a perfection none can hope to rival. What the world waits for is the deed of doing. Revolutions never cease to move forward. The mind of man once it has won its point does not dwell there. The step it is taking is always the next step. There was once a revelation to man of fire, as more lately of love. We can imagine the kindling zeal of the first bringers to man of the new truth of life by fire. We can rehearse the whole drama, the cry of anarchy raised by those who held the high places by virtue of their superior administration of the flints, the bones, the skins, the cold chops of the life without fire, which had been "good enough for our ancestors," and on which "law and order" and religion itself rested; the martyrdoms, the universal adoption at last of the rejected innovation; finally the consecration of fire, the worship of it, and the never-dying lamps hanging in the temples of the world to this day to prove that the Church was the original source of this blessing, and that the priests had from the first been its special guardians. That which was once the prerogative of DISCOVERY OF SOCIAL LOVE 21 the gods only to strike fire any common man can do now. The era when fire was so new that men knelt to it and its great solar symbol in adoration, and the poets and possessed ones rhapsodised over it is so recent in human development that it really belongs to modern times. We are just passing out of a corresponding phase in the domestication of love. Love needs now to be discussed in matter-of-fact language, as if it were mechanics, or arithmetic, or housekeeping. The im- passioned, hyperbolical, capitalised way in which love is commonly spoken of has the effect of mystifying plain people, and keeping alive the superstition that love is something sacred, not of the day, beyond man. We are but just escaped from the heroic days, when every flash of love we saw on earth we ascribed to a god. Still ringing in our ears are the intoxicated accents of the seers to whom was revealed that love was of man, and that it flowed through human nature in inexhaustible streams waiting to be tapped for every social service. Now is beginning for us the more practical age, and also the richer, which is to apply the new force more and more universally and to enjoy its fruits. The poetic and prophetic energy which flashed out the first divinations of love was more intense, no doubt, than this of ours. But our descended and correlated energy, which is putting the fire to all the uses of common life, in great departments and small, in public and private, has as high a power, even though it shines with less brilliancy, or even though it may not, thus diffused, shine at all. The greatest leaders have been the men who have preached love most persuasively to the world. That work has been done. What we need to-day is the historian of humanity, the philosopher of the true society, who will discover to men how great is the extent to which 22 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR they are living love. These will point out to men that the measure of happiness and success they have attained their civilisation has been due to their observance of love, as the law, to their organization of the spirit of association, friendliness, into institutions. Any region of human propinquity in which love has not been thus institu- tionalised, as in the region from Calcutta to London, where the Hindoos produce wealth and the English consume it, or the region between the wheat fields of Dakota and the Chicago Board of Trade, or the region between the orange growers of California and the New York offices and palaces of the Southern Pacific Railroad the region between the poor and the rich is a region as yet outside of civilisation, an exception to the law of progress, a continent we have not yet surveyed, a No Man's Land. The new prophets will make men under- stand that the discords, poverties, of our era do not call for the destruction of our institutions but for their extension to new provinces of human contact labour, business. Our concern now is not to add a new felicity, if that were possible, to the Golden Rule, which his reporters show grew even as it came over the lips of Jesus. It is not now our concern " to the souls of fire to give more fire" to keep that commandment. We are studying here, not as poets, prophets or priests. Ours now only the prosaic task of the scientific investi- gator who recognises in the fact that men say and do these things a phenomenon, and sets himself to the study of it. The genius of great institutions whole groups of institutions can be traced back through the actions of the people of one day to the words of the people of the day before, as the group we call the United States had its origin in the words of the generation of Paine, Jefferson, Rousseau, which had their roots in still older soil. The DISCOVERY OF SOCIAL LOVE 23 fact, therefore, that the mind of man has expressed itself in such utterance as this of the Golden Rule is a phenome- non as distinct and important as the falling of an apple. Here is the clue for the Newton who is searching out the laws of society. The Golden Rule is full of suggestion. The mind which uttered it in its first form, as far back as Leviticus or Confucius, and no one knows how long before, was one of those able minds which had eyes to see and saw the processes by which even in those tribal days men were being united together. The acceptance of the rule by every generation since, as the highest ideal of social conduct, justifies the statement that the social institutions by which men have provided the ways and means for the common life will be found in their last analysis to have been built by this rule, however im- perfectly they may embody it. From the study of this "law of nature" and of the natural objects, social institu- tions which illustrate it, we may deduce that it is an exact law of universal jurisdiction, and can predict that it will shape institutions in the future as it has done in the past. The scientific sociologist does not come to exhort men to love ; love can take care of itself. He comes to report to men that since their affairs have brought them into propinquity they surely will love, and to warn those standing between who think to prevent the union to get out of the way. Love, like primitive law, sanitation, architecture, all art and science, was a monopoly of the gods. The ancient mythologies correctly represent men as fighting against their deities. Men made law a science by driving their gods off the bench of the law- giver and seating themselves there. As law has done, so must religion do, cease to become the voice of a hidden God and become the voice of the people. One by one 24 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR all the sciences have been found to be of man, for man. The dove sellers and money changers have been driven out of the temple. Love, too, has been taken out of the hands of the gods, like fire, and put to the daily drudgery of house and field work for which it was meant. Man will preserve religion and patriotism, no matter how many churches and governments he has to destroy in the defence. Our special task is to iterate and reiterate to the people that Society is organised love, and the Golden Rule its law. Though this may not be the whole truth, it is the half which now needs to be swung forward in the compensatory balance. The people have been lied to. They have been degraded by the theologies and political economies which have told them that they were bad, and that, do their utmost, they could not organise their daily lives on any nobler belief. The people have never wholly believed it, they have never mixed their daily bread with the slime of total depravity or self-interest. Man's nature to good, says Mencius, is like the tendency of water to flow downward. There are none but have this tendency to good, just as all water flows downward. Death, silencing calumny, ending strife, stopping envy, giving pause for thought, reveals to us in our new ap- preciation of the virtues of the dead how much better mankind succeeds in being than the common report of the living about the living would have us believe. This lesson repeated at every death will some day convince us that we are all better than we have thought ourselves to be. But the ceaseless repetition of the lie of total depravity has depressed us bitterly and lowered the level of human life along the whole line from the family to the nation. Men are longing now to hear the glad tidings 25 of the truth that man is a loving animal. The future belongs to the leaders who will cheer men with the proof, from man's own history, that they do love. They have been cast down long enough with the exhortation that they ought to love, with the implication that they never can, because that is possible to God alone. Over and over again let us tell men that it is love by which they live to-day in every association which has made life together practical and profitable; that love is one of the universal forces, like gravitation, intelligence, electricity, heat, inexhaustible; that society is on the eve of the social inventions which will make this once wonder, even terror, of the skies the commonplace motor for the service of all. We are in travail to stretch our powers of tribal patriotism up to the possibilities of international love. The most practical of men, Turgot in France and Stein in Germany, attributed the evils of their time to selfishness. This was their way of saying what the prophets and poets have always said, that unselfishness, that is love, is the true law of social life. Its patriotisms are the best exhibits of social love to-day. One would expect the religious tie, as the broadest bond of union, to be the highest illustration of social love. Christian German fights with Christian Frenchman, or Christian Englishman with Christian Boer, and each appeals to the God of Battles as "Our God." The sense of fellowship of Baptist with Baptist or Catholic with Catholic is not as intense and real as that of Englishman with Englishman or American with American. The communicant, individually, or the Church, collectively, hears with little loss of equanimity of misadventures to fellow worshippers in other lands, as in Armenia to-day, which if done to the fellow citizen would call a nation to arms. Whether because church people have not yet 26 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR come to think of each other as members of one another in this life but only in the life to come, or for whatever reason, political love, patriotism, radiates with a higher and more practical efficiency than does religious love. And this patriotism is an artificial tie. There is not a "nation" in the world whose political boundaries are not arbitrary, almost fortuitous, and whose patriotism must not therefore be ascribed to something deeper and broader than the ethnic ties. The French are not all French, the English not all English, and as for the Americans, of what tribe or race are they? Patriotism in fact is one of the temporary and intermediate phenom- ena of social love. Bring men together within any enclosure and their hearts will at once begin to flow together up to that line. Patriotism is our present resting place on the way to the love of all men. We have got so far. The old cosmopolitanism of Lessing and Rousseau and the eighteenth-century philosophers was a castle in the air. It thought to build up the love of humanity without putting in the foundations of love of country. The new cosmopolitanism of Mazzini and Marx, which our times are evolving, rests on the nations as its corner stones, and its nations run their conscious roots back into the community, the family, the individual, as indestructible terms in the progressive series of social love the first of the series as indispensable as the last, without individualism no humanity, without humanity no individualism. A love of humanity in which all the loves of tribe, of country, even of self, are not still shining, and shining brighter and stronger than when alone, is a chain without links. Patriotism is a coalescence of little local loves. As each of them was a preparation for something larger, patriotism is the school of the greater tie that will bind nations together in the larger groups, of DISCOVERY OP SOCIAL LOVE 27 which intimations are already to be seen in the Dreibunds, Holy Alliances, Pan-American Alliances, etc. It is because they could love that men have been able to organise the home, the representative government. This love is the precursor of the larger love that is destined to show in larger associations. Your love for your brother playmate is the bud out of which shall flower the love that will embrace all your brothers of humanity. Brotherhood is not a dream of enthusiasts, but the paramount and growing fact of existing society. The ideal comes first, the details are filled later. Tens of thousands of men who cannot live at peace with their neighbours will go to war to die for the same folks called fellow countrymen. Social progress is a constant con- version of multitudes into societies. Sympathy leads to emancipation, and emancipation creates new sympathies. This has been the natural result the world over, between husband and wife, father and child, master and slave, baron and serf, ruler and citizen. To just the degree to which there has been emancipation, so that one side has been freed from using force and the other from suffering it, there has been a gain in the sweetness of intercourse. Men are different, hence need each other, and are always moving toward contact, even if force be needed to bring it about. Contact tends to love, and with love comes freedom. This is not a dream. It is the most accurate political history and political philosophy. Social love, the love that alone can solve the labour question, is not mere good-will. Love, the great actor in humanisation, has not been a mere ecstasy nor a wash of good-will. The love of children has been as practical as affectional. It has been hard at work in the schoolroom with Froebel, seeking to open every vent for the discharge of child 28 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR force and every opportunity for the exercise of faculty. Social love uses social forms to protect the child in the home, the school, the factory alas, that a child should be in a factory! The French law protects it from a disinheriting father. The American law taxes all to give it education. The English law taxes all to give it playgrounds. Social love of woman does not leave her fate in the hands of the personal affection of the "good" father or the "good" husband. It has changed the daughter and wife from properties to persons. Social love abolished the horrors of slavery, not by telling the masters to be loving owners but by ordering them not to be owners at all. The law of love is not good owners but free men, not good kings but enfranchised citizens, not good employers but self-employing workingmen. These are the terms by which social love settles the problems of slavery, monarchy and monopoly. Love and Freedom is the law. There must be good-will; as much of the passion, emotion, sentiment of love as your temperament, the fashion of the times, and the precise point reached in the cooling of the earth permits, but there must be good-will on both sides, and the good-will must be free, and it can be free ; that is, it can know its laws and how to follow them only by being organised, institutionalised. Love is the fulfilling of the law. CHAPTER II SOCIAL PROGRESS ALWAYS RELIGIOUS THE philosophers have their cosmic dates when the great events of evolution happened. At such a period, by a variation of intelligence, man came. At such another period, by the variation of conscience the sense of duty to each other the recognition of the "reciprocal necessities of behaviour," as Fiske puts it, began the clan, the first company to enlist in the march of civilisation. But all the variations, from the amoeba up, have been variations of intelligence, though we cannot place the seat of intelligence. All the variations have been variations of conscience, even before those of the eohippus, striving to live a better life and aspiring to become a horse. To do and to do better. This has been the law of creation, even of matter, before it grew what we call life. "The inner perfecting principle" of Aristotle, "the slow wishing of animals" of Lamarck, Darwin's "origin of species" through the selection by nature of variations for the better, Wallace's "spiritual nature" whether we look at the process from the outside with Empedocles and Darwin, or from the inside with Wallace, Aristotle and Lamarck. If we agree with all, as would be nearer the truth, we cannot put a finger on the point when the variations viewed in the cosmic whole were not of intelligence or conscience, of doing and doing better. Nor can we tell at what moment one stage of the dawn of intelligence or conscience passes into the rest. All life is an ethical movement. The history of 29 30 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR the universe is written in those words, to do and to do better, to be and to vary, and this cosmic intelligence and conscience were as real before we were here to report as they are now. They were just as real when they were the efforts of a nebula to revolve itself into suns and planets as now, when they are the efforts of the industrial world, which is the whole world, to reconstitute itself into groups of lovers. The variations Darwin studied in flowers and worms were the experiments of the "inventors" and "reformers" of the vegetable and zoological world. One of the last things the Church gives up is its custo- dianship of the mystery of life. It has had to let go law, and sanitary science, and architecture and arith- metic, and weather prophecies, and much besides. But it still conceives itself to be special sanctuary of the mystery of the universe, the guardian of what man does not know. One of the most important duties of the priests, like other scientists, has been to find im- posing names for our ignorances. If this be so, then the part religion has to play is a decreasing one. Science brings into camp every day a new fact captured by its pickets scouting along the line between the known and the unknown. Once the stars sang together, and went before, and stood over as part of the escort of the Church ; but now the stars are weighed, and timed, and named, and analysed, and the astronomers are their only priests. The mysteries are fading away, and if they are the capital of religion, or the Church as the habitation of religion, then the Church must be fading away. The conception of religion which makes it the experience of the supernatural in the heart and mind of the believer is but Witch of Endorism. It was not the Church which revealed the mysteries, though it claims to be their SOCIAL PROGRESS RELIGIOUS 31 special interpreter. The Inquisition tries to prevent Galileo from interpreting to man that part of the mystery about him which is in the motions of the earth and sun. When there was only one book the Bible everything men knew and all the names they gave to the things they did not know had to be written into it. Wonderful parallelisms are being shown between the order and processes of creation as chronicled in Genesis and as revealed by science. The late science and the early science are not as far apart as we thought in our first pride of induction and deduction. The race seems to have kept a record of its experience and of creation before it was itself and before it had any consciousness, and this memory, as if of fossil marks on tissues where the brain afterward was, the light of consciousness finds waiting for it. Is it a memory of the fire through which he and his nebulous world went before there was sea, or mud, or dust which makes man picture the place of torment as a lake that burneth with fire and brimstone ? Man knows himself to be a progressive animal; it is heaven for him to go forward ; hell, to go back. Fire was his starting point; the supreme infelicity would be to be put back into it, to begin the ascent again . One of the first of Man's writing lessons is to transcribe by the light of consciousness out of this mysterious library of his pre-human observations the story of the evolution of chaos into the world, and of his emergence out of the mud of the sea. Man remembers how he was before he was. The true interpreter of the mystery of nature is science, not religion the scientist, not the priest. But eternal alternation is the law of nature The same processes which are taking away from the Church its former function of "universal provider,'' and differentiating or evolving religion into the service 32 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR of the better life, the upward life, which seeks the incarna- tion of aspiration, Church as educator, almoner, justice of peace, is bringing religion and the Church of its wor- shippers back again to the function of universal provider. The new conception of religion the service of the upward life the work of Man as creator, redemption by the redeemed, makes it necessary to give a religious value and recognition as a religious fact to every good man and every good deed. Every good day is a Holy Day; every good book a Bible ; every good man a Creator and Redeemer. The stage of mental development in which we pride ourselves on discovering that the Church has been dropping one by one the multifarious functions of her Mosaic days, and that what was her work is now distributed among a thousand classes of artisans and artists is but an intermediate stage. We next find, as we are finding now, that we have specialised these functions only to get the benefit of the division of labour; that they are still religious services; that their higher scientific, or sympathetic, or utilitarian value is in the truest sense a higher ethical value. We come in our science to see that the earliest memories of man include all his latest science. So we see that the latest Church must stand in the same place as the first Church, though on a higher plane, and must include all human activities. " Let religion cease to be occasional," says Emerson. Religion now becomes the sum of all human aspirations ; worship the sum of all human services ; and all the workers are the worshippers. The Church loses one by one its functions, and ceases to exist as a separate institution with a special set of officials for the special work of incarnating religion but its place is taken by the universal communion of a humanity pressing forward to the prize of its high calling. SOCIAL PROGRESS RELIGIOUS 33 What religion has to deal with is not the mystery of the world, nor the supernatural. Its subject is love, the great force, and its actions and reactions on persons and peoples. Here the conflict between religion and science fades away, as so many other creatures of mental night have gone when light came. Religion is one of the sciences the highest science of all. Men group themselves along the lines of many different ideas. That one of these ideas which is the broadest and widest, uniting the largest number and the most different kinds, the king and the cottager, landlord and serf, rich and poor, men and women, is the religious. Religion is that group of ideas which binds men together. Religion is the theory and practice of life. It is the greatest thought and fact of the individual and society. The "tradition of humanity" is the embodiment of its established truths; and the divination of the poets, from Moses to Tennyson, are the prophecies of the truths to be established. The decalogue of its commandments began to be written, before there were eyes to read, in something broader than Mazzini's tradition of Humanity the universal experience of all living things. We may dismiss our ecclesiastical worries about the decay of religion. We need not go to church to get religion, nor even go out of doors to find the universal religion. Man has advanced in creative energy, in civilisation, just as he has thrown off the incubus of an unalterable will compelling him to its desire. The dread, inappeasable " Fate " of the Greek tragedy, the fatalism of the Orientals, are out of place in the life of modern man. They persist in our theology, though lightened and sophisticated by doctrines like "Free- Will," which are the first notes of the declaration of independence of the soul of man. Our current theology is the fatalism of the Orient and the 34 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR Fate of the Greek tragedy in modern dress. Protestant- ism releasing mankind from the absolutism of the vice- gerents of God was the beginning of the release of men from the absolutism of God. Protestantism, or freedom of conscience, was the theological term; the republic, or self-government, the political term; and wealth, or freedom of exchange, the economical term and evolution ; or self -variation the scientific term in which the great movement we call modern times has expressed itself. These times, with their glorious discoveries, immigrations, inventions, revolutions, were a great eruption of the energy which European mankind had been accumulating during the thousand years of the Middle Ages, as the boy who is to rule the city gathers his growth during his quiet years of country childhood. Such another ex- plosion of energy came before in the wonderful days of Greece and Rome. Such another period is to come again, though possibly only after another long period of rest. When it does come the partial emancipation of the will of man which has been made by the com- promise in our theology between God and predestination, and man, or Free-Will, will be completed by the abolit- ion of the mental distance now separating God and man. All the marvels, splendours, conveniences and tendernesses we call Progress are but a faint prophecy of the beauty and riches and -love with which society will burst into bloom when its creator, man, begins to live his new-found faith. All life is incarnation and there is no dead matter. But The Incarnation that has not yet been; it is only becoming. It is not given to one prophet or redeemer to be The Incarnation of the Divine. All humanity. is not yet large enough to be all of that incarnation. The intuition of truth by which the Greeks saw a god in every SOCIAL PROGRESS RELIGIOUS 35 tree, waterfall and mountain is the intuition by which, we are coming to see God in everything that lives and all things live. Our mind is swinging back, not to where the Greek mind was but to a corresponding point higher up. Mankind has always recognised the divine in itself. One of the first forms was the worship of ancestors. Another has been the making of men into gods. The divinity of man is not a new doctrine. It is not a blas- phemous doctrine. The identity of God and man is as clearly insisted upon in the Hebrew Bible as in the fables of incarnation of God in man in all ages and all religions, down to the scheme of Comte. Whatever view we may take of this, however secular, however sacred, it bears easily the interpretation that Godhood is one of the stages of Manhood. Man, John's words clearly say, is a possible God. If he loves he becomes God, for he is born of God. Jesus declares the same truth; the man who does the works of the Father becomes one with the Father. In these words of Holy Writ we see expressed a doctrine of the divinity of man in tune with the passion- ate aspirations which are now breaking out from the lips of modern men. All the men who have gone before, even the bad ones, have travailed to prepare our way and get ready the inheritances into which we have been born. From their labours comes the message: A new commandment give we unto you, that ye love one another, even as we have loved you. It is time for the people, knowing themselves, and catching the sequences of human benef- icence which make history a drama of good will, to declare to each other: Eternal love is the love we are living here and now. The spectacle of a new religion in the making we can 3 6 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR see to-day. In the co-operative literature, in the speeches of strike leaders and new party men, the lectures of scholars, the sermons of the clergy on the mount, in the Church and outside, in the trades-union and socialistic press, in the magazines, in the conversation of all sorts of men, in the successful books of the year, and in the action, social and personal, which is embodying this thought, a new theory and practice of life are being worked out before our eyes. Anyone in a few hours can gather out of current discussion and movements of reform hundreds of illustrations of each count in this enumera- tion. We live at the conflux of two eternities, Carlyle says. This is as true of the thought of life as of life itself, and mankind has always been remaking its theory and practice of life, which is its religion. But ours is perhaps the first age which had the self -consciousness to see itself doing this, and our time by all its signs manifestly approaches one of the great crises which have marked off history into eras. In the sense in which Christianity, though only a variation in an unceasing evolution, was a new religion, may that also be said to be a new religion on which man is now brooding. The new era is ushering itself in by a new religion, and that religion is not merely the Christian religion but an expansion of it. The use of the Christian religion as the standard of the new movement is not leadership but reaction, religious reaction, and a tactical mistake. It infallibly breeds controversies, heresy hunts, trouble. There will be only one form of worship in the new religion work. But one form of prayer aspirations. There will not be one dividing line neither of creed, nationality, property nor anything else. Man is solely being revealed to himself. The word the world waits for to-day will come from those who can disclose to Humanity that the SOCIAL PROGRESS RELIGIOUS 37 perfections it has been attributing to its gods are sparks struck out of the goodnesses it feels stirring within itself. Mankind struggling up out of the mud has not dared to think of itself as the nebulas in which were contained shining star stuff. But it is coming to feel that it does not need to be divine by proxy any longer. When the agitation among the peoples takes a religious colour, we may know that they are stirred to their deepest, that the universal instincts are aroused, that that which is irresistible has begun to walk abroad. Such is the stir to-day in the multitude. Even those who had no conception of any social significance in it, and have viewed the subject from the standpoint of theological evolution merely, have long been pointing out to us the signs of a new religious synthesis. There has always been religious excitement in connection with great popular movements the Hussites, the Lollards, the Puritans it is not necessary to multiply instances. But we will have to go back to the beginning of our era for anything to match the force of the deep-sea swell with which the surfaces of faith, tranquil for centuries, are now beginning to heave. It is nineteen hundred years since, for our province of the race, the conception of One Humanity and One God expressed itself in the idea of the Son of God and the Son of Man. That now is assimilated, fertilised, in the missions, emancipations and democracies of nineteen centuries, and interwoven forever in the tissues of race consciousness. Another thought stirs in the universal mind. The Son of Man, Father in Heaven, Son of God, God, Heaven, Mediator, the Holy Spirit all these are symbols by which men have been picturing themselves to themselves. Their hinder parts not yet pawed free, they have hardly known themselves, they have seen themselves only darkly, 38 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR they have hardly dared believe in themselves as far as they have known and seen. But now they begin to dare to believe. The words and deeds attributed to the gods are in truth the words and deeds of humanity. They are the words and deeds in which men not yet realising themselves have tremblingly expressed ideals they thought too great to have been their own creation. Men have been worshipping themselves, and they are beginning to see that the time has come for humanity to declare itself and express its hopes and fears in terms of humanity. God is the name man gives his own future. What men worship that they are growing toward. Men have always been ruled by elective gods. It does not derogate from the invisible to emphasise the visible, that religion has always been a revelation to man from man. The mystery of the world, its source, its destiny, no man with a sense of humour would pretend to know. But a man can see what is in the mind of men on these things, and report and criticise. The "sacred" words are all of man's make, and are subject to man's cross-examination. The men who discuss them are not making claims to omniscience. Men are at last becoming conscious that in their mythologies they have been writing their autobiographies. The "revelations" are self -revelations. It is the infinite love to be of man that is imaged by the words the Infinite Love of God.- The religious idea advances from the Fatherhood of God to the Fatherhood of Man. Not what man does exalts him, Browning tells us, but what man would do. The divinity of man struggles to express itself of man making new compositions of force and matter; changing the face of nature and society and himself of Man a Creator. SOCIAL PROGRESS RELIGIOUS 39 The mystics think that man, supplementing himself with locomotives, telescopes, microscopes and telephones, and seeking to fly, is prefiguring what he will be. Man improvises himself. As he does so, he knows that he is to be something above and beyond the best that now appears, and that man is merely one of his own by- products. This is the revelation which is now coming to humanity out of itself. One meets its private avowals everywhere, most frankly expressed, in that free talk of free men and women in which human powers play at their best and human intercourse reaches its highest the outflowing conversation, unofficial and unabashed, of congenial people seeking the truth in each other and in the world about them of the partnership of man in the creative power. Human brotherhood, like the fatherhood of Humanity, is something to be achieved. It is an order of numberless degrees into which the people enter, degree by degree, according as they acknowledge their "mutual responsi- bility" and pool all they have and all they can do into the "indissoluble copartnering " of a true society. God- hood also is still an unfulfilled hope. Our exhorters, in preaching to men that they are brothers, are telling them not what they are but what they are to be. " Life is sacred" means that life is growing sacred. Out of the pulsing, spending streams of human energy, rioting in the waste of overloaded tendencies, pouring forth men and women by uncounted millions like the spawn of the codfish to secure the perpetuation of one ideal after another, rises a progressive incarnation of life moving on to ever better uses. All life is not sacred. Only sacred life is sacred. No life is ever more sacred than when it goes to make a mouthful for some higher life. The "people" means that all who are on earth 40 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR should share their efforts and the fruits. The "natural" man Rousseau and other philosophers thought to be the perfect man, to whose sanity and goodness every question could be trusted. From the "state of nature" and "the natural man" society and humanity, they thought, had descended by a fatal evolution to its present slavery and degradation. Their "state of nature" and "natural man" are ideals. Their place is before us, not in the past. Of all the prophetic and poetic anticipa- tions of its future which the thought of man has recorded in the forms of words and the names of things, none is finer than that which gives to what is the appellation of "nature," which means "that which is to be." Freedom of belief gets a new sanction when we see how the guesses of the philosophers, Greek and mediaeval, have been the heralds of the great discoveries of science. Our sense of humour alone ought to be enough to forbid us to question the fullest liberty of everyone to believe where no one can know. But Freedom of Belief has a utilitarian basis. The history of science makes nothing so clear as that the human mind has a faculty by which it foresees what it is to see. Protoplasm, natural selec- tion, adaptation of environment and all the other leading ideas of evolution are to be found in Aristotle and Em- pedocles. Aristotle gets a glimpse of the time when the shuttle shall weave itself. The Mosaic account of creation anticipates the discovery of geology and astronomy. For every political institution on which modern freedom prides itself some anticipatory flash of intuitive genius has been put on record by poet or prophet. Such minds are our fortune tellers, and freedom of belief gives us their confidences. Natural selection plays its part among the guesses as among those other adventures of -life, putting itself forth into forms with which the natural SOCIAL PROGRESS RELIGIOUS 41 ists deal. Some guesses are the fittest and survive. Our progress for thousands of years in the future is already anticipated in our poems and prophecies, some of the greatest of them no doubt not yet recognised. "The power of love as the basis of a State has never been tried," Emerson says, writing under the influence of the amiable voluntarism that rilled so large a part of the speculation of his days and would not let the beasts be beasts of burden. But there is a point of view from which it is evident that the fundamental basis of the state always has been love, that natural social force which makes for association. This analysis cannot be disturbed by making a distinction between the society and the State. The State is one of the organs of the society, and has its foundations in the same forces of human nature. Heaven is one of the Utopias one of the most popular of all the Utopias. It has been created by those who do not dare to express their real thoughts for the illumina- tion of those who would not dare consider them. The reform which makes our wrongs here right in Heaven is the recourse of slaves afraid to do their duty on earth. Progress on earth, not perfection in Heaven, is the word of the future. Man is the god of society. He is its creator. Looking forward, he can see opening up the vista of an infinity of creative acts, combining the forces of man and nature in ways beyond number and beyond present foresight. Purposes of beneficent activity multi- ply by geometrical progression. Humanity sees its goal to be not perfection but progress ; the invitation of every to-morrow always worth accepting, because of the never-broken promise of the past to-morrow. Man is not under the law, he creates the law. True law and order means loyalty to the spirit of the law more than to 42 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR the letter of the laws. The creator will never stop creating and man is the creator. A mankind able to emerge out of the political economy of massacres and slavery, out of the politics of the despot and the oligarchy, out of the religion of the idol and the gods of hate, need not doubt its ability to rise higher. It knows it shares the divine power to create environed and environment. The creature is the creator every creature. Man is not the creator, nor the creator of aH, but he is the greatest creator we know on earth. He is the creator of himself and of society. Life, our life and all other, is a constant pilgrimage toward the goal of desire. " Man wills, accord- ing as he believes and loves," says Lamennais. There is that in nature, not man alone, which can, first, foresee and, second, make its own vision come true. We are to pray to ourselves and each other. Such prayers can be answered. The people has to create itself, as man has to create himself, and nowhere yet is there a people or a man. The whole past life of humanity, with all its faults, has been a religious service in a cathedral vaulted by all the constellations. God's eyes are men's eyes; his arms men's arms; his mind men's minds; his heart men's hearts. We are the vicegerents, the mediators, the sons of God made manifest. The work of creation is our work. The joy of the poet, the delight of the inventor, the triumph of the patriot, the calm gladness of duty done, the perpetual holiday of the genius in action and of the doer of good these are " God saw everything that He had made, and behold it was good." The religion of the future is to be the religion of the past, but continued, expanded. We are not to have a new revelation, but more of the old flows forth every day. Our farthest seer can see no truths more divine than those which have been already declared to us. SOCIAL PROGRESS RELIGIONS 43 The fundamental principles of law, government, political economy, morals, already seen by Moses, Justinian, Jesus, Adam Smith, will never be overthrown nor displaced, but, like the twinkling stars reported by observers from age to age, they will be seen more clearly. Our doers will never do anything better in kind than the patriotisms, loves, martyrdoms, of the heroes of the past, but they will do the same kind of things with the wider scope and the nicer measure our times need. The eye of primitive man saw a sky full of stars; the eye of Herschel or Mitchell could see no more than a sky full of stars, though it could see more stars. The "Redemption of the World" did not begin at the beginning of our era. It began with the beginning of the very first of the eras, and has never paused. This Redemption is a drama whose scenes include every step of evolution, every act of emancipation, every discovery of science and every deed of good-will since time was. Redemption was already old when amphibian man struggled out of the mud and began creating for himself better respiration than his fish gills. Redemption is still young now that our society feels leaping in its womb for joy the new man coming to add a new peace, a new good-will, to the long list of those which his elder brothers of history have established before him. Adam was one of the redeemers when he led mankind out of savage precariousness of dependence on the wild food of the Garden of Eden, going forth "to till the ground from whence he was taken." Noah was a redeemer when he taught men how to build boats, and Abraham when he led his people to abandon human sacrifices, and Moses when he introduced written law, and perhaps wrote it. Perseus, Theseus, Hercules, traversing Greece to slay monsters, the enemies of God and man, releasing 44 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR maidens from Minotaurs, freeing cities and peoples and draining swamps, were redeemers ; and Howard in the prisons, Darwin in the fields, Washington in the camp, Stein among the serfs, Garrison among the slaves, Shaftes- bury among the workingmen, Franklin in the thunder- storm, Wendell Phillips running for Governor of Massa- chusetts on the Labour Ticket, all are of the same noble line. All the creative minds are reforming minds. Redemption and creation are the same thing. Re- demption and progress are the same thing. There are new names but few new things. What the Church calls the Fall of Man is Degeneration in the vocabulary of Evolution. Science says Adaptation, Variation where the Church says Born Again, and the Elect of Calvin are Darwin's Fittest to Survive. The greatest evolution that is in progress is the evolution of mind. The most thrilling scene in the drama of creation is the transforma- tion of matter into life and life into God. Pushing upward and outward through all the forms of nature is life, urging on all the variations of matter from the mollusc to man in perpetual aspiration to express itself better and better. The impulse-shaping matter from within is itself limited, imprisoned by matter from without. It reaches intelligence. It passes on to conscious will. It steps up to conscience. It begins to unite with other minds. It forms the public mind, the public conscience. It looks toward the stars and plans signals for Mars. The Central mind which will direct all the universe, as the mind of man directs his body, is now being formed. God is growing. This universal consciousness we call God, which sees all, feels all, knows all, does all, is now in process of development. It is becoming ; not yet is we have not carried evolution far enough. In its first reaction against an impossible God and against SOCIAL PROGRESS RELIGIONS 45 the absurdity of explaining the imperfect and imcomplete creature and creation by a perfect and complete God, evolution would have been glad to abolish God altogether. But evolutionary thought now sees that God must be included in its scheme, but as a God that is evolving. Man is now making God. God is the sum total of our ideals. There is no King God in a true democratic Heaven. Every one of us citizens has his chance and his right to play God. A people who are monarchists in their prayers at church and democrats at the polls are riding two horses going in opposite directions with the speed of runaway comets. "What shall we do to be saved?" is the cry of our times, frightened by its Labour movements. To be saved, save! Save and you will be saved. Do every- thing. Every good deed, every good thought, is an act of redemption. None of the many harmonies already existing of the family, the State, the Church are complete, and each grows rounder and fuller and sweeter as a new harmony is added to the series, floating with its new tide the boats left stranded by the tide before. All family life in America, and in truth beyond America, grew richer both economically and affectionately when family life was made possible by emancipation to the Negroes of the South. They who are to save and to be saved are all men; all faculties are to be given their field that they may give their fruit. It is no derogation from the Fatherhood beyond, and above, that man recognises here the Fatherhood of Humanity over its sons, the children of men. In the democratic Kingdom of Heaven the children and the father are one, in the same order of succession as in real life. The fathers were once children, and the children in their turn become fathers. 46 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR There has been known to us no holiness, no omnipotence, no omniscience, no love so divine that man has not been found fit to be its spokesman, mediator and executor. He is made in the image of the highest means that he is making himself in the image of his highest aspiration. Age by age he approximates to the ideal, and the ideal moves on. Perfection, never; perfectibility, always! To be perfect is to stop ; only perfectibility makes eternity possible and worth living. There is no perfection, but the conception of perfection. Nature with no perfect individuals produces perfect effects. This she does by her prodigality. In her flower-spread meadows, her forests, her seas, her starry heavens, her multitudes, no one is right on all its sides, but every defect in a part is balanced by myriads of better parts in others. What one lacks thousands of others supply. A conception of perfect humanity or of a perfect flower is got from a cloud of witnesses not one of whom is perfect. Life is joy, and has always and everywhere been joy. The groans of men have been only aspirations for a higher joy than that present to them. The fish-man of Anaxi- mander and Darwin and Cope, having somehow got a first touch of the comfort of sunshine, did not stop winning his way until he made the sunshine instead of the sea his home. Our moments of patriotism, brother- liness, good-will, are leaps up into the happiness which flows all through social space, and in it some day we shall live, and work, and bask, and ripen. Life, looked at from the point of view of the individual, is an insoluble mystery with its heart-breaks and its back-breaks. Before the advent of modern science with its vast fund for generalities and new views, its statistics, evolutionary demonstrations, etc., mankind was com- pelled to find hope and courage in the idea of a future SOCIAL PROGRESS RELIGION 47 life. There was no other source of hope. But life, looked at from the point of view of the whole human race, and in the long periods we can now command with all the accumulations of social science, becomes an ordered movement, a creative purpose. This will give hope. This will help us understand the mystery and arm the people to create themselves. The successful man in America has a hard and almost incredible lesson to learn that in running about the continent and dis- covering, developing and appropriating all the good things, he was acting only as an agent of society and the social plan. In the struggle for existence the Hebrew ideas of the fatherhood of God, and brotherhood of Hebrews, expanded by Jesus to brotherhood of all men, survived as fittest of all ancient syntheses. That restatement of the same old principles which can bring men as fellow labourers under the same law, and that can associate them as fellow worshippers, will be the religion of the coming era. The one must precede the other, men must learn that all are fellow beings, before they can advance to the con- ception that all fellow beings must be brothers on earth as well as in Heaven, brothers in all things as well as in one thing, brothers in the rewards of labour as well as in the labour. The religion of the immediate future is to be an Industrial Religion one which will expand to the association of men in their common toils, the sacred law of brotherhood which they now obey only in the Church, and there brokenly, because, being infidel to it outside the Church, they are unfit and unable to live up to its fulness within the Church. Fallen man naturally has a perfect God, but that vision disappears with the disappearance of the vision of the perfect man. A progressive man can worship only 48 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR a progressive God and institutionalise his worship in a constantly progressive religion. As the family, the republic, are what we make them, so God and the govern- ment of the whole world will be the sum of what is done by each person, each force, each will, in its place. We are each God to the extent of our ability and within our opportunity. We must work while there is light and strength to realise God. What God will be depends on each of us. This view makes democracy more sacred than ever. When men realise that they are all responsible for what God as well as the State is to be, they will look as never before to see that each has the chance to do his best, and does it; and they will comprehend as never before the virtue of a common ideal for the inspiration of all, and will appreciate that the Bible is proved by the experience of mankind. The whole social scheme is hindered, and men, its creators and promotors of progress, handicapped, because we have converted our aspirations for perfection into the superstition that perfection has been attained in God. God is simply the name of an ideal carried to its infinite terms. It is the ideal realised the impossible done. Perfection is simply a name for the end of progress, that is of life and of happiness. Happiness and life are move- ment, achievement, progress The striving, the labour. Is progressive in itself. It is the discharge of outlet- seeking force, the realisation of function. To make possible these relations is a new hope. This is a new religion, because men find that they ate not bound together as they had been told they were. They have discovered that the common tie is not that of helpless victims of the caprices of the Greek gods nor of the blind fate of the gods of the Orientals. They are coming to see that the tie is that of co-workers. Men at last SOCIAL PROGRESS RELIGION 49 are waking up to know themselves as creators they are co-creators. It is consciousness that lifts to the level of religious thought; and it is this new consciousness which is lifting men up to this new religious height. In its essential qualities there is nothing more super- natural in the glow and uplift and insight of what we call religious experiences than there is supernatural in that almost suffocating suffusion of emotion in the breast with which we look upon the flag of our country in a foreign land, or which hurries the noble-hearted youth of a nation with joyful smiles to their death on the battle- fields of patriotism. The religious emotion, as having in its horizon all life, and as having its roots in the deepest memories and hopes our natures are capable of, may be intenser, more intimate than the patriotic or any other emotion, but that therefore it is supernatural No. We have called it supernatural only because so great a thing needed the greatest word we had. But it is, instead of supernatural, really the most natural. CHAPTER III MERE CONTACT MAKING FOR SPIRITUAL UNION MODERN growth has thrown men together in a multitude which overpasses national or even continental lines In the money world men are in contact but not in associa- tion. We have commerce, travel, but we have not society. This chaos exists in the separate provinces and in the whole area of the Labour world. Here our times have their special task indicated to them. These people, touching but not uniting, must unite and cease to touch. Men in juxtaposition must associate. A multi- tude must always become a society, a collection of friends, or separate, in anarchy or despotism decay. There must be a union of the people coextensive with their contact in modern affairs, and on a basis as broad as humanity. Just as inexorably, where men come together in industrial multitudes must there be as in men 's politi- cal multitudes, in Mazzini's words, "a mutual human responsibility," "a community of belief," "a retempering of the individual life through communion with the uni- versal life." Arthur Young, making his famous tour of France on the eve of the French Revolution, visited Alsace-Lorraine, which had been torn by Louis XIV. from its Father- land, Germany. In his classic "Travels in France," still being put to press in its second century, and known to every schoolboy in the French Republic by the passages concerning the Old Regime which the New Regime takes pains to reprint in the textbooks of the public so CONTACT MAKES SPIRITUAL UNION 51 schools, Young reports upon the people who for one hundred years had been under the French flag. It was " totally distinct and different from that of France, with manners, language, ideas, prejudices and habits all different." Young had read of the outrage in the histories of Louis XIV., he had traced out the boundaries of the stolen Province on the map. But "so much more powerful," he says, "are things than words" that not until he sees how great was the range of mountains Louis had to cross to get at his prey, and beholds how German the people were in everything, does he realise the "injustice and ambition" of what the Grand Monarch had done. In another hundred years another traveller, Miss M. Betham Edwards, visits Alsace-Lorraine, but lately snatched back from France by Germany. The people Young had found German in heart and habit she now finds all French. She sees the "sorrowful, indeed agonised, clinging of born Alsatians to the mother- country," France; "once witnessed, it can never be forgotten." Rich and poor declare to the sympathetic foreigner, "We are more French than the French." Their former nationality, that of their German grand- fathers and grandmothers, now has to be forced upon them, " by a system of repression only to be compared to the Russian rule in Poland." "Thrice unhappy Alsace," says this observer, "in the position of a richly endowed orphan alike the darling and the prey of one jealous foster parent after another the ill-fated country seems doomed to perpetual disenchantment and betrayal, her affections no sooner firmly implanted than they are torn up by the bleeding roots." Alsace, weeping in 1789 because torn from Germany by France, and weeping in 1889 because torn from France by Germany, only illustrates more dramatically than 52 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR ordinary experience the universal secret of human and social progress. The Negroes carried away from Africa with heart-breaking cries for home and made the slaves of American masters, in the third generation will not go back to their old home, not even to be rulers of an African Republic. Richard Cceur de Lion was taunted by some of his fellow crusaders with being King of only half an island, but now across the Scotch border, scene of centuries of wars between Highlands and Lowlands, comes a Gladstone to rule the United Kingdom of Great Britain, which has digested into one blood and one patriotism Celt, Saxon, Dane, Norseman, Teuton. Every page of domestic or national history has its specimen facts to illustrate the law that men always seek contact; contact tends to union and multitudes grow into societies. When contact has not produced union, it has been because it was not contact. Such is the case of Ireland and England, and of the still disparted elements of the Austrian Empire. They have not been allowed to coalesce. One reason for the easy conquest of the Gauls by Ceaser was the fact that he always found allies among them. The mother serves her child and thereby comes to love it. The foster mother loves the child she nurses, though it belongs to another woman. Instances are known to all who have had experience in such matters of the wet nurse in whose heart the strange child supplanted her own baby. We love our schoolmates, the playmates of our childhood. The young men of the neighbourhood having "gone West," the farmers' daughters of the district marry the hired men, though these are not their social equals. Propinquity makes marriages, and more. It makes the love of parent and child, of neighbour, of childhood's comrades, of villagers and of fellow country- CONTACT MAKES SPIRITUAL UNION 53 men. The modern wealth production which is bringing all men into propinquity has for its sure end making all these men lovers. We always find the seers and poets, no matter how far back we go, prophecying a universal humanity. While they were singing the little sails were putting forth to join bay to bay in what becomes international commerce. And the international com- merce, with its arbitrations, expositions and alliances, is well on the way to become the international Common- wealth they dreamed of. So far and so long as this civilisation spreads and endures it will work thither. Contact produces love; love makes more contact. Love makes men serve each other; men serving each other come to love. It was a glimpse of this, though from a low, prudential point of view, that guided Benjamin Franklin in one of his most characteristic acts of policy. When in the Pennsylvania Legislature he found that a certain member had apparently some sort of prejudice against him. He thereupon borrowed a valuable book from his "mortal antipathy," calculating, and rightly as the event proved, that, having done him a kindness, the current of feeling would be reversed in his favour. Whether love causes the contact or is caused by it we cannot tell any more than we can tell what the attraction of gravitation is. But this we know, that when men come within attracting distance of each other love appears and becomes operative. This is the fundamental fact chronicled in the word which describes human contact society, the state of being friends. Even in relations which have come to seem intolerably cruel, like those of slavery or the wage system, or the capitalist and the community, the idea of reciprocity is always of the substance of the union. No slave owner, great employer, monopoliser of commodities, millionaire, 54 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR bondholder or money lender was ever so conservative that he was not anxious to prove that it was for the good of his people, or the people that "God" or "the nature of things" or "right" had put the power into his hands. The political economists and the clergymen, the majority of whom have in all periods supported the established order, as the majority of all men do and as it is proper they should do, are at infinite pains to expound this beneficence of the power of the great. This is well. We may hear the false note of hypocrisy and flattery and stupidity and cowardice running like a sub-bass through the chorus of this appreciation. But the pretence of the King that he is the Father of his people, and of the capitalist that he exists only to econo- mise and invest the wealth of the community, is built after all on a foundation of reciprocities which are eternal if he is mortal. He may abuse a.nd usurp, but is still a functionary of the whole. It is still society, and they must keep it going, and the reciprocities will go on evolving through one incarnation after another, long after Kings and Kingships, monopolists and monopoly have sunk into their place in the fossiliferous strata of society. So paradoxical is the constitution of things, so mys- terious the unity, so obvious the duality of all, that it seems possible to state everything as the opposite of itself. Fear is one of the springs of love. By the same law by which the dog licks the hands of the vivisecting surgeon who is torturing him, the Christian adores the God that chastens, and a new tenderness brings closer mother and child after a struggle of disobedience and discipline. Out of the fear of the Saxons for the Normans, the Scots for the English, has come the love of the people of the United Kingdom for their Union Jack. Wherever CONTACT,. MAKES SPIRITUAL UNION 55 the multitude calls itself a "people" they stay together by choice, but the history of every one of these assem- blages shows that it was brought together by force. Love brings and holds men together because each has something all the others want ; the discovery that each, too, has in himself potentialities, as of hate, also may bring and hold men together. ,. For love has another name, hate "even hate is but a mask of love's." Love of justice, right, truth, is hate of lies, oppression and wrong. Love must pull down as well as build up, must come with sword as well as with peace. There has always been at least one new war for every kind of love. The greatest love that has yet spoken among men, the gospel of peace, has been the greatest war-breeder of all. Hate is the name for love's destructive moments. But the two names, as the two moods, are not of equal rank. It may be as neces- sary to destroy as to construct, to clear away the ruins as to plan the palace of the people that is to rise in their place. But it is not as noble work. It is not the creative. The statues of infamy with which the people of the Italian cities used to impale the wicked and the oppressor in the common memory are gone out of sight and out of memory. The statues of the good and beautiful remain. We live, says Wordsworth, by admiration, hope and love. The greatest of these, says Paul, is love. The faith of hate is not one by which a party of progress can be raised and kept together. Against the evils of the Old Regime the sullen hatred of the victims could enroll no valid opposition; not until those came who called in the clarion notes of the brotherhood of all men liberty, fraternity and equality were the people fused into the conquering host of freedom. Because love is the force that holds men together 56 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR crafty men have conjured with it to snare the people. Priests, Kings, Slaveholders, Capitalists, have taken its holy name, and not in vain. They have cried Peace when there was no Peace, Love when there was no Love, because they knew how potent was the mere sound of the words to charm the heart of the multitude always thirsting for love. The depredators used to rob with the tools of hate; now they rob with the tools of love. The professions of love of God so profusely made by the prelacy of the Church of self-interest are in truth denials of their real Lord the Devil. These men put on the livery of love, not to do its work but to prevent its work from being done. Wesley said he was not going to let the Devil have all the good tunes. Love is too universally human to be left any longer to be monopolised by the Church and the poets. The real love does not mean that the people are to continue at peace with the oppressor and with reconciliation submit to the wrong. Mankind has been called to do so for centuries in the name of love and religion, but it has been a false love, a false religion. Love is the greatest of revolutionists, for its sentiment and its science both teach that the relations between the oppressor and the oppressed run athwart the true line of union, and therefore cannot endure. It taught in the last century that the relation of tyrant and people, in this century that those of capitalist and producer, are not associative, are not friendly, and therefore must come to an end. The labour movement proposes peace, in seeking the conciliation of the diverse multitudes co-operating in fact though not yet in spirit in the business world. The people want peace. There is no people until there is peace. Up to the line of village or nation, within which the inhabitants live in peace, there is a people. 57 At the frontier, the border, the people end; beyond, another people, and in the sparsely settled borderland there is war. The great poet Dante, the great philosopher Kant, all great poets, all great philosophers tell us the social destiny is Peace. Peace is the goal of all human association. Peace is the equilibrium of love. It must be industrial as well as political. Our political peace exists in patches. We have the German peace, the French peace, the peace of the Saxon Heptarchy, but no peace between Germany, France, Russia, England, nothing but truces. The Pax Romana, the Pax Brittanica, but not yet the Pax Humana, of which these others are so surely the dawn. Peace, too, is progressive. To have established one kind is but the beginning of the series. National peace got, we want international; after political peace, industrial. Love teaches that whatever social contrivance seeks to take without giving, to have without sharing, to do other- wise than it would be done by, seeks profit for itself out of loss to others, violates the law, and is therefore doomed. This love knows but one kind of peace the peace of righteousness. No power in human affairs has ever been great enough to silence it ; no heredity has been long-lived enough to outlast it. Love tells us never to rest as long as one human relation remains awry with hate, fear, force, or selfishness, or ignorance. In the face of the Cassars love raised the hand which at last pushed their Empire into the dust. It uttered to slavery and to feudal Europe the prophet's cry it is now addressing to modern Business, "Love your enemies." To love is to build up, to give to, to make right, to defend, to emancipate, to enlarge, to straighten, to fraternalise, to warm, to uphold, to free from hate and fear. To love the King, dethrone him. To love the slave owner, free his slaves. To love 58 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR the priest, make him one of a universal congregation of divine communion. To love the business man, cure him of his leprosy of greed, eating into him with the terrors of panic and bankruptcy. If one fact shines more clearly than another in the science of society it is that men will always pay the highest price for sympathy. When Coriolanus solicits the people of Rome for their votes which are to make him great and rich, all that they ask in return is sympathy. "The price," says the citizen to him, "is to ask it kindly. " Tweed's robberies of millions while Boss of New York fell severest upon the poor, and are still making their lives heavier. But these are not the facts by which they remember him. He had a bluff Prince Hal air of kindliness, and once he gave the poor of New York 50,000 tons of coal when the winter frost was on them, and to this day if his name is spoken around Mulberry Bend or on Eleventh Avenue, it is to be blessed, not to be cursed. Lincoln is stealing the hearts of the people away from Washington. "Our first American," Lowell calls Lincoln. Washington loved us not only greatly but passionately. How unaffected is the tender- ness of his Inaugural and Addresses. "My beloved country," my "inviolable attachment," my "solicitude that can end only with my life," "in offering to you these counsels of an old and affectionate friend," my "fervent love." Our hearts have not done justice to that heart. At twenty-two, when defending the "cold and barren frontiers" of Virginia, he wrote that the "supplicating tears of the women and the moving petitions of the men melt me into such deadly sorrow that I solemnly declare, if I know my own mind, I could offer myself a willing sacrifice to the butchering enemy provided that would contribute to the people's ease." CONTACT MAKES SPIRITUAL UNION 59 When the Hessians after accepting the surrender of the troops at Fort Washington began massacreing their prisoners, Washington, looking over from Fort Lee across the Hudson, wept and sobbed like a child. What greater love hath any man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend? It was of the essence of Washing- ton's service to his people that he offered his life for them, day after day and year after year, as no other great American has been called upon to do. His passions were volcanic so volcanic that he had to keep them under a discipline like that of the steam in the engine. Wash- ington's love was great enough for a nation, and tender enough for Lafayette. But he was not magnetic, and his reserve was increased by the manners of his times. It is not on record that Lincoln ever showed a touch of austerity, official or personal. Always a patient tend- erness streams from him, and creates the aureole of love in which he always stands in the eyes of the people. Washington loved the people as deeply as Lincoln, but Lincoln had the greater power of personal expression. The sympathetic or magnetic man is in high disfavor among our social economists, but the people's hearts are his. Wallace marks as a decisive point in the evolution of man the moment when the power of intelligence appeared as a "variation" in one of the species of animals strug- gling for emergence. With that variation the history of the first citizen of the world, man, begins. John Fiske dates the origin of society from a second "variation" in the evolution the appearance of conscience in one of the species of men. Thenceforward only those species of men could survive which, by that variation of conscience, and by accumulated growth of it, had the help of family, tribal, national life. " Bare is the back, " says the prov- 60 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR erb, "with no brother behind it." Perhaps the sym- pathetic man, the man who loves, is the third " variation. " All the world loves a lover. Society accumulates these "variations," and amiability becomes the fashion. The men and women, the Puritanic creeds, the despotic mon- archical institutions, that are non-conductors of the sym- pathetic fluid, die off. Of two hands that bring help to the poor one will be cursed and the other beloved. A genius of love like Dickens appears and sings his Christ- mas Carol and good-will diffuses itself, making us con- scious of a fragrance in each other, and the sweet perfume rises from every child and from everyone poor, everyone weak, weary and oppressed. As the example of a Shake- speare's genius enlarges the common vocabularies for all time, a Christ, a Lincoln, opens the hearts of men to love each other as they loved us. The universal sweetening of the social tone, in family, industry, society, made known by the history of manners, is the fact in which the survival of the magnetic man is recording itself. The magnetic man came to stay. It was he who could get a wife, friends, votes, customers, help, office, fame. He can perpetuate himself, and his tribe increases. The magnetic scoundrel is, so far as he is magnetic, nearer the true type of manhood than the vinegar-faced saint. These smiles, friendly words and kindly deeds, though trifles, are the food of our highest natures. Even if insincere, their hypocrisy has the merit of paying trib- ute to the highest virtue we know, the highest due man owes to man. They are the recognition of our oneness. Why should we give the high place to him who while he grants us "justice" denies us these? Is there any greater cruelty and injustice than to treat a fellow man with look or tone of hate or the "I am holier than CONTACT MAKES SPIRITUAL UNION 61 thou" superiority? Is not that to begin to play Cain, and to dig at the Very cornerstone of the foundation of social humanity? Men want more justice, but they will not take any less friendliness. If the magnetic man is a villain; if he is one of those born to fortune because possessed of some trick of voice or glance that ambuscades the tiger's heart of seducer or traitor behind the mimicry of love, we can win his prey from him not by denouncing him with how many maidens and people has that failed but only by a better love. If he be false, let us be true, and live the love he plays. The surren- der of their hearts to him by the people is a tribute to the value they believe was in him. They thought they were giving up to the love that is the true law of life. There are no true politics, no true marriages, no true economies but those of love. When we get "municipal reform" it will be because we have achieved a municipal ex- pression of social love. When we get the Commonwealth it will be because we have stepped up into the elevation of a life of friendship made universal. All social problems are problems of union. The significance of the social settlement is in its essay to re-establish union in com- munities grown so large that all the social connections are endangered, domestic as well as civic. Neighbour- hood life, with its censorships, its appreciations, its loyalties, connects family life and the larger associations of state and nation, and without it there can be, truly, neither city nor nation. The social settlement reintro- duces neighbourhood love into city life. Reformers who feel themselves possessed of powers too great for anything less than the reconstruction of society or the revelation of a new religion belittle the social settlement. They are right that it is not "the solution." There may not be any hope of a "solution" for us, but, even so, the 62 MAN. THE SOCIAL CREATOR social settlement is likely to be remembered. While others speculated and theorised and patented compli- cated mechanisms for the perpetual motion of social harmony, this simple and loving impulse offered itself as a sacrifice to prove that all that men needed to do to Eve together was to live together, and that it was not sacrifice but delight, and honour, and safety. When the civilisation arrives in which "the people's hearts are the only title deeds," and where "a man's a man for a f that and a' that," it will be more than likely to look back upon our social settlements as its precursors. Love is more than justice, as the beautiful is greater than the good ; according to Goethe, since it includes the good and adds something to it, it is the good made perfect. Love is creating itself afresh every hour. When we denounce slavery as the sum of all villainies it is because we have advanced beyond the point at which love spared the lives of the conquered. We now wish to spare that which makes life worth living. But even within the area of slavery there were vast currents of love playing between master and slave. The good- will of the master demands that he and his slaves live kindly together. It was their consciousness of this which made the Southern people feel so outraged by the characterisation of their "institution" which was spread throughout the North. Their indignation was honest. The laws of the South for the protection of the slave showed that there was a social good-will, too, as well as a personal. That there should have been any recognition by law of the rights of slaves who were utterly at the mercy of these superiors is proof enough of the irrepressible demand of good-will for utterance. As strong forces of good-will are pulling on the capitalist to make him a "good" employer as on the Southerner to make him a CONTACT MAKES SPIRITUAL UNION 63 "good" master. Our whole body of labour laws and state regulation, the exhortations to share profits, deal kindly, release the children, and the like, have for their aim to make "good" employers. The radical reformers are impatient with these "palliatives," because into their minds has entered the conception of a still higher creation. But it will strengthen, not weaken, them to ponder these proposals until they clearly see that they, too, are steps in advance steps for the victims to whom they would offer something better than they have steps for the rulers, who offer more than they have been giving. It will strengthen not weaken the radical to grasp this. Because, if society has made an advance instead of a retreat in adopting the palliative, it is all the more certain that the next step will also be an advance. The reformers who argue that what society has done has been a reaction and "all wrong" succeed only in proving that it is moving away from them. It is more inspiring, because more true, to perceive that its movement it always forward. It is not true that self-interest is the only or the supreme motive of men in society, but there is a lie within the lie. Man has been falsely told that this self-interest could be only a self-interest of the individual. The self- interest of the whole, which is as real a fact as the self- interest of the one, and much greater, has been denied. Love is not the only force; society is not the only fact. The force of self-interest, the fact of the individual, are co-ordinate and equal with those. Love is that which makes us do for others ; self-interest is that which makes us do for ourselves. A universe of love unopposed by self-interest, of self-interest not centripetallised by love, would be a universe either without orbits or without centres. A religion that did not preach self- 64 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR interest would be only half a religion. "God is love" is but half the fact. Love and self-interest in harmony is the full fact. That is the Supreme Being. Our philosophers are partisans of self-interest. Our priests, partisans of love. The best mind flatters itself if it believes that it gets so much as a half truth of anything. Love is only half the truth of union ; the utilitarian need men have of each other must be counted. There is a third force of coalescence the sense of duty. Conscience as well as sympathy and self-interest tells men to stand by each other and to reciprocate. The science of society can be stated in terms of political economy, or of ethics, or of the love of man for man. Every fact of the past, every hope of the future, is a fact of self-interest, and conscience, and sympathy. But here some of our social philosophers have gone astray. They begin with the highly "scientific" method of "isolation," and discuss society as only an economic organism of self-interest eliminating its other forces and facts for the moment. Next, they forget that the elimination was only a logical device of setting aside part of the facts to concentrate attention on the other, and finally they end by denying altogether that these eliminated forces have any part to play in the mechanism. The practical men make the same mistake when, though professing in the language of their Friar Tucks to be the Lord's Stewards, they administer the common toil and common resources for their own selfish advantage. The capitalist who says that business is business merely puts into action the mistake of the philosopher who first isolated, then for- got, and at last denied, the existence of the sympathetic forces of political economy. Hence the origin of the unscientific heresy widespread in our "civilised" world that sympathy, mercy, justice, love, admiration, hope CONTACT MAKES SPIRITUAL UNION 65 and faith, by which says we live all the finer, higher forces of human nature have nothing to do or say in Business, Trade, Industry, Commerce, Finance. This school prides itself on being of hard-headed men, and they sneer at sentiment. Soft-hearted men are as normal as hard-headed ones. History has no lesson for us if we do not read in it the demonstration that the hard heart implies a soft head a head, that is, which does not and cannot understand its day, and cannot successfully manage its own affairs. The one thing that always breaks down is the institution of cruelty, no matter how hard its Alva's head may be. A laughable aspect of this is that those who take this view arrogate to themselves specially the title of "scientific." Theirs is the only "scientific political economy." This is the extravagance of small minds. Their master, Adam Smith, grasped both sides of social science and wrote a theory of the moral sentiment to add the philosophy of sympathy to that of self-interest in his "Wealth of Nations." A self-interest which harmonises with love, as the centrifugal with the centripetal, is a loyalty, a corner- stone, a sanity. The self-interest which declares itself first and supreme is an insanity, a usurper, a vandal. The chief significance of books like Kidd's "Social Evolution," and the immeasurably greater "Ascent of Man, " by Drummond, is that they demand the rights of the floor for the sympathies and altruisms which have for nearly a century been excluded from the debate. Altru- ism is individualism at its best. Another terror gone, another smile come. One runs little risk of being a false prophet in predicting that we are at the beginning of a renaissance of the literature of social love. Self-sacrifice has been lost to its proper use. It has acquired the sense of self-destruction, from the fate of 66 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR the pioneer discoverers of the laws of life. The men who first see that to live their best men must be free to think and utter, and who with the ardour of truth anp genius proceed to lead their fellows in this freedom have had to drink the hemlock, wear the thorns, stand in the burning fagots. But we can look through these accidents of bad temper or cruel selfishness and detect that the real event was not the stake, or the cross, or the poisoned draught, but the discovery by a genius of social invention of a new reciprocity. The fire burns out, the cross rots, but the new-found mutuality survives, and all men get freedom to worship as they will, or get the freedom of the citizen by giving it. Here is the true meaning of sacrifice, to make sacred, which is to make right, which is the law of life. Martyrdom is always the fate of the pioneer in sacrifice, whether it be the introduction of umbrellas, Christianity, railroads or emancipation. Ex- perience does teach; give it time. When mankind has long enough contemplated itself it is always compelled in the end to worship those whom it crucified for first bearing it the word of some discovery of the secrets of progress, and it will become educated to watch for these messages as we watch for the buds of spring. To the majority of his day the martyr is a fool. It is the majority that is truly the fool to discourage unto death those who have it in them to lead in a better way. Sacrifice is devotion to the good, and that, whether in individual or society, does not mean suffering but the prevention of suffering. For the individual it means the choice of a higher pleasure ; for society it means all the remunerative self-surrenders of the home, the state, civilisation. It is not a loss but a gain million-fold. Self-sacrifice is preached with so little acceptance as the law of life because so few of the preachers or the hearers really CONTACT MAKES SPIRITUAL UNION 67 know what the law means. It means not destruction but salvation. The destruction of the martyr has come, not from their self-sacrifice but from the failure of the others to adopt the law of self-sacrifice, which means safety and joy for all. Self-sacrifice is a law of universal jurisdic- tion which must be obeyed universally to produce its fruits. To give is to "sacrifice," and when all give to all where is the " sacrifice " in the popular sense? There is none, unless it is a " sacrifice " to have a home or a club where you are always welcome, or a country which will send its fleets to the ends of the earth to protect you, or will educate all your children for you, or will carry your letter five thousand miles for a copper. To consecrate oneself to the right is always to move on a little in advance. The same spirit of progress which creates an institution hastens the next instant to displace it by something better. "We must follow what is right," Aristotle teaches, "not what is established." But early man, conscious above everything of the extreme difficulty of effecting any working arrangement of men and things a difficulty we all demonstrate afresh the moment we attempt to do anything new in house, shop or state could hardly help looking upon the innovator as a de- stroyer. We of latter days did not treat Jonas Hanway and William Lloyd Garrison so well that we can affect to be greatly superior to the aboriginal conservator. But the nearer the people were to the primitive institu- tionalisations the more vivid was their sense of the difficulty of getting any institutions to work, and the more savage was their treatment of the sacrificers who proposed a change in institutions and urged them to follow not what is established but what is right. Thus self-sacrifice has been made one of the most repellent words to the multitude, because encrusted with cruel 68 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR memories. To-day public intelligence, even among the intelligent, has hardly got farther than to welcome the evolution of thought in what are crudely called the "natural" sciences. Evolution of thought in social science still brings with it martyrdom. There were some great ones in Church and state who reproduced against Darwin as far as they could the enginery of persecution which gave Galileo his welcome. But the spirit of the age had carried the common mind too far for that to succeed, and Darwin became in his lifetime one of the great names of the world. But general odium is still the lot of those who suggest that the principles and institutions of social science need to be re-stated, and re- formed to suit modern needs. In the labour movement the law of sacrifice, consecration to the right, is that the wealth all produce all must share; that since capital exists only by the labours of all, all must have a voice in its direction; that property, like government, must exist for the welfare of all; and, like government, can have no powers it does not derive from the consent of all. The suggestions of torture which make self-sacrifice and the crown of thorns synonyms in our minds are but temporary and accidental. It is self-sacrifice to give each other the habeas corpus, sea-coast defences, city police, the vote, free speech, the reciprocal good morning when we meet. It is that which makes our life together safe and beautiful. Can we ever rescue the word from the taint put upon it by the excess of primitive zeal to save the established so hardly got? What Alexandrian libraries of the miseries, errors and follies of Humanity struggling to emerge are all summed up in the signification of destruction which has overgrown the greatest word of man sacrifice to make sacred. Our mission is to redeem that word and make sacrifice a word of joy, hope, CONTACT MAKES SPIRITUAL UNION 69 gladness and worldly success, because through sacrifice only can there be success for all. The law of sacrifice, making sacred, and the law of self-sacrifice, making each other sacred, or whole, is the law of love. This law is that on which all progress of man in association or organised friendliness has been built. If it has furnished the statute for the past pacifications of human encounter, we can confidently expect that it and it alone can legislate us out of the crisis we find ourselves now in. It is only by labouring that man can fulfil his function as creator. When man works creation is under way. Labour as the exercise of faculty is the greatest happiness, and as the fabricator of nature, man and society is the highest prerogative of humanity. All faculty demands expression, and the work of creation is infinite. Labour with love is the divine in action at its highest power. This divine service is the true worship, and was pre- figured by the sacrifice by primitive man of fruits and yearling kids, the doves and the first-born of every flock. All labourers serve each other, however unwittingly, but as they rise into the consciousness of social love and learn the laws of life and the fruits of reciprocity, they desire as the greatest good that all shall share in all labour. Training in the manual arts appears in education to restore to all classes the privilege of participation in all kinds of labour and of the exercise of every faculty. The individual also seeks his full development, and this manual training is democracy creating these new rights. Any life tends to become sacred as it makes all life better, and every man is valuable according to his creative performance. He is loved according to his love, but used according to his usefulness. To develop to the fullest his faculty for the service of life, including 70 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR himself, is the highest duty and privilege of the individual, and to get for all and each the benefit of this individual development is the highest function of society. The establishment of this freedom of opportunity is called Social Equality, and its object is to encourage the growth of every variety of faculty. Social Equality exists to stimulate individual inequality. This social function requires social action. This has been made possible by the invention of the state. But the state is now passing through a crisis of its own, and is temporarily unable to expand with the needs of this social function for ex- pansion. Parliamentary Government, Talk Government, Government by party selfishness, is visibly breaking down. Government by politics, changing policies and administrators with every change in the public mood or in the schemes of clique greed, is proving self -destructive. The task of the Labour movement is forcing the reorgan- isation of the state on lines more nearly parallel with those of human and social development. We give and take ; we establish social equality and create social rights. But it would be a hard and narrow and unscientific analysis which found no other source of rights than this institution of reciprocities. We possess for a better reason than because we have given. There is something deeper in nature than to do as we would be done by. How is the right of a child to the care of its parent created? To what reciprocity is it due? Whence comes the right of the stranger to be taken on the first day of his arrival in a foreign city to the hospital to be treated at the expense of the public, for the disease or accident which has laid him low? The right of common humanity we say. But what right is that what is its basis? Here we come upon the primal fact of human nature, and not of human nature alone but of all nature. CONTACT MAKES SPIRITUAL UNION 71 The reciprocities we speak of, the Golden Rule, spring out of this primal fact. We speak of the Golden Rule as if it were itself the disclosure of some fundamental principle of divine action. It is not so; it rather describes a method of action, a rule, as we call it, which has sprung out of a fundamental principle which underlies it. The Golden Rule is a description of a social process, put into the form of an exhortation for the guidance of conduct, and generalised out of myriads of experimental observa- tions, which prove that for some reason men tend to do unto others as they would that others should do to them. But the exhortation and the rule of conduct do not as phrased disclose why men do so tend or why it is well that they should follow this rule. The deeper springs of the care of the child, of the sick stranger, of the man who fell among thieves, are the same as those for the brooding of the lark over her young, and of the union of effort in the mutualities of the postoffice or coast defence. The primal fact beneath all is love that force which is wherever life is. It is out of love the institutions of reciprocities come. It is out of love the animal rears its young ; it is out of love the deer herd and the sparrows flock together, and men gather into families, tribes and cities. It is out of love we protect the animals and form societies to protect the birds from our fashionable women. Some tenderer man than the ordinary does one thing more than other men till then had done takes notice of the griefs of the slave, or the pitfalls of ignorance, or the miseries wrought by private war. He steps forward to serve men by leading them to take the next step. He probably becomes a martyr. We have hardly yet emerged from the primitive barbarism where men cannot see that change eternal is the law of life and happiness, and so kill instead of welcomin 72 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR the heralds of change. But his love calls the love of multitudes into action in a new path. There is what we call a movement a movement for universal education, or the abolition of slavery, or prison reform and at the end a new institution, a new right, a new social reciprocity has been created. That which stirs in the heart of the mother bird in the nest is the same as that which animates the great political uprising of the people. It is love, and from the lower manifestation to the higher we see it range from the instinctive to the consciously creative. A Declaration of Independence, an Emancipation Procla- mation, is the mother brooding of the nest developed to its highest manifestation the conscious exercise of the creative love of all for all. All the politics, all the industry, all the science, all the religion of the future as of the past, have for their task to keep this force at work. Mankind has been scattered the earth over. Now conies the moral after the physical, reunion after separa- tion, humanity after man. Obeying a universal law, the physical itself begins a return curve, and men flying from each other in search of wealth are brought back by international trade to see that the wealth was in those they were seeking to escape. Our mission is to create society; and to create is to continue farther on the route already taken. The human need and heart have both always demanded, when men have been brought into contact, that they should become associates, friends to each other. It is out of this simple law that social institutions have grown. To what is so cumbrously called sociology the science of organised friendliness this law will be recognised to be what attraction of gravitation is to the science of the heavenly bodies. Already through modern industry the physical contact of all the peoples is an almost accomplished fact. The CONTACT MAKES SPIRITUAL UNION 73 steamship, international law, the bill of exchange, the globe trotter, colonisation, are legislating one universal regime. Japanese employees are to be seen in American banking houses. America has accomplished more of this physical contact within her borders than any other nation. It must either civilise these varying elements, different nationalities, different classes, and make citizens out of them ; that is, establish all in relations of equality, liberty and fraternity toward all, or must see them mutually repellent, held together only by a military despotism. The first is the method which history shows to be characteristic of the race. Society springs spontaneously out of the agglomeration of men. That they are men works with more power for union than that they are white and black works for disunion. The body politic, like the physical body, can unite its bleeding parts by the process known to the doctors as union by first intention. The first intention of men in contact is love. That is what we have seen going on in America for a hundred years. Red blood flows in some of the proudest white veins of New England. Amalgamation of the master and servile races was the great ethnical fact of slavery. White women with yellow husbands, almond- eyed, are not infrequent in cosmopolitan New York and Chicago, and they tell the reporters, for the press must know this, too, that they are happy. The new man being formed in America by the prismatic concentration of all colours is but the precursor of the unified Humanity which is going to be the product of the world-wide union now being so rapidly consummated. America is a home rehearsal of the drama which will have the whole world for its stage. The divergencies and antagonisms which make the American labour agitator sigh for the simplicity of the problems of organisation in one-blooded 74 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR Germany, or England, or France guarantee that our labour movement will issue the more gloriously. It can find no other possible bond than that of a cosmopolitan and equal humanity. To that realisation it must struggle. In every compromise short of that it must break down. In this the American labour movement will be the advance guard of the whole labour movement. For the new multitude of industry outreaches the boundary lines of any government. To unite these multitudes in a society the labour movement is now gathering its forces and brooding in what is mistakenly thought to be reaction. Unity there must be, of rich and poor, learned and unlearned, high and low, Jew, Greek and Barbarian. The present territory of actual contact has reached such dimensions through travel, international trade, industry and finance, social good-will, political democracy, that we cannot have unity on the basis of unity of race, or politics, or theology. They who are to be made one are of all varieties of race, politics and theologies. There must be some simpler, some greater, tie. Civilisation has brought about a contact which overruns all the old boundaries, of race, class, country, condition, and the old unities have become localisms. CHAPTER IV SOCIAL LOVE CREATING NEW FORMS OF SOCIAL LIFE THE labour movement is not the labourer's movement any more than the abolition of slavery was the Negro's movement. The labour movement is specially the movement of our times. The labourers alone cannot conduct it. It is the heir, in the direct line of descent, of all the great emancipations which have made civilisa- tion, and its questions can be settled only by the use of all the entailed estates of progress. Our attempt at civilisation must settle the labour movement or be settled by it. Thus evolutionary and descendant, the labour movement calls for no new laws of industry, politics, society or religion. But when, by the new application of the old laws, the labour movement has reached its goal, industry, politics, society and religion will be found to have been revolutionised. We have politics without government, business without industry, a church without religion. We are moving toward a government without politics, industry without business, religion without a church. To-day, all over its territory, the labour movement though only at its threshold appears to halt. The movement is universally described as one of reaction. One social solution after another, tentative, moderate, of the one-step-at-a-time, evolu- tionary kind has been proposed eight hours, income tax, trades-unionism, government railroads, the living wage, reform of taxation, profit sharing, abolition of child and wife labour, anti-monopoly, arbitration all 75 76 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR have been rejected. Louis XVI. feels himself so strong- seated on the throne of the Bourbons that he will not negotiate with the people. He will not even receive their committees. "Under the present system," says Carlyle, "work cannot continue." But he also says that "only with love can men endure each other," and as work must continue, men are compelled to be with each other, and thus by fate led to love, are learning from these failures that they must seek a deeper founda- tion for unity, since, being human, they must have unity. "An unspeakable religion," Carlyle said half a century ago, "is struggling to speak itself." The labour movement in its pause to-day is changing in nothing so visibly as in the rapidity with which it is taking on a religious tone. Father Ducey comes to speak words of sympathy to the Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labour in 1895, and says that he does so in obedience to the inculcations of the Labour Encyclical of the head of his Church. The Protestant pulpit in England, Germany, and, at last, in the United States, is seeing that its salvation must be for the hell of industrial hatred also in which we live. A foreign socialist is asked to speak to meetings of ministers in almost all the great cities. Fashionable clergymen subscribe to funds for socialistic propaganda, as Emerson subscribed for arms for John Brown in Kansas. The Methodist minis- ters of Chicago in their weekly meeting unanimously voted a gold watch and chain to the shepherd who kept his arms around his flock at Pullman throughout a long strike and cried out for help so that the whole country heard. The churches are opening their lecture rooms to meetings to discuss by what adjustment love shall be made the law in the business world. Labour Churches are being formed. In Africa, in Paraguay, in NEW FORMS OF SOCIAL LIFE 77 the United States, co-operative communities are being established to make brotherhood and business compatible with each other. Some of their constitutions sound like transcripts from some new word of Revelation. "The way to live," says one of these, "is to love, the way to Jove is to serve, the way to serve is to organise ourselves together as one person that we may become members of one another." This is the declaration under which the Christian Corporation of farmers, mechanics and scholars was incorporated under the laws of Nebraska, February 16, 1895, that its members might dig, sow, reap and rest as friends. Thus is the fire of love brought down from heaven to plant our potatoes and bake our daily bread. This god is to do our chores; we are hitching our wagon to a star, as Emerson told us to do. Very practical is the reason for which the labour movement is "getting religion." The sudden and vast expansion of modern business has made the co-operative commonwealth a physical fact. Now comes the next expansion that which will make the co-operative com- monwealth a moral fact. All classes and all countries are partners in production, and partners, too, in distribution, partners in the efforts and partners in the fruits. The inhabitants of the labour, the business world, find them- selves members of a larger union than that of even the greatest society, church, government. The world over they are as a matter of fact members one of another. But they have no head. Even unto the uttermost parts of the earth they are joined together in the infinite complexities of the exchange of services. But this communion has no name, no doctrine, no temple. It is an association which is not yet an association. Only a religion can furnish the simple, universal tie by which One can be made of all these. The greatest empire is 78 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR after all provincial. Even the United States of Europe and America would be too small to include all the co- workers of modern life. The greatest congregation in the world to-day is this of the workers. Men brought together always seek a bond of union for all, and this they always find in the recognition of their common humanity and of their common aspirations This is religion. When the union is of the family, the gens, the religion is patriarchal ; when it is of the tribe, the religion is tribal. As human association widens the religion, the tie that binds, widens. When humanity becomes international a voice rises, as scientific as ecstatic, and, saying "Our Father" and "Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations," utters the words which close forever the tribal eras. Mankind has reached a growth where the greatest states are but its parishes and imperial affairs are only local option and home rule. It has reached a growth with which none of the existing religions are co-extensive. That Mahommedans, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Confucians, Africans, rich and poor, learned and illiterate, are now members of one another in a practical, existent, co-operating, though still unconscious, social coalescence is a fact. The other fact, mate of this, is that this coalescence is becoming known to its members, and is demanding to be expressed to them with appro- priate words, and to be provided with appropriate social forms for further progress. These people might have waited until they had all become members of one creed before they united, but they did not wait. While the proselytisers were working in the field, each sure that the harvest was for his sectarian sickle, a different growth had ripened. Quite another and greater communion had taken place, and all the peoples had broken bread with each other. Thus have the working people of all NEW FORMS OF SOCIAL LIFE 79 countries come together in a new relation; thus have they established the new fact of a social union ; thus laid the foundation of the new religion. This new religion is so far along that it is almost ready to be named. The fact of international commerce, international law, inter- national friendliness, as to the immigrant, the traveler, is not new. But the recognition of the moral relations between men as men which underlie and make possible these relations is new. The momentary pause in the Labour, Co-operative, Socialist, New Party and similar movements, the religious colour the unrest of the people is taking on, show that mankind is groping for a new basis of union. That which makes the labour movement of America seem more difficult than that of any other country, the clash of sects, nationalities, sections, languages, creeds, all to be played against each other, is in truth the guarantee that this country will reach the highest because the broadest solution. America can solve the labour ques- tion only on the basis of simple humanity all for all. The labour movement is most promising in America, because here it has the greatest difficulties to overcome. The American labour movement is drawn on by its destiny to find no resting place until its democracy recognises the industrial liberty, fraternity, equality, of men and women of all births, native and foreign, rich and poor; of all colours, white and red, black and yellow; and of all occupations, manual and mental, skilled and unskilled. Let there be one outcast, one Samson, prisoner, holding to the pillars of our temple, and we are undone. We leave the blacks unprotected in the South only to see them brought North to take our places in the mines and mills. Its foundation is not sentiment but science. It has grasped the scientific fact, the bottom principle of 8o MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR all true science of society, that the rule of religion that men are to live for each other is as a cold political fact the rule by which, and by which only, men are holding together in family, church, club, government. One vote for each, all taxed that all may have education, free speech, peace from riot within and invasion without these are the literal, practical, every-day actual appli- cations of the law of sacrifice and the Golden Rule in human life. These are the greatest scientific facts of sociology. It is as a law of science not sentiment, as a social fact tested by the experience of ages, that they mean to write the Golden Rule of all living for all into the political economy of supply and demand, all supplying what all demand. The doctrine of the Declaration of Independence, that no government is just to which the people do not consent, has been approved by thousands of years of republican life. The labour movement holds that this law of consent is the law of all life together, and it will never rest until it has made it the law of in- dustrial life and has seen all the workingmen freed forever from all compulsion, whether of starvation or grosser forms of violence. We are forced to provide for the fraternity of all. America first of all nations will put the religion of humanity into practice in the province of labour, as it was the first to make it the state religion in the province of politics by the creation of universal suffrage. The instinct with which the people rose to preserve the unity of the nation in 1861 was more than instinct. It was an intuition of the greatest truth of social science, that for the love of man for man contact is all that is necessary. So generous is the flow that even through forced contact men can be brought to love each other. Many fear this country is entering an epoch of industrial and social disorder, in which it can NEW FORMS OF SOCIAL LIFE 81 he held together only on the level of the avarice of a few and only by the cement made of the ashes of gunpowder. This may be true. It is a hard saying, but if this is true it is true that those who do so hold the country to- gether will be doing it a greater service than those who in the name of higher ideals would pull it apart. The explorations of our moral geography are always carried on by those who can go forth alone to find new ways. This is the law of social science, and when once understood it will put an end to the cheap aspersions of the Church for always being in the rear of the reformers. The Church as an organisation cannot lead reform; no organisation can do so. Organisation and reformation are two antagonistic facts. Labour is the universal religion. It is the living of the life of creation, service, redemption. It has its moments of aspiring exaltation, its hours of prayer, revelation, consecration. But not less religious are the daily recurring hours of drudgery and routine. Love is the force, work the manifestation. It is only in the development of the common life that the individual life reaches its fuller expression. What the world does for us is of far more value to us than all we can do for ourselves. To work is to believe. The true believers are the true workers. All who have faith and work, who take part, whether grand or humble, in the task of that creation which must be renewed with every hour and every season all these make up the true communion of the righteous. He who adventures in the fields the sacrifice of his strength that men may have their grain is thereby one of the elect. The smith who beats the ploughshare into shape, the genius whose invention makes it possible to have a thousand ploughshares where there was one, the cook, the nurse, the poet all are of this communion. This is the Church where the saved are 82 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR the saviours. By their fruits ye shall know them. He that doeth the will, he shall know the doctrine. The best of orthodoxy here is whether the work be for the good of the people. The hum of industry is the hymn of praise. Every good recipe is a sermon. Every effort to do a good thing better is a prayer, and progress is the answer to the prayers. The recorded memories of their thousands of years of experience have at last fastened in man the secure confidence that these prayers will be answered. They know now that their destiny is progress. This is the Church universal, where all who are workers are worshippers, and where the redeemed are the re- deemers. There is the Temple of the Fatherhood which will give all men the chance to be brothers the father- hood of man by man. And coming up into the eyes of men through the eyes of their best and first seers is the vision that a great primal force, as real as that which pulls the planets along, is at work here. Little under- stood as yet, it has been so weaving them together in the web of world industry that men serving each other around the globe show themselves to be one with the spirit which could proclaim its divinity in no words stronger than "I come among you as one who serves." This mighty stream of flowing energy weaves together the works of men that it may weave together the workers. In this congregation is love to be made manifest. It is a waste of time to talk pessimism, degeneration, to a century which has walked with Darwin and has seen congresses of International Arbitration, and has been a participant in such a social function as the election by universal suffrage, white and black, of a four-years' king from among the people acts of civilisation never before possible. The age that has seen these things knows also that it sees in them the precedents by which it will pacify NEW FORMS OF SOCIAL LIFE 83 the tumults, civil wars and tyrannies arising between the economic strong and the economic weak, the economic cruel and the economic tender, the economic lawless and the economic law-abiding, the classes between whom rage the civil discords and violences peculiar to our times. Property is now a stumbling block to the people just as government has been. Property will not be abolished, but like government will be democratised. The philosophy of self-interest as the social solution was a good living and working synthesis in the days when civilisation was advancing its frontiers twenty miles a day across the American continent, and every man for himself was the best social mobilisation possible. But to-day it is a belated ghost that has overstayed the cock-crow. These were frontier morals. But this same, everyone for himself, becomes most immoral when the frontier is abolished and the pioneer becomes the fellow-citizen, and these frontier morals are most un- economic when labour can be divided and the product multiplied. Most uneconomic, for they make closure the rule of industry, leading not to wealth but to that awful waste of wealth which is made visible to every eye in our unemployed not hands alone, but land, machinery and, most of all, hearts. Those who still practise these frontier morals are like criminals who, according to the new science of penalogy, are simply reappearances of old types. Their acquisitiveness, once divine like Mercury's, is now out of place except in jail. Because out of place they are a danger. A sorry day it is likely to be for those who are found in the way when the new people rise to rush into each other's arms, to get together, to stay together, and to live together. The labour move- ment halts because so many of its rank and file and all its leaders do not see clearly the golden thread of love 84 MAN' THE SOCIAL CREATOR on wmch have been strung together all the past glories of human association, and which is to serve for the link of the new Association of Friends Who Labour, whose motto is All for All. For this Association machinery is ready to do what slaves did for the few thousand free- men of Athens. The leisure which gave the opportunity for the glories of Athenians, health, beauty, valour, wit, its freemen drew from the labours of their hundreds of thousands of slaves. But leisure with all its fruits is made possible to all of us by the unsuffering labours of machinery which can put fifty helpers at the side of every one of us helpers with no back to ache, no hearts to break. The demands for Eight Hours, Anti-Truck Store, Child Labour, Factory Inspection, Tax Reform laws, are but broken bits of the prism of reform. What is the whole? Ethically, that where wealth, leisure, power, freedom, beauty, joy, are produced by the labours of all, all shall have joy, beauty, freedom, power, leisure and wealth; economically, that all can have them, the means are so abundant; and politically, that all shall have a voice as well as a share. Earth is rich, man is good, love is the law. What the ants, the bees and the beavers do ought to be the minimum for man to begin with. This is the idea that shines with the light of truth, this the inspiring belief, this the school of thought which is to beat down those Castles of Despair beyond the reach of the "hammer of restrictive laws." For the new glory and wealth now forming we do not need to look into the visions of the prophets. They can be read in the hard facts of our political, economic, statistical pages, incontestable even by the least senti- mental. The lowering of the rate of interest and of the death rates, the increase in longevity and literacy, the universalisation of suffrage and the common schools, NEW FORMS OF SOCIAL LIFE 85 recalling a too civilised race through its children to the dignity of labour, the renaissance of the ideals of common- wealth in the municipalisations and nationalisations, which make light, heat, power, parks, means of travel, health, common property, the suburban expansion which is carrying back to country life the cities which had grown away from country air and country virtue, the substitution of machinery for slaves, chattel or wage, international law, the voluntary, private co-operations and co-operative communities here and in Europe, South America, Africa, heralding the universal Co- operative Commonwealth these are some of the facts. The police are so new an institution that they are called Peelers in London, after Sir Robert Peel, who passed the bill that brought them into existence. The argument that supported this protection against physical assault and street robberies is now expanding into the demand of the labour movement for a police which shall shelter the people against financial violence and wholesale larceny in the name of trade and commerce. The agitation for this new police the conservatives meet with their prescription of "Self Help." We cannot say too much for self help unless we exalt it above each-other help; the two make one truth. To use their common resources to prevent adulterations; monopolies, to give every child education, to give every member the right of employment, the right to life, is the self help and each- other help of men acting together. The social movement does not seek to cause people to be like each other. One of the great creative acts of society is its opening the path for the emergence of the individual. To stimulate each one to be his utmost, to make each as unlike all others as possible, is the work of society. The peace under which this may be done comes only by the creation of 86 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR the institutions which permit all to develop free from belligerent selfishness, and which unite in common action powers which, separated, would, like monopolies, produce social war and oppression. Self help is possible only through equality of opportunity. This is the aim of the labour movement, not equality of performance nor equality of possession. Nothing has done more for "individuality," "self help," in the political development of men than the democratic system by which all give each other an equal vote and an equal chance for the Presidency. Aristocratic, monarchic and servile castes denying individuality are broken up, and the merchant's son, Gladstone, and the tanner, Grant, rise from among the people to seats of supreme power among the world's rulers. This democratic system was resisted, and is still resisted among the politically backward peoples, like most of the nations of Continental Europe, on the ground that it is "levelling." It levels barriers to the free evolution in each citizen of his political aptitude. It puts an end to the levels on which the old political castes have kept the people. It aims to fix a level below which none of the people shall fall. They may go as high as it is in them to go. Austria, Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia may have Lincolns or Grants growing mute in the bosom of the people, but they and the people must remain unknown and unserved by each other. Under their institutions the expanding energies of the general life are shut out of the political life unless they will break into it by the overflow of revolution. Like republicanism, the labour movement's level would be one from which the people could go up to any height within their powers. It is a telltale incon- sistency that the very class which insists that Self Help, Personal Regeneration, Individualism are the only pan- NEW FORMS OF SOCIAL LIFE 87 acea we need are also the least tolerant of new reforms or new opinions. These variations in opinion and in action are pre-eminently the manifestations of the very Individualism, Self Help, they profess to worship. There never was greater individualism than Garrison's, Lincoln's, Wilberforce's ; never a clearer case of Self Help than to-day's efforts of the people to rise to a higher social and industrial life. The task set for love for to-day is as clear and concrete as that of any previous moment of social creation. It is determined by the new circumstances of our time, which are incontestably the new wealth and the new multitudes it has brought together. The history of love is the clue to follow if we would understand the earthquaking power with which men are moving toward each other to establish peace, happiness and prosperity in the now desolated fields of the new Industry. Poverty is to be abolished, and with it the crime and disease caused by poverty. Every man is to be made a master the master of all because he and all serve all. More wealth than has ever been known is to be created out of the manhood and earth now waste. The rewards of the leaders as well as the people are to be made indefinitely greater than now. The dependence of individuals or communities on the will or greed of others is to be brought to an end. Admitting all that is claimed for the Captains of Industry and for Capitalists, chosen by competition and inheritance, as functionaries of the organisation, pioneering, superintendence, conservation, of the re- sources of man and nature, still mankind has within itself the power of finding elective leaders still better. All are to be wealthy, all educated, all to have leisure and holidays, all to have a share in the right of managing the common wealth and common industry. 88 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR This does not mean that all industry is to be common and all homes and pocketbooks owned in common, any more than that it means Plato's scheme of all wives in common. But when any industry has become, in fact, a common field of effort, the people are to exercise a new right by applying to it the morals and the forms of the common welfare. This is the creed of the future, for it is positive, constructive, creative. It is the gospel of glad tidings, not of despair; of optimism, not of pessim- ism; of regeneration, not of degeneration. It does not believe that men are bad and the Republic a failure. Its outlook is that mankind has about finished its ap- prenticeship in learning the art of living together, and is about to give the art a new application in the widest field of all association industry, with a religion, a patriotism and a political economy to suit. All human association has been a success, and each experiment has done more good than harm. Each has been a stepping stone to something better. When the smoke in which Bonaparte wrapped himself has blown away we see that he destroyed the first French Republic only to make more perfect the solidification of France for the present Republic. He broke up the German unity of centuries and consolidated its hundred great and small principalities only as the unconscious agent of the social will in clearing the ground for the united Germany of our day. The factory has been an advance on the cottage, the corporation an advance on the individual, the combination of corporations an advance on the corporation, and the combination of all the citizens and all the corporations in the greatest citizen and the greatest corporation of all the whole people will be the longest step forward of all. Those who have eyes to see can behold society busily at NEW FORMS OF SOCIAL LIFE 89 work to-day on this new unification. Witness all our municipalisations, co-operative stores, communities, na- tionalisations, social settlements, the living wage, arbitra- tions, labour laws, government contracting, our Children's Aid Societies, charities, labour colonies, industrial com- binations pioneering the people, the universal preoccupa- tion of our literature, grave and gay, with these themes. The great work now to be done in the science of society is to gather into one great generalisation all the facts of the past institutionalisation of love in human affairs, and to add to this a catalogue of the budding germs the co- operations, private and public, the arbitrations, the international labour conferences, the sympathetic strikes, which prefigure as guide-post facts, like the world-wide sale of "Looking Backward" and "Merrie England," the new institutionalisations by which Humanity is now visibly at work on a new Incarnation. The Geneva arbitration between Great Britain and the United States, the plans of Karl Marx for the international organisation of the workingmen, Tennyson's vision, are all variations of one thought the union of men. The international bill of exchange was an earlier variation of the same thought of union. That was a variation of the idea of trade, and trade, we learn of all the political economists, was a variation of piracy. Sensational as the statement may sound at first, the international com- monwealth when it comes will have for its foundation the same fact as the robberies and murders in which primitive men carried on their international inter- course the fact, namely, that our fellow man has some- thing we want. On this thread of reciprocal need has been strung all social institutions. Our generation is visibly about to attempt to get for itself the heaven of a new peace peace from the slaught- 9 o MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR ers, the famines, the hatreds of industrial war; another instalment of the universal peace which Jesus and Dante and Kant and all the great friends of men have told them to make for themselves another circle of heavenly independence, joy, love and wealth. Never was there so much good-will in the world as now. We have not yet had time to apprehend the mean- ing of the emancipation of the serfs in Russia and the abol- ition of slavery in the United States. The task of twenty- five hundred years is almost completed. Mankind has not waited to finish this work before getting well under way its logical successors, the abolition of war and the abolition of poverty. They who scoff at the feasibility of these next steps are no more prophets than their prototypes who all through the twenty-five centuries now closing kept defending the institution of slavery, and denying with the infallibility of "practical men" the possibility of ending it or getting along without it. The first manumission of a slave was the beginning of the abolition of slavery. The passage of the Poor Laws of Queen Elizabeth proved that the idea of having the poor always with us was already dead. Our plans of labour colonies, of employment for the unemployed, of child rescue, contain somewhere in their manifold forms the rudiments of the institutions which will at last put poverty into the Museum of Antiquities. This evil must assuredly be near its exit when Professors of Political Economy, as Professor Marshall of Oxford, discuss its abolition in their textbooks. Poverty, monarchy, war, will not be as long in the passing as slavery was. The energy that was engaged in the contest with slavery is now released, and is mobilised with the accumu- lating forces released by all the other emancipations going on to the next work. Exactly in proportion to NEW FORMS OF SOCIAL LIFE 91 the gain the ocean telegraph, the steamer, the diffusion of English, the Postal Union, the Press, Universal Suffrage gives us in the speed of exchanging ideas and inspirations and joining forces will be our gain in the speed of reform. Evolution teaches that its later stages move more rapidly than the earlier. It begins to be seen that the social problem is too big to be debated or settled in terms of any class move- ment. If anyone supposed that the question of freedom for the Negroes was the Negroes' question, he was un- deceived by the days from 1861 to 1865, when America, like Egypt, had hardly a house where there was not one dead. No one now so dull as not to see that the power of wealth over production, prices, markets, livelihoods, courts, legislatures, government, church, education, so- ciety, the press, is not the workingmen's question. They protested first, because pinched first and worst, as economically the weakest. Now we are all beginning to feel the peine forte et dure with which the plutocracy presses its victims to death in imitation of mediaeval torture. The programme to work by must be for all. The world, too, has outgrown the dialect and temper of hatred. The style of imprecatory psalms and the denunciating prophets is out of date. No one knows these times if he is not conscious of this change. The softening of temper which has put an end to the whipping of wives, and is banishing the whipping of children at home or school, and instinctively ranges any company, public or private, against the man who shows anger, is a sign of a universal access of amiability. Social reformers must defer to the feeling that men are largely as they have been environed before and after birth, and that in substance all are about of the same stuff. The high tone is become unfashionable. People feel that even 92 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR the oppressor is a victim of mistakes for which all are responsible, and that the task is not to judge but to rectify. The love method is more winning, more just and more scientific than that of hatred. We have lost our powers of indignation, Ruskin says with regret. But that need not be regretted, if one cause of it be that we have passed through that stage that necessary stage and are now at the more important point of moving to the remedy. This demands other forms of energy than imprecation. The old division of men into the eternally elect and the eternally damned gave a bad precedent for dealing with the socially evil. This theology lent itself easily to the social science by classifying the oppressors as the naturally bad and the oppressed as the naturally good, and the logical solution was get rid of the bad. Science and good-will have banished this theory both in its theological and sociological forms. To put the blame of social ills on the plutocracy alone is ridiculous The abjectness of the people is as much the cause of despotism as the tyranny of the would-be tyrant. The knights of the ethical tournament are not Sir Right and Sir Wrong, but Sir Was Right and Sir Is Right. All the great controversies of history have been between that which is "established and that which is right." The real character of the struggle never changes, but it assumes new shapes as it passes into new regions and deals with new materials. Every revolution adapts its familiar quotations from the revolution before and hands them along to be adapted for the next. There is but one phase for all progress, though infinite are the variations. The Abolitionists got their fine words from Rousseau and Jefferson, and our advocates of a new Brotherhood do but revamp the same words of humanity NEW FORMS OF SOCIAL LIFE 93 In which all emancipations have spoken, back to Christ and before. A new inequality or, better, the perception of a new field for equality, calls us to review all our past achievements of equality, and to learn to apply the old principles, eternal, to the new circumstances. All the old masters, Plato, Aristotle, the reformers, Luther, Calvin, More, the American Fathers, are made up to date by this new crisis. To read them into authority in our present problem we have but to substitute new names of things for the old ones competition for anarchy; poverty for the extermination of the conquered, the vae metis; strikes for internecine war; capitalist for priest or tyrant; workingmen and farmers for slaves; socialists, anarchists, for heretics; business for conquest; and so on. "The intercourse is old but the scale is new." The new scale of modern wealth-making also brings all the old passions up to date. Envy, hate, greed, anger, fear, cruelty, tyranny all the old mean, selfish and murderous passions are waked again. They had been put to sleep more or less soundly within the charmed circles of the old pacifications of brotherhood, husband- hood, fatherhood, clanship, church communion, free masonry, the trades-union, citizenship. But the new power, the new temptation, the new immunity of the new world of wealth where men and women and children have been thrown together pell mell, have waked the sleeping furies. In this new crowd the restraints of the home spirit and the community spirit are thrown off. All are strangers. Everyone is to take what he can get. The motto is Laissez Faire, Laissez Aller. Do what you will. Go where you will. It is a whole world plunged into opportunities of secret sin, two hemispheres full of countrymen, alone, rich, in Paris, or European "ex- plorers" with Maxims and whiskey alone with lust of 94 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR power and pleasure amid the unsophisticated black men and women of some African valley. What the devil whispers to these would-be Fausts on the Avenue de 1'Opera or in Matatebeleland, our political economists preach in open print to the breathless gold seekers in our new wildernesses of Business. Do what you will. Go where you will. We thought we were a civilisation, but here are the seven devils at work again seeking to drive us into the sea. And our new indulgence in the old vices is unsettling the virtues we felt sure of. We see the evil spirits creeping back, and ravelling out the ties of family, church, state, society. Among the working- men father, mother, children, must be competitors; the father becomes a tramp, the home falls apart. And among the rich, how money alienates brother and sister, divorces husband and wife. The people are surfeited with criticisms of evils ; they are surfeited with Utopias. The only questions they care for are : What can we do? How can we change to a better system? How can we create the instruments of the new order? We have the instruments at hand if we will but use them. We no more need a destruction of existing institutions and the creation of new ones than we need a new body of social principles. Our religion of Fatherhood and Brotherhood, our political economy of the exchange of equal service and of supply for demand, our law of equal rights and of the common welfare, our property of stewardship these we have had for thousands of years. All our social institutions are attempts to incarnate these principles. Very imperfect the incarna- tions have been. They have had to be subject to the perpetual necessity of compromising with the greed and strength of the strong, the ignorance and weakness of the weak. But they have been progressive. So far human NEW FORMS OF SOCIAL LIFE 95 history has been a history of progress. We know that other issues are possible in evolution, for we see atavism, degeneracy and atrophy all through nature. But there is reason to believe evolutionary reason that progress is still our destiny for an indefinite future in our present sphere. We are therefore able to hope and believe that we shall continue our progressive application of these fundamental principles, and that our future institutions as well as our future principles will be but developments of those we have and have had. The King and the President are both representative institutions, but with a variation in the method of selecting the representative. If we lived up to but one of these principles, if we made what it ought to be but one of our institutions the school, or the municipality, or the court of justice we would solve the whole problem. All the rest would have to change with the perfected one. The greatest social instrument at hand to use in developing society is the government. Even as it exists now it has an abundance of power for the most advanced social reconstruction. The postoffice, for instance, is already used, in one country or another, as an express carrier, a savings bank, an insurance agency and a telegraph company. It would need but a slight expansion a change in size, with no change in fundamental parts to become also a carrier in freight and passengers. The court which can operate bankrupt railroads through receivers could also so operate the mines, or the refineries or the factories, or the mills, of the monopolies which the courts have found to be forfeit under the anti-monopoly laws. The evolution of the municipality shows it capable of being a universal provider. There should be somewhere a model town which did everything that any other town did, combining in itself all their efficiencies as a composite 96 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR photograph unites all the features of the prevalent face in a class or a community. Liberty, fraternity, equality, are words of an ideal which we are always creating but which is never created. They are cries with which the people have been united in their resistance to inequalities, unbrotherliness, tyran- nies become intolerable. In these names the Revolution of the Eighteenth Century the name mistakenly nar- rowed down to the French Revolution was fought, but it did not attempt to install Liberty, Fraternity, Equality in any department of life, not even the political, though it was pre-eminently a political movement. It abolished many forms of the opposites; it took several great steps toward its three ideals. That was all. It lifted France, Germany, America to a higher level of social efforts, but it left in all of them Tyranny, Inequality, Unbrotherliness. In all of them it is no doubt strictly accurate to say that there is to-day more general, more conscious and more definite discontent than there was before this revolution. Phenomena as full of warning to the established order as the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the Socialist- Communist movement in France, the Populist, Socialist, Granger and Labour agitations in the United States were not in sight in the eighteenth century. There were in view grosser wrongs, but the characteristic of our day is the greater sensitiveness of the people. This answers to the greater refinement of the methods of taking life and property without visible bloodshed. In fact we could none of us, not even the noblest or the shrewdest, tell to what forms and felicities Liberty, Equality, Fraternity could develop ultimately. But we can tell very practically and accurately that the sense of right and sympathy of which they are the ideal expressions is shocked beyond endurance by the division of the prod NEW FORMS OF SOCIAL LIFE 97 ucts of the social labour into West Ends and East Ends, Fifth Avenues and Five Points, as preceding genera- tions were shocked into action by the Chivalry of Slavery and its Uncle Toms, and the Marquis and the widow gathering nettles in the rain for his rent. As we abolish in succession the feudalisms, slaveries, properties, which stand next before us in our path, we become conscious, too, of a broader, sweeter, stronger air of human com- panionship, of a better society. The word Liberty is of double entendre. The popular use of Liberty is to do what we will. This false significa- tion has grown up around the word because its champions have had to drag it into rebellions, protestantisms, revo- lutions. To have Liberty is to obey the laws of life, from animal to social. We are free to walk the earth because never for one instant does the law of gravitation let go its hold upon us. Liberty has acquired its colour of self-assertion, of resistance, from the temporary inter- ference of tyrants with the pursuit by the people of the true laws of social life. In itself the essential idea of liberty is positive, not negative. It does not mean resistance; it means obedience. If we could take the accidental and factitious meanings from these three words self-destruction from sacrifice, dead level from equality, and resistance from liberty or if new words could be found for their finer significations, social reform would go forward with a great bound. The industrial world with its disputants gathering to themselves guns that fire ten shots a second to arbitrate the dispute as to how the common product shall be divided would be a thing of the past. The labour movement is the belief that this strife like all precedent strifes can be pacified, and pacified only by the same laws of love and freedom which have given us all the forms of the life together. 98 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR Equality is another beclouded word. Poverty of language has led us to use it for two utterly distinct ideas, sameness and reciprocity. Two coins are equal when they are of the same value. Two eyes are equal when they are of the same power. But citizens are equal when each gives all the others the same rights he asks for himself. Practical men and philosophers alike deride equality. There is no such thing, they say, and life would be intolerable if there were. The equality they mean is not the equality we mean. Equality is not identity. That all men cannot speak with equal effect is no reason why all should not have the equal right to speak as well as they can. That all men cannot be equally fit for President is no reason why all should not have an equal chance to fit themselves. That all men are not equal in their power to get and hold wealth is no reason why all should not have an equal right to get and hold what they can. Equality of abilities, of possessions, there will never be, but equality of right to possess, to use abilities, there must be. There are vast properties in which the people are equal possessors the postomces, streets, parks, and the like. Enlarge these communisms to the widest extent, inequality of possession and of ability would still remain, and the inequality of possession would certainly be greater than it is to-day, and the less gross and material the possessions the greater would be the inequalities. Every new social co-operation is vast economy of energy, giving to every individual a saving of force which he can put to new uses for himself. Our language is a poor shift to express our ideas, and nowhere is its poverty plainer and more hurtful than in this use of Equality in the two totally different meanings of reciprocity and sameness. Even learned professors and distinguished literary men have made themselves a stumbling block by this confusion of terms. NEW FORMS OF SOCIAL LIFE 99 Men need luxury, splendour, beauty and magnificence- palaces, parks, galleries, colour, music, refulgence. They will have them; kings and aristocracies are not too high a price to pay for them in their primitive days, but civilised man must get with them the greatest luxury of all democratic self respect. Not to destroy luxury, but to democratise it is the true policy. There ought to be pageantry, splendour, magnificence, luxury, beauty, and a fill of it in every life. These are possible to every one to walk in palaces, parks, to rest on velvet, to feast the eyes with the colours of gems and art, to taste the sweet, to caress the brain with harmony ; to travel far, and mix with our fellow- men but only by co-operations by democracy. And while men were too much of the clod to be democrats and get these things for themselves through the part- nership of citizens ; mankind has had its finer suscepti- bilities saved for it by the grandeur of its kings, popes, and millionaires, selfish as they may have been. Better that escape unconsciously from the killing drudgery and commonplace of life than no escape at all. The labour movement is a hope, a prayer, an inspira- tion, a faith that the multitudes of men thrown together by modern industry will be able to group and to organise themselves on the lines of mutual respect, equal justice, reciprocal profit and social love. The first material need, the cornerstone of welfare, is the same among workers as among citizens, or tribesmen, or families organised love, as emotional as the temperament chooses, provided it be at the same time institutional, that is, in working shape. This is not the "philosophy of comfort." It teaches that there is one thing more important than to have, that is, to share; and it reads in history that if you begin by not sharing you will end by not having. CHAPTER V THE NEW CONSCIENCE FOUR hundred years before the workingman of Nazareth in behalf of the toilers of the world came to deliver his message of love and a sword, a new conscience stirred some obscure heart in Greece to speak for liberty for the labourer. Plato was dreaming of the elevation of man through impossible Republics and preposterous stirpiculture, and had no ear for this new voice. But Aristotle, man of science, knowing that the humblest of opinions may come to be the biggest of facts, puts it on record, though evidently merely as an eccentricity of contemporary thought. "There are some," he says, "who think that it is only the fashion of despotic government which makes one man a slave and another free, and that the tie must be unjust because it is founded in force. " His was one of the greatest of minds, but it never divined that in this whisper of the new conscience of a few nameless Greeks lay the full diapason of a cry before which would fall many a wall of citadeled oppression, built on sand because founded on force, unjust and therefore unsound. That still, small voice rolls around the world, shaking the oppressor out of his seat, whether king, priest, man-stealer or monopolist. To the accompaniment of the guns of Fort Sumter and the Wilderness it sang the chorus of union and liberty, which Lincoln in 1861 heard sounding forth from the mystic chords of the American heart. Those unknown Greeks were the first Abolitionists. Lincoln signed only a chapter THE NEW CONSCIENCE 101 of the emancipation which they proclaimed, and that not the last chapter. Ceaseless growth means ceaseless emancipation. The symphony Lincoln heard plays on. One by one the cries of imprisoned and imprisoner blend into the strains of a widening freedom. It is the fashion of scholars to speak of the Greek intellect, the Roman will, the Hebrew conscience. The Hebrew had a conscience, not because he was a Hebrew but because he was a man. The same birthright belongs to the Greek and to all of us. It was the voice of con- science, " that prophetic sign of my divine monitor," which always spoke to Socrates when what he was about to do would be wrong, and by the same revelation God wrote the Ten Commandments on the hearts of men before they were graven on the tables of stone. Fichte says that the greater the wealth and rank the greater the vice. Seldom does the new conscience, when it seeks a teacher to declare to men what is is wrong, find him in the dignitaries of the Church, the State, the culture that is. The higher the rank the closer the tie that binds those to what is but ought not to be. It is the tramp, Jesus, who has not where to lay his head, the peasant Luther, the poor mechanic, William Lloyd Garrison, who are free to listen to new truth, and brave and free to speak the words that lead men out of old Church, and old State, and old industry. The new con- science which warns civilisations to do justice to the workingmen has always encountered the opposition of the mighty ones of earth. If this spirit of love and liberty stirred in the hearts of any Jews of the old dispensation, their priests, unlike the scientific observer of Athens, let the fact find no record in their scriptures. Aristotle declared that no man could be a workingman and lead a life of virtue. In ancient times, learned, pious, patriotic, io2 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR noble, all agreed that the victor who had the right to kill had the right to command, and that he who was given his life had no right to demand his liberty. Lawyers invented the doctrine that the slave could not buy his freedom, for the money he proffered for it must be his master's. The early Christian Church did not so much disapprove of slavery as of the enslavement of its own members. In the United States religious synods voted that the slavery agitation should be suppressed by laying on the table, unread, all petitions, resolutions and other papers about it, and Evangelical Alliances forbade young people to dance, but refused to declare it sinful for a bishop to hold slaves. Boston hissed the fanatic who declared that the theatre would receive the gospel of anti-slavery truth earlier than the churches. But in two years slaves on the stage in "Uncle Tom" shot their hunters amid loud applause, while the pulpit remained silent or hostile. As for property, its broadcloth mobs attacked meetings of women for proclaiming the new freedom, dragged Garrison through the streets of Boston to hang him for maintaining the right of the black workingman to fuller growth, and its Presidents and Supreme Court Judges ran with the bloodhounds to catch the fugitive labourer. The courts then, as now, made many things successful which they can never make respectable. When the subject of the extension of slavery in the territories was before Congress, a Southern member arose and told how he loved his black "mammy." He had been nursed at her breast with her own black baby. "I love that black mammy," the Southern member fervently exclaimed, "and when I go into Nebraska I want to take her with me." "We do not object," said Ben Wade, " to your taking your black mammy with you to Nebraska ; but we don't mean to let you flog her or sell THE NEW CONSCIENCE 103 her when you get there." Pro-Slavery law and order easily proved that to buy and sell workingmen in the market was constitutional, pious, profitable, based on contract, benign. All that the new conscience could reply was: "Hear the whistling of that lash, that drip of blood, the cries of that mother, the cries of the children ; see those empty homes, those human faces twisted out of shape, master's as well as man's." It was ridiculous, was it not, to meet those judges and bishops and millionaires and great editors with this talk about the lash, and blood, and the sacredness of the persons of working men and working women? There was no argument in it, only sentiment. The gravestones of Arlington and Gettysburg prove that sentiment can force a hearing. There came a day when the black mammy could not be sold or flogged, at home or abroad, when families could not be torn asunder at the auction block, when the great brothel was closed where half a million of women were flogged to prostitution or, worse still, degraded to believe it honourable, when a professedly Christian nation ceased to deny, by statute, the Bible to every sixth man and woman of its population. This was what the new con- science did for the slaves with the help of religion, but against the opposition of the Church; with the help of 'the spirit of justice, but against the opposition of lawyers, judges and legislatures ; with the help of the true science of labour, but against the efforts of the economists and capitalists. After all is over, lawyer, priest, professor and money-maker find that they were wrong and con- science right, that the theory that treated men and brothers as chattels or goods was illegal, unjust, irreligious, uneconomical, and wealth-destroying. For twenty-three hundred years the argument never 104 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR reached a higher plane than that attained by the forgotten Greeks, who held that they were unnatural ties which were founded on force. This revolt against ties founded on force finds another echo in the 'aspirations and ideals of those who are to-day seeking for themselves and others the right to work in secure tenure of employment, to live as long a life as their neighbours live, to live it as freely and to rear healthfully and happily children to live after them. It was the force of battle that overcame the labourer of the old re'gime ; it is the force of the market that subdues the labourer of to-day. The tie between the labourer and the master is still one of force, although it is not now one of visible chains. You say, "The labourer is free, he consents." Yes, free as the captive was to work for what he can get or die. Like him he consents to save his life or, more accurately, a part of his life. The Con- gressional Committee, investigating the strike of the Reading Railroad's men, asked General Manager Whiting, as reported by the Associated Press : " Have you made no effort to supply the places of the striking miners?" "No sir." "Why?" "Because we desire and expect our old men to come back." "On your own terms?" "At the old rates, yes." "What force do you rely upon to bring these men back?" "Well, sir, their necessities." It is not by free will that the workingmen of to-day work ten, twelve or fourteen hours, take competitive wages, live in poor tenements at high rents, spend their days as the mere servants or grooms of machinery, and, THE NEW CONSCEINCE 105 sending out their little boys and girls and their pregnant wives to work, sacrifice almost everything that makes family life for you and me so sweet. They do not submit by consent to live a life not much above half the average length of that of the prosperous. Workingmen the world over are struggling to free themselves by every means of strikes, protest, organisation, even to the desperation of physical violence. Singular behaviour, is it not, for men who are only doing what they want to do? They are kept down by force, by the force of competition instead of conquest, by the strategy of the generals of supply and demand. Once it was the force of the warrior, now it is the force of the capitalist. It was their weakness and the strength of others which formerly made the workingmen merchandise, and force still keeps them at the mercy of the markets. But the unresting heart of man is always in revolt against ties founded on force. Yesterday it de- clared that government is the control of man by man, and that the rights of rulers are drawn from the consent of the governed. To-day it avows that property is the control of man by man. That the rights of the ruled are the source of the rights of the rulers in property as much as in government. That if the common people can be allowed to vote in government, they can be allowed to vote in that other government, property. That if they do not insist upon their right to vote upon all affairs of property, they will lose their right to vote in matters of government. That there is no conscience, new or old, which compels the many to die undeveloped in order that the few may live misdeveloped. What stirred the warrior's heart to spare the captive instead of killing him was the first beat of a new conscience. When it grew stronger it said: He is more than a com- modity. Grown stronger still, it says to us : His labour 106 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR is more than a commodity. The central doctrine of the slave power was that the labourer was merely merchandise. The central doctrine of the money power is that labour is merely merchandise. Society supports the latter, as it did the former, with the consolidated array of all its insti- tutions and laws. But both doctrines, and all that is built upon them, are absolutely destructive not only of the liberties of the labourer but of the liberties of all. The conscience that said the labourer shall not be a commodity though despised of the builders is now a cornerstone. A new conscience takes its stand before all our institutions and says to them : Labour shall not be a commodity, for the labour is the labourer. Under the theory of merchantable man the employer said : My workmen. Under the labour commodity theory the employer says: My workmen. Neither means my sheep to feed, but my sheep to shear. Congressman Hutton, of Missouri, says about the Reading strike: "I am tired of reading about strikes. Capital should be at liberty to pay whatever it sees fit for labour, and to em- ploy whom it chooses." An iron manufacturer lately said : " If you employed on a large scale you would soon find that you cease to look at your men as men. They are simply so much producing power." If the Captains of Industry can reduce ore to iron only on these terms of reducing men to units of power, the sooner the Captains of Industry are discharged, and their places filled by Brothers of Industry, the better. Henry Ward Beecher, after the Emancipation of Slavery, said, amid enthusiastic applause, "We have struck the shackles from the slave, and made him free and a citizen. Now he must take care of himself and work out his own social and industrial salvation." Why? asked the new conscience. Is he not still your brother ? Because THE NEW CONSCIENCE 107 you have abolished one of the wrongs done him by you, does that give you the right to maintain the other wrongs ? Are you not still his neighbour? When you work with him, and divide proceeds into profits and wages, will the God of Plymouth Church considerately turn his back, so as not to see whether you love your neighbour as yourself? The remark of the great pulpit orator epitom- ises the whole spirit of our civilisation toward the labourer. The ancients bought and sold men ; we buy and sell the heartbeats only. The new theory that though the workingman is not a thing his labour is a thing, marks but a slight advance on the old. It means that the labour can be bought and sold regardless of the man behind it; that the buyer, the employer, can take any advantage of the seller, provided he does it under the formulas of supply and demand; that to buy his life of him cheap and sell it dear is all we have to do with the labourer; that the only conscience the buyer needs is to observe the rules of the market; that he can depress or raise prices without moral responsibility for the backs bent or hearts broken by his manipulations; that he can take more than he gives, regardless that the "goods " he gets are the lives of workers who cannot survive if they receive less than they give; that buyer and seller have a right to deal with each other as if they were business animals instead of business men. The labour is the labourer, because the man has to live twenty-four hours in order to be able to work eight or ten. His heart and head, his thoughts, his wants, his aspirations, all co-operate to produce the so-called commodity which at the sound of the factory bell is ready to begin the work of the day. When the man leaves the factory he but takes the "commodity" away to recuperate his wasted energies for another day. That which he has left io8 MAN , THE COMING CREATOR within those walls is not a thing. It is himself. " The great fundamental principle of anti-slavery is that man cannot hold property in man," said Garrison. The doctrine that "labour is a commodity" gives man property in man, and is therefore iniquitous and void. If labour is a commodity the labourer is a commodity, and chattel slavery still exists, freed only of all its Biblical and patriarchal restraints, possessed of powers for abuse more dangerous because indirectly exerted. If you shall not buy the whole man, you shall not buy or sell part of a man. You shall not count into your purses the ruddy drops, from morn till noon, from noon to dewy eve, and then say, "I know not whence they came or how." We who "buy" labour, who take the expenditure of life that labour can part with, and do not return to the labourer that share in the produce of labour which will permit him to repair his vitality, maintain a family, attend to his political duties, save enough for sickness and old age, have enough for such play and rest as will enable him to live to his allotted span, are, in the words of the Bible, "man stealers." In our day and civilisation such a man-stealer is as bad and wicked as the slaveholder in his. We who take from any business profits or interest on capital while any of our employees are suffering for want of means for full growth as individuals or citizens are man-stealers, and we as man-stealers are to-day, as of old, robbing children of their years of joy, men of their prime and mothers of their motherhood. It is no excuse for merchant or manufacturer or mine owner or railroad cor- poration that the " system " permits, even commands, such wrongs. Mankind and God never separate the sinner and sin. The sinners will go down with the "system" if they don't change it. The money power so contracts with tha THE NEW CONSCIENCE 109 working man, working woman or working child that it gets the whole of him or her or it, as Wordsworth says, "health, body, mind, and soul" it gets the whole twenty-four hours of him, her, or it and says, I cannot share with you enough to let you live at the rate of twenty-four hours a day for a natural life. I and my system can find others in the free labour market so wretched that by themselves they cannot live a week. They are willing to give me outright ten hours a day if I will but pay them enough to live at the rate of fourteen hours a day for the few years their bodies can stand it. As you know, our God is a God of competi- tion, supply and demand, "free" contract. You must take the wages the other man will take, or yield to him your "sacred right to work." This may seem hard to you, but you must admit that it is right, for all our good and brave business men and their college professors will easily prove to you that you are not a man but merely a seller in the market, and your labour is not your life, only a commodity. When the employer, the nation, the world of employers sit in comfort, and the employed are massed in the tenements whence comes the bitter cry of the outcast, and where poverty, prostitution, intem- perance and premature death are chronic, are they on one side any less the oppressors, are those on the other side any less the victims of force because the fashionable world says, " Labour is a commodity " ? The incantations of political economists cannot cure disease. Conscience cares nothing for the fine phrases of professors, statesmen, lawyers, clergy, employers, for their theories and philos- ophy of business. It says, What have you done? What are the results ? Bother your theories and doctrines of right! Show me the facts, not the formulas! It looks at Chicago and New York, at Dives in his palace and no MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR Lazarus in the slums, at the profits of one "brother" and the wages of the other. It does not ask what church do you go to on Sunday, nor who were your professors in political economy. No, it only repeats the question asked under similar circumstances some thousands of years ago, What hast thou done where is thy brother? Let us listen while a delegation from the Money Power remonstrates with the new conscience for its unreasonable sentiments and ideas. Here they come, one by one, and range themselves about. First speaks the Merchant Prince : I have a right to buy where I can buy cheapest. Conscience. See these little stunted, hollow-eyed girls coming out of that factory! Lawyer. Wages are settled by contract. Conscience. Where can I find white-haired working- men? Capitalist. Every man has a right to do what he will with his own. Conscience. What is the price of a Senatorship to- day? Statistician. Never were food, fuel, clothing so cheap. Conscience. Little Mary Mitchell works in Waterbury's rope works five days a week, from six in the evening till six in the morning. Railroad King. Every man makes his own career. I was a working man myself twenty years ago, and now I keep a carriage, a butler, and several judges and legislators "in four States," and Conscience. That tired-looking man is a conductor of a sleeping car belonging to a company owned by half a dozen men worth three hundred million dollars, which is not enough for them, so they squeeze a few more dollars a month out of him by making him on every alternate trip THE NEW CONSCIENCE in do twenty-eight and a half hours' continuous work without sleep. Banker. Our wealth is increasing one billion dollars a year. We have boards of trades, the best railroads in the world, packing houses that can kill ten thousand hogs. Conscience. The sickening stench, the blistered air, the foul sights of the tenements, and the motherhood and the childhood choking there! Conservative. This is the best government in the world. America is good enough for me. Conscience. Listen to that "tramp, tramp, tramp" of a million men out of work. Philanthropist. The Church is renewing its youth. We give millions of dollars for hospitals and foreign work and domestic missions, to carry the gospel to the poor of all nations. Conscience. I hear a voice in the Abbey that cries, We do not want charity ; give us work. Manufacturer. Without this system of industry the subjugation of North America to civilisation would have been impossible we could never have shown the world the magnificent spectacle of Conscience. There is a little boy standing ten hours a day up to his ankles in the water in the coal mine! Coal Monopolist. I have a statistician who can prove he can prove anything that the workingman is a great deal better off than he ever was, that he makes more than I do, that small incomes are increasing and large ones decreasing, and there is no involuntary poverty, and that the workingmen could live on twenty-five cents each a day, and buy up the United States with their savings and Conscience. How long will it be cheaper to run over ii2 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR working men and women at the railroad crossings in the cities than to put up gates? Clergyman. The poor we are to have with us always. Conscience. That sewing woman you see pawning her shawl has lived this winter with her two children in a room without fire. Are you wearing one of the shirts she finished? Statesman. The working man has the ballot and the newspapers. He is a free citizen. Conscience. As the nights grow colder see how the number of girls on the streets increases! Now what can a man of affairs, a business man, a reasonable man, one who understands political economy and the Constitution of the United States and all that do with such a disputant as this? The more the pride of America points to its magnificence and boasts of its Declaration of Independence, the more does the new conscience point to the wrongs and sufferings of these miserable men, women and children and so few of them too! All extreme cases, you say? Just so. It was the possibility of its extreme cases that destroyed slavery. The possibility of such extreme cases as these demand the abolition of the system and the philosophy which permits them. Upon the false theory that men cease to be brothers when they buy and sell, upon the theory that employer and employee are not fellow men but merely dealers in a non-human market, is built up the false society in which we live. The new industry and finance have put the labour of mankind under the control of the Money Power, which declares its right to deal on all sides with men according to the rules of a prize ring called Supply and Demand. Conscienceless and greedy a.s the old THE NEW CONSCIENCE 113 slave power, its competitive rents give us the slums. Its competitive wages leave women the choice between suicide of body or suicide of soul, and tempt men to find in the stimulant of drink a substitute for the stimulant of food. Professing the gospel of competition, it imports contract labour, breaks up trade-unions, employs and disemploys labour in order to buy cheap of men who have no commodity but themselves to sell. But when it turns about as seller, it confronts the buyer with pools, trusts and combinations denying competition. The revolution of the new industry and the concentration of wealth have given the Money Power unlimited means to buy, and the morals which permit it to buy men as commodities permit it to buy everything, even the things once held too sacred for traffic. The system that denies the manhood of man in the most sacred function of all, labour, must deny it in all the relations based on this foundation. The system which permits the welfare of the labourer to be settled by competition, the law of the market, the false claim of property to do what it will with its own, must allow all welfare to be settled by the same philosophy. If the Money Power can make life and the means of life mere commodities, it makes it right to buy life as cheap as possible, to sell it as dear as possible. It makes it, when bought, the buyer's own. Hence the capitalist's claim of a right to do as he will with his own is the claim of a right to do as he will with human lives. Such a system, and it is exactly ours, has no moral reserves with which to meet the Money Power when it applies these principles as it is doing to-day in every direction to the moral ruin of society. Just this result is being worked out. The Money Power with its huge fortunes and corporations built up on the right to treat life as a mere commodity, more and more treats ii 4 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR everything else as a mere commodity from the virtue of employees to that of trustees, public and private. It refuses to respond when called to account. It simply asserts its right to buy cheap and sell dear, and to do what it will with its own. Andrew Carnegie, before the Nine- teenth Century Club, dismisses the labour agitation by saying in effect, " Since no man in the United States need be a pauper unless by his own deliberate act, there is no labour question." Must American citizens wait to redress their wrongs until they have been made veritable paupers by the Steel Rail Trust and its confederate price con- spiracies? That was not the way of the fathers. The price of tea in the American Colonies was cheaper after the imposition of the stamp tax than before. Nothing could be so light as that a burden of less than nothing. But Justice Dana, in the presence of a great assemblage of the angry townspeople of Boston, standing under the Liberty Tree, administered an oath to Mr. Secretary Oliver that he had not distributed and would not distribute the odious stamps. The people of Boston did not wait until they had been made paupers. "Enslave but one human being," said Garrison, " and the liberties of the world are put in peril." Surrender to the Money Power the right to make but one price, the control of all prices will surely follow. They who control the prices of a nation control the liberties of its markets, and those who control the liberties of its markets will come to control all its other liberties. The student of the evolution of freedom, from Athens and Calvary to Appomattox and Trafalgar Square, says, When you see a cause against which all the powers of law, Church, culture and wealth are united, there is a cause worth looking into. If there was nothing in it, why should all these mighty institutions be so disturbed about THE NEW CONSCIENCE u 5 it ? And if you find all customs, statutes, learnings, creeds, logics, bazaars and currencies against it, look at it still more searchingly. All these have always at the first been united against any new conscience, and have always conspired against it, even to the death. Let those who are the great because others are small let those who are the happy because others are wretched let those who are rich because others are poor listen out of their golden security for the crier of the new conscience. His voice foretells a new day. If the working men and farmers have once, twice, thrice recognised and saved great truths neglected by the powers of the earth, it is quite possible they may do it again. It is possible they are doing it now. The ardent, sighing for a cause, bemoaning that they were born too late for the Anti-Slavery agitation, have, in to-day's ferment of the poor and lowly, the greatest cause of history. The abolition of chattel slavery has but cleared the ground. Toynbee Hall in London, and similar schools elsewhere, have been formed to carry university culture down to the workingmen. The movement is wrong from end to end. It is the universities that are in need of culture of the culture of the working men in hardship, and equality, and sacrifice. The great New England divine, Lyman Beecher, was very much put out because the fanatic, William Lloyd Garrison, would not leave the slavery question to settle itself. It would do so, Beecher said, in a couple of centuries. Erasmus deplored, in the case of Luther, that the great change of the Reformation was not allowed to work itself out slowly, calmly, and without violence and disruption. But there has always been one thing that put God and man into a hurry injustice. It is a singular truth that only in poor and primitive communities is there enough for all. Charles Dickens n6 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR could see no beggars in Boston forty years ago. Like the early England, the early New England was one of great poverty but of great independence and equality. "No rich man, no poor in it," said Wendell Phillips, one of the patricians of modern New England ; "all mingling in the same society; no poorhouse, no beggars; opportunities equal." Thorold Rogers says, in his Economic Interpre- tation of History, " The means of life were more abundant during the Middle Ages than they are under our modern experience. There was, I am convinced, no extreme poverty. The essence of life in England during the days of the Plantagenets and Tudors was that everyone knew his neighbour, and that everyone was his brother's keeper. Though there was hardship in this life, the hard- ship was a common lot." It is only when communities get rich that there is not enough for all. The indepen- dence and equality of early England and New England were close to the ideals of Christ. But towns and the temptations of riches have been too much for the virtue of the quickest of hand and eye, and they have moved away into Beacon Street and the West End, and left their brothers in the tenements and factory towns. But if there was enough before the steam engine and the Pool, there is enough now. Those who control the labour of England, Old and New, must direct it more evenly to equal ad- vantage, or they must give way to those who will. The lot of the people must be settled by the common people. If railroads and factories cannot be built and operated without their labour, neither can the proceeds be divided without their consent and co-operation. If the common people can be allowed to vote freely in government, they can be allowed to vote freely in property. It is not necessary to befuddle the subject with the fogs of political economy or constitution or legal intricacies- THE NEW CONSCIENCE 117 The simplest elements of justice, freedom and love supply the only profundities needed. The question between the Money Power on one side and the people on the other, with the labourers and farmers in the van led by men like Emerson, Mazzini and Carlyle, is simply and sharply a question of More ! more for the People, less for the Power. If you want to quibble about words, and say that all men are workingmen, then the question must be denned as one between rich workingmen and poor workingmen; between workingmen with luxuries and workingmen without; those around the parks and those on the farms; those who own the machinery and those who operate it; between the workingmen who monopolise and those who are monopolised; between the workmen who get the privilege of living in shanties as their share of coal mining in Pennsylvania and the workingmen who get dividends on five hundred million dollars of coal stock. Bring on all the statisticians in the world to figure out that the farmers and workingmen are better off than they were. Thorold Rogers proves it is not true, but, if it were, it is beside the point. They are not getting their share. Never was there a country, says a popular preacher of Chicago, in which the rich have done as much as in America for the poor. But the truth is, never was there a country in which the poor have done so much for the rich. The leaders of the revolution of the new industry have quite mistaken the terms of the contract with society under which they have been hired to do these great things. Society hired them to work for society. But the captains have assumed that all they led in making was to be their own, and that they could do what they willed with their own. They still have something to learn. The Conservative cries out, " You are going to destroy society." n8 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR Did it destroy society to abolish slavery? The Conservative cries out, "This is revolution!" No, it is the remedy. The revolution has already occurred. That took place when the mighty wheels of the new industry whirled the peasant and his children away from his little homestead, the artisan away from his cottage loom and his village shop and non-competitive brotherhood, and herded them into tenement houses and factories. It was the revolution which took the husbandmen, labourer and artisan out of the Golden Age of the fifteenth century, which preceded the new industry. Then living was cheap and men were dear, the working day in field and town was but eight hours a day. Master and men both belonged to the same union, no man could compete with another of the same fraternity, and the employee had the same right to his place that the employer had. It is the revolution which has changed all that. During the last century has come the realisation of the vision of the ancient Greek poet who foresaw a time when "the shuttle would weave and the lyre would play of itself." That is the revolution. Time was when judges sent men to jail for forestalling, cornering the markets. That was in the "dark ages." Now the Money Power establishes " trusts " in everything, and our judges tell us the burden of monopoly is "light." That is the revolution. The new industry has broken up the brotherhoods of the old industry, and has swung the few strongest and cleverest of the workingmen into palaces and front pews, so far away from their old comrades and fellow workers that, as one of them said, "I have no time to remember their faces, much less their names." THE NEW CONSCIENCE 119 That is the revolution. It is the revolution that has capped the new industry with the high finance, and tied up the people in the paper chains of charters, contracts and stock-exchange securities. "The time is coming," said the Earl of Derby not long ago, "when the people of Europe will repudiate their national debts, which now take eight hundred million dollars a year from them." That is the revolution. And the gospel of the revolu- tion is the doctrine that you can do anything with your fellow man provided you do it in the market. The remedy is in the new conscience, which says simply that a man shall never be so much of a buyer or seller as to cease to be a brother, and that labour shall not be made a market thing. Before us is the practical question, What is the next step? The next step, like the first step, is more liberty for the labourer. His emancipation still invokes us. Conscience has freed him from frightful abuses, but frightful abuses remain. His growth is not yet full and free. Civilisation groans under the evils of the revolution wrought by the new industry and its philosophy. The denunciation by our prophets, the outcries of the farmer and workingmen, the attempts to regulate factories, railroads, mines, tenements, infant labour, are all con- fessions of the evil, and confessions of the impotence of the system which produced those ills to remedy them. A gospel of hatred is rising in classes and masses which hate employers, hate employees, hate household service, hate household servants, hate foreigners, hate pools, hate trades-unions, hate the grangers, hate re- formers, hate politics. All these are symptoms of a high fever. But a new mankind has been conceived and will be born a winged beauty out of the earth- 120 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR measuring worm which will not know force, and fraud, and hatred, and will let love, their natural tie, bind men and nations together. The practical work of to-day is to abolish the cannibals of competition, warriors of supply and demand, tyrants of monopoly, monsters of the market, devourers of men, women and children, buyers and sellers of life. The progress of humanity, says Emerson, consists of recognition of the truth that every private and separate good is delusion. Property, capital and money-making as now permitted are still systems of man-hunting. Monopoly is force, and force is slavery, and slavery must be abolished. A lover of birds, Maurice Thompson, tells us that as he wanders through the Southern forests he knows afar off when he is nearing a human habitation by the songs of the birds near the cabin, which declare to all the world, by a special tenderness of tone, that they love man and have made their nest near his. The heart of man is not less than the heart of the bird. Churches come and go, but there has ever been but one religion. The only religion has been that which clears off one by one from the face of the earth-stains that hide the God imprisoned in the flesh, which breaks down one by one every barrier which incarnation has put in the way of the growth of the God within in the likeness of the God without. In the sight of the new conscience wherever man walks there is the Holy Land, and it raises the cross of the new crusade which shall deliver it from the infidels who deny the divine right of the people that the will of God shall be done on earth as in heaven. It insists that every question between men is a religious question, a question of moral economy before it becomes one of political economy, and will make all political, industrial and social activities functions of a new Church a church THE NEW CONSCIENCE 121 of the deed as well as of the creed a church that will not only preach Christ but do Christ a church where science, the revelation of what has been, will never be at war with religion, the revelation of what ought to be a church which will make its worshippers share this world as well as the next world a church which will recognise no vested right of property in man except the right to love and be loved a church which will declare that the difference in the death rate between the classes and the masses is evidence of murder done for money a church which will look upon idleness by the side of industry, wealth by the side of poverty, luxury by the side of want, health by the side of disease, as impious and profane in the highest degree, the real sins against the Holy Ghost a church which will stop the manufacture of poorhouses because it will stop the manufacture of poverty a church which will not let any man offer charity to those to whom he refuses justice a church which will not help the poor but will set them to helping themselves, and will slay the infidel in the path a church which will abolish all middle- men in morals, and will make every man doubly guilty who grinds the face of his fellow by an agent guilty for himself and guilty for the agent a church that will offer not even the lowliest member of the communion of man- kind crumbs from the table but a seat at the table and a full meal three times a day every day a church that will consider it more practical to keep its buildings open and its congregation at work in relays night and day than to let "brothers" starve and freeze or go astray for want of sympathy or advice a church which will persecute the heretics who give the highest bidder the best pews in the churches and the best chance in the courts a church which will teach that the life eternal is the life we are living now a church which will not let the poor give up 122 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR all of this world on the unsecured promise of the rich to divide the next world a church that will judge civilisation not by the six-million-dollar cathedral on Murray Hill but by the children in the back alleys a church that will "dine with the poor and preach to the rich," until there are no more poor a church which says that those who are to be brothers hereafter must be brothers here a church that will know what its members believe only by what they do a church which recognises nothing as love which does not bear justice as the fruit a church of law and order, but the law is for the rich as well as the poor, and the order is to be peaceful growth for the least of these little ones a church which will prevent the anarchy from below by punishing the anarchy from above a church which will deny the right of infanticide to the employer, now denied by society only to the parents a church which declares the sacred right to work to mean that he who works a full day shall live a full day, and that employment is a right not a charity a church which will restore reverence to men by giving them leaders in church, state and business worthy of reverence a church which will make every social wrong a moral wrong, and every moral wrong a legal wrong a church which will teach men to turn the other cheek when they can do it as free men not as slaves a church which will deliver with the message of peace the message of a scourge for the money- changers in the temple a church which will tell the merchant prince that between him and his ruined com- petitor, and between him and his employees there is a moral question greater than the question of markets a church which will abolish the merchant prince and the factory corporation sooner than let them abolish the childhood of children a church which will not let the employers profess on the Fourth of July that all men are THE NEW CONSCIENCE 123 born equal, and then fatten the rest of the year on the advantages of organisation which they deny to the employee a church in which God will be natural and men supernatural a church which will abolish charity and philanthrophy, for these cannot be between brothers, and need not be where justice is a church in which no man will have a right to do with his own what he will, but only a right to do what is right a church which will take the weak and despised out of the earthy Inferno of dirt, and want, and ignorance, to which they have been condemned by the oppressor a church which will keep a hell hot in this world to punish the oppressors here for every blow they strike at God through his image, man a church which will tell the sinner that repentance fit for heaven only begins by restitution and reparation on earth a church which will teach that brothers must share both the mess of pottage and the birthright a church which will worship God through all his sons made in his image, through a mediator, Mankind, which, having suffered all and sinned all, can sympathise with all, and will carry all the weak and weary ones safe in its bosom a church which will realise the vision of Carlyle of a Human Catholic Church. A mankind which has known the heroism of patriot, friend, father, son, disciple, lover, thinker, as a practical fact of its daily life for thousands of years, doubts the beautiful consummation of a social conscience, although it is already securely gathered in the individual as a guide and inspiration, stronger than any hope or desire he has for himself, only because it does not yet know itself ; those who see must reveal this beautiful creation, humanity, to itself. We can see in the careers of our greatest men, our Turgots, Washingtons, Mazzinis, in the coral-like growths i2 4 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR of unselfishness and tenderness in personal and social manners, in the organised and unorganised manifestations of good-will, that the new conscience is already well under way which before long will make an act of selfish- ness as revolting to the general opinion and consequently as rare as an act of immodesty. " Religion " of any age is the dominant generalisation of that age. Above the other inventors, poets, generals, philosophers of any civilisation rank always those geniuses who can make and declare the formula in which all other truths are included its prophets. All the others who are excellent are religious in so far as they get their feet in the ways that lead to the summit, but he who fuses all their beings into the inspired declarations that serve as a guide to the theory and practice of life, he is the Master. The social mind continually strives for new truths and new expressions, but only once in many ages is a re-statement of fundamental truths needed and only once in many ages is it heard. Moses, Christ, Buddha, Confucius these poets are quoted by millions of men for thousands of years. There are countless signs now in current literature and social labour that a new chorus of poets is training, out of whose preludes shall come another great voice. "The first one who makes a religion of Democracy will save the world," Mazzini wrote in substance. He reiterated that the religious idea is the very breath of humanity. His constantly repeated declarations that Humanity was not an accident but an aim, life its mission, and duty its highest word have never been surpassed for inspiration. There have been no more eloquent char- acterisations than his of the faith upon which he was always calling that faith of the multitudes in their own mission, their own destiny, which arouses the multitudes THE NEW CONSCIENCE 125 and is the parent of victory. But though Mazzini felt the need of a religious conception of life, still he did not arrive at any clear idea of what it should be. His eloquence and insight and faith were after all but the passionate outcry of one who had so far emancipated himself from the old that he knew believed there was a greater revelation for men, but could not yet discern the new day's light. It was a great feat of the intellect and the heart for him to have divined and expressed so much. It was all one could do who had not been widened and enlightened by modern science. The natural law and the rights of the individual on which the eighteenth century built its revolutions too much of the credit of which has gone to the spectacular French were but emancipations from the old, and no mind or generation of minds could perform so gigantic a feat as the destruc- tion of the old and the construction of the new. The whole of exhortation in religious literature calling upon sinful man to surrender his will to that of God, to repent, to become a new man, to obey the Ten Command- ments, when viewed scientifically and this scientific view is the most appreciative and sympathetic view- is a highly dramatic, an elaborately allegorical and symbolic presentation of the new conscience to the individual. God is simply the hero of a religious novel. What was actually occurring under cover of this romance of the seers and priests was that the minds of the best thinkers and the deeds of the best doers were working upon the commonalty to bring them to accept better thoughts and higher models and more fruitful methods. Time was when discoveries and inventions new fruits, better sanitation, the building of boats could get the favour of men only by being commended to them as the revelation of God or the gods. It is through Allegory i 2 6 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR and Illusion, says Wagner, that men most easily reach moral truths. There was a stage when all truth had to be given this imaginative touch of a divine origin, and when everything that happened was an incident in the continued story of the Creation. We have become self- conscious to the point of looking upon the ordinary activities of life as human and secular; we are now ap- proaching the step up into the self-consciousness which will see that the aspirations toward a higher truth are as human and secular in the regions we call those of con- science as in those of the industry and common life which were once handed over to the direct administration of divinity. Hesiod claims the authority of the gods for the times and ways of sowing and reaping; we claim the same authority for the ways of the Higher Life. In one we shall come as already we have come in the other, to see that it is man himself who is the authority for himself. Old conceptions are ever recurring in the development of humanity's mind and life in new and broader and more beautiful forms, and one of the most fascinating of these returns is unfolding itself now in the advanced thought which is again claiming a divine sanction for every act and idea of life the sanction of the divinity of man. All the control gained in the past by conscience in all its forms personal and ecclesiastical, religious and ethical, political and physical is a prophecy and guaran- tee that man, the individual, society, is destined to succeed in the struggle to supplant with the rule of right the rule of self-interest. This is only the old struggle between right and might carried, logically and historically, into a new and wider field. The first man who denied himself a sensual gratification, because it was forbidden, on that day or in that place, or under those present THE NEW CONSCIENCE 127 conditions, was the herald of the day now in sight, when men would deny themselves life itself for their country's sake, and later indulgences of wealth and power for their fellow men's sake. Civilisation is simply applied conscience, and Progress is a widening conscience. Society in a thousand ways and by a thousand teachers sanctions in teaching the unruly, selfish, passionate, greedy individual and associations of individuals to do not what wishes, appetites and ignorances prompt, but that which is right. The economists who preach self- interest as the guide of conduct, and the men, corporations and nations who practise it, are heathen, atheists, bar- barians more animals than men. Men, individually and socially, in building up Conscience as the rule of life, have been endowing themselves with, creating in themselves, the power, ability to do, at the price of sacrifice that which is best for the whole, and best for the highest instead of that which is best for a part and for the basest. The new conscience is creative as well as dutiful and tender; To be ethical in its view to use every power to its fullest, and to co-operate to the utmost with all for the common good. Its religion is to do more than practise the peisonal virtues of goodness; it can express its energies of righteousness only by public co-operation to the public welfare. Its Golden Rule says, Do! Do! Do! and in the doing do as you would be done by. The new religion will have for its strongest words, not Sub- mission, Repentage, Trust; but Unite, Create, Rise, Progress! It will not be converted, it will convert. CHAPTER VI NEW CONSCIENCE IN INDUSTRY THE individual alone cannot fabricate the new conscience nor obey it, alone. He must be surrounded, protected, stimulated, co-operated with by associates. Society must create for him the institutions which will make possible the industrial conscience. Men are chaste, loyal, so far as they are so, largely because they are born into the family, the Church, the State, and are moulded by their institutions into brotherhood, patriot- ism. The world needs a new set of institutions for the new conscience. The least shrewd observer can see society already at work making these new institutions t but they are not as yet established. The most desperate mass of unregenerate people and the largest for years were up to 1889 the London dock labourers. Hopeless the misery of these people. They gathered daily by thousands at the docks, with emaciated forms and leaden, sunken eyes, huddling together lest they might fall from the weakness that came of starvation. They slept before the gates all night to be the first in the morning, and when the gates were opened trampled each other under foot, fighting like beasts, for the chance to get in. When in, they were driven into a shed, iron- barred from end to end, and herded there while the foreman walked up and down picking and choosing with the air of a dealer in a cattle market. Mark Valle was a " casual " who made a shilling when he could unloading ships at the London docks. One day 128 NEW CONSCIENCE IN INDUSTRY 129 he went for his pay. As it was handed to him he dropped dead at the paymaster's feet. The doctor said it was starvation. The coroner found that he had had nothing to eat from Saturday till Thursday. Sunday the children had a little stew and nothing more till Thursday. The father went without on Sunday that there might be a little more for the children. He was steady and temperate, the neighbours told the coroner; he was a good, kind father, said his oldest boy at the inquest. His wife was in the insane asylum gone mad with worry and hunger. There were seven children. The dockers were of the class of which Thorold Rogers says: "There is a large population collected in our great cities whose condition is more destitute, whose homes are more squalid, whose means are more uncertain, and whose future is more hopeless than the poorest serf in the Middle Ages." They are the class which Macaulay predicted would be found in our American cities, a pre- diction already verified. All about this degraded and embruted population rang Easter Bells and Christmas Chimes. Magnificent cathe- drals called them with colour, music, eloquence, warmth, to listen to the glad tidings of Salvation. Devoted disciples of the Ecclesiastical Establishment went among them day after day, to take to them the gospel of Good Tidings they would not come to hear. Lord Mayor's Relief Funds, slumming philanthropists, Charity Organisa- tions societies innumerable all took their shy at them. In vain. The , evangelisation of this mass of misery appeared as desperate, as impossible, the last day as the first. They would not be converted. Prowling about for work, finding in drink the only variety in their lives, the only escape from misery, often beating their wives, and starving all the time these were the occupations they 1 30 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR unaccountably preferred to the pressing duty of looking after their spiritual emergencies. What they made London, Shelley put into one line: " Hell is a city much like London." East London is Hell without a fire. One day three workingmen, one of them a socialist, whose way to work led them past the dock gates, moved with compassion, began to preach to this multitude possessed of the Devil. Every morning on their way to their own work John Burns, Tom Mann and Ben Tillett, putting down their dinner pails, gave a ten- minutes' sermon. They preached to them the old doctrines of doing as they would be done by, of loving one another, of putting away evil, of the first consenting to be the last, of all being members of one body, of re- generation. They did not put all this in oriental or theological phrases or they would have had as few hearers as the missionaries and slummers. Burns, Mann and Tillett took the dockers where they found them, like the ox fallen in the pit, and preached to them a practical way of getting out, a plan of immediate salva- tion, for body and soul, for their wives and children. This was so different from all the exhortations they had been used to that a few gave heed at once. The number of believers grew. Three years these evangelists preached, and for three years the ties of the new love of fellow for fellow spread, knitting these haters together. The glorious day came at last when faith flowed into action, and the dockers of London stood forth before the world and said: "We will be men beasts no longer. We will be brothers enemies no longer. Here we stand members of one body the least among us shall be first. You may martyr us ; we will murder each other no longer." In the words of John Burns. "These men had been the embodiment of weakness and every- NEW CONSCIENCE IN INDUSTRY 131 thing poor and insignificant. They were the despair of the social reformer and the ghost of the milk-and- water politician. They had been regarded by all political economists and by all men as the worst specimens of the degraded labour of all countries." They who had fought to take the bread from each other's mouths marched, five abreast, up and down London in harmonious pro- cession, put their pence into a common fund, for the common benefit, and with their employers, the public and fellow workmen used no weapons, but reason. The dignity of such co-operation, the majesty of such sacrifice for the common benefit, produced its counterpart in the domestic moralities of the people. The men stopped drinking. Quarrels between man and wife had been dreadfully frequent when the man could bring home only three hours' earnings at five pence an hour, or as often brought nothing for weeks ; but they now became almost unknown. This was the greatest revival of modern times. It revived bodies as well as souls, and lifted up every brother. This, said John Burns, is not a demand for more wages. It is the spread of a religion. Its ennobling vibrations are still undulating through the life and the thought of the people of all lands, and will be recorded in forms of permanent beneficence in the life of the race, like curves of beauty left on the rocks by seas long gone. This was done by the gospel, but it was not the " simple gospel" so much in demand by our fashionable churches which have imperative reasons why the eleven command- ments should remain what Sydney Smith declares the Scotch girls talk to their lovers in metaphysical Edinboro' "Love in the abstract." It was not the "simple gospel," the unapplied gospel, like the sunshine, which, touching no earth, runs to waste between the stars. 1 32 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR It was a very complex gospel a gospel of body as well as soul, a gospel of justice as well as love, a gospel of brotherhood which drives Cain forth. John Burns preached to the men that they must conquer themselves, their vices, their prejudices, their envy and jealousy of each other. He went further. The workmen of the world must learn to conquer these faults and themselves and expand this conquest of evil, this union of the good, into a brotherhood which should band the earth. He preached only what had been preached how often before! but he showed them where the first step lay, and his plan of salvation gave the sinners a taste of brotherhood and comfort, and a chance to begin the real life of Christ right away, and they followed him into these vestibules of heaven. John Burns also uttered what may prove to be prophetic history-making words. "Here is a peaceful way," he said, " of solving the social problem which it has seemed revolution alone could settle." The universal voice of the poor the cry of the un- employed in San Francisco, Westminster Abbey, Chicago, Australia and South Africa where they have their labour question, too shows that the people understand this. "We want work, not charity," they always say. They want their own fulness of growth, which gives its brother as much as it gets and more. Charity from us to those who are made to need it by the very superfluity we take for ourselves out of the produce of their labour is an insult and an outrage. The people have always felt it, now they begin to understand it. Charity as we practise it is but the insolvency of brotherhood, paying back one cent where it received a dollar. " If you gave the poor charity a few years ago," said a Buffalo clergy- man, "they would thank you. Not so now. It is not NEW CONSCIENCE IN INDUSTRY 133 only charity," he says, "to give your check, but to see how you got that check." The humanitarianism of the Church, the Good King, the merciful slaveholder, the kind master, the benevolent pirates of Broadway and State Street has not been a failure, for any love, any repentance, is better than none. But we might as well stop reading history if we are so dull we cannot see that this has been and can be but the prelude to the real humanitarianism, which seeks to give every man his own, or, rather, to let him keep his own. Jesus said: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's," but He did not say what things are Caesar's. The test of time has shown that all the things the Caesars claimed belonged to God. The things that are really Caesar's are only those that are any man's the right to be one of all, and to be a brother. The deepest among the "causes of the present discontent," to use Burke's phrase, is that to-day the enlarging conscience which has pushed aside King and Priestcraft feels itself pushing with its tender shoots against the hard crust of the insti- tutions of property. "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind," and as they ride, like Tennyson's Northern Farmer, declare that "the poor in a loomp is bad." The Church is Conscience in action, and conscience is the music of behaviour in large and small the ordering of life to the growing harmony revealing itself to be the law. Animals vary upward, according to Lamarck, from low and inferior types mainly by wishing. The saying that men are always praying, and their prayers are forever being answered shows man responding to the same law. Every conscience, even the most primitive, grows with some response to the rhythmic beat of the right of things. And there come times and places of 134 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR exaltation, the bedside of Socrates, the cross of Christ, the pyre of Savonarola, the scaffold of Vane, when an ecstasy from the universal conscience without pours a new strain into the "still, sad music of humanity" which is never again as still or sad. Man, responsive, bends the very rocks and trees, codes and constitutions, to fix its waves in things of beauty, and as the rapture grows becomes every day more a friend. Screams of pain from the business district fill our ears and disclose the moral paradox of our times. No man may take one child, tie it to a post and underfeed and dwarf it. But the model merchant may tie thousands of children to his wheel and return them to the world dwarfed forever in body and mind, robbed of their too little of the joy, freshness and sweetness of life, to increase his too much. He may do this and remain the model merchant, the model citizen, the model husband, father and parishioner. Business, Cardinal Manning declared, is destroying the family life of the working classes. In our child labour and destruction of family life we curse and dishonour the fatherhood and motherhood of the world, and make it inevitable that the days of so wicked a society shall be short in the land. Our pretence that we cannot so divide the fruits of labour as to give the labourers out of their own produce all that they need for a fuller and fairer life is a lie. In the family we love each other; in the state we have begun to bear each other's burdens; and in many forms of associations there is a suspicion of brotherhood, mercy, love, the emancipation of each by the co-operation of all. These high morals and mechanics of the highest life business philosophy avowedly excludes from its jurisdiction. They are good enough for the family, the state; they are magnificent, but they are not NEW CONSCIENCE IN INDUSTRY 135 business. Now these are of the kingdom of God. If they rule anywhere, they rule everywhere. The world of business, supply and demand denying them, reveals itself to be the Darkest Continent, where there is no God. This is the atheism which menaces the religious life of mankind. The system based on it is breaking down all over, in strikes, riots, panics, gluts, unemployed idleness and class murder. It is breaking down, not because the task of getting plenty for the body and the soul for everyone out of the fruitful earth and the fellowship of man is an impossible task, but because the task is an impossible one of accomplishing that, or anything else in human affairs, by the Devil's code of selfishness instead of love; of solitary advantage instead of the good of all. By such a philosophy there could be no government, no family ; and if it continues there will ere long be no busi- ness. But it cannot continue. We are on the eve of another of the great expansions or extensions which have made up the civilisation, evangelisation, of the world. Emerson's felicitous phrase, "the growth of natural goodness," touches the inner force which exhibits itself in the outer forms of courts, families, states and society; and these we see constantly rearranging themselves to give more or better play to the growth within. In the Christian expansion the glimmering idea that one people were chosen to hear the divine truth that makes men free was broadened out in the discovery that all people are so chosen. Peace has spread until now the nations are within sight of a morality long since reached by the individual. Industry is the only department of domestic life where the right of private war is still asserted, and there all the influence of one side is being thrown in favour of arbitration and against the barbarian whose voice is still for war. The 136 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR sentiment of humanity has widened until we are beginning to be sensitive to blood shed by bargain hunters, and the factory acts are but a late carrying into a broader field the same duty of protecting the weak with which we charge the policeman in the streets. The Republic came out of Monarchy, and Christianity out of paganism ; something is to come out of Republicanism and Christian- ity. The business world is a chamber of horrors, because it is a region where men are forced to associate but where they defy the laws of association. The new conscience can now be seen beginning its work of bringing order into that chaos by asserting there, as everywhere else, that the only individualism which is "fit" and can survive is that of the brother, the friend, the citizen, who have learned that to gain their rights they must give them, and that the more they give the greater they are. Science and Conscience are about to extend to industrial life that compromise between the inequality of the animal and the equality of the brother by which all civilisation has become possible which is civilisation. The scrambling of mankind over each other for property is but a passing phase of the moon. In the name of "property" we are producing the millionairism and squalor which denies property to a majority of millions. True property can only be got as citizenship was got, by giving to all that we may receive from all. Those who come after us will be able to see that only idiots could have believed that we, a minority of thousands against millions, could succeed long in holding up a system under which we eat and glow, while those who raise the food and dig the coal watch us in hunger and chill; a system under which, to make our homes shine with jewels, and gold, and happy faces, a mournful procession NEW CONSCIENCE IN INDUSTRY 137 of fathers, mothers and little children issues forth every winter morning, while it is yet dark, out of thousands of homes, and return, again in the dark, squeezed dry by us and for us, to gain the precious boon of sleep, enough to be given another such day, literally cutting off their day to add to ours. One of the banners carried in London in the Eight Hours' procession Monday, May 5, 1890, bore this device: "We kill ourselves to feed ourselves." To have been accurate it should have read "to underfeed ourselves." A conscience is stirring to make good its belief that if property, security of life tenure, the material pedestal for the spiritual life, is good for me it is good for you, if good for one, for all. If it is a social product, created by all men, all men have a right to it, for it is but freedom of conscience extended to material things. The " evangel- ical conscience" which grew within the chains of slavery until it burst them now feels its spiritual capacity suffo- cating in the air of the market. It declared first that man should not be a commodity, then that labour should not be a commodity; now it makes these part truths blossom into the full truth that nothing shall be a com- modity, if commodities are to be covers for dealing with our fellow men falsely, selfishly, homicidally. The prophets are already born who are to lead us into the new dispensation which shall enlarge our narrow polity into the glorious fulness where all shall be free not only to hear the truth but to live it ; where peace shall be the atmosphere of life ; where the service of brother, widened to the service of countrymen, shall grow into the service of all men; and where the wealth of the few shall sink to rise again in the Commonwealth. These are but the forces and principles in terms of which all human progress has been written, and in the extension of them to the i 3 8 NEW CONSCIENCE IN INDUSTRY Dark Continent of Commerce we can read the secret of the history the finger of time is about to write. Osborne Ward tells us in his "Ancient Lowly" that the orator who rose in Judea more than nineteen hundred years ago out of the labouring class did but bring into the light the principles of the organisations to which workingmen of that day universally belonged. There existed then innumerable associations which counted millions of despised workers who only by union could stand up against the cruel system of that civilisation. Through all their forms of ritual and obeisances to tutel- ary gods a religious complexion they assumed to gain the right of meeting there was, he says, an uncompromising devotion to the rougher forms of brotherhood. In the midst of a world given to laughter, slavery and hatred, "the workmen had wrought unseen below the surface the revolution of brotherhood for unnumbered ages before Jesus came to sweep it by one magnetic and amazingly omnipotent stroke out of their modest secrecy into the open blaze of public opinion." Jesus said : " The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head." Tiberius Gracchus, one hundred and forty years before, said : " Wild game have holes, but the poor who struggle and die for Italy have air and light; nothing more. Houseless and homeless they wander with their wives and little ones." "Christ," says Ward, "boldly took up the unionists' social methods, their fraternal love, their meek, silent humility, their secret work, brought them grandly forth from their obscurity, proclaimed with an irresistible pathos the absolute equality of man, and succeeded, before he could be brought to the cross by a maddened society, in forcing the vast movement upward into view for adoption finally by the whole world." NEW CONSCIENCE IN INDUSTRY 139 It has always been the unlearned who, as Mazzini says, have "ever been the first to seize and compre- hend through the heart's logic the newest and most dar- ing truths of religion." The new Church always lays its corner-stone among the wretched, for their greater woe is the clearer clue to the seat of the sin. It always has been, always must be, in the name of the poor and lowly that the Saviours come. "In the voiceless religion and uncomplaining duty of the peasant races throughout Europe," says Ruskin, "is now that Church on earth against which the gates of hell shall not prevail." The poverty of the workers is the sin of our age. It is in the name of the landless, the unemployed, the striker, the penniless, the factory child, the foreclosed farmer and worn child-bearing women that the new Church of the Humanitarian is forming. The agitators teach- ing the farmers and working men, and especially the working girls and sewing women to combine are high among the Apostles of the new Church, for without union the men cannot be free, and without free men the world cannot be free. The Earl of Shaftesbury, one of the noblest men of modern times, giving his life, with the help of the labour movement and against the opposition of the clergy and the rich, to lifting up the women in the mines, the children in the chimneys, the hands in the mills and the hands on the farms, into the possibility of a human life, was in his time the head of the real Church of England. To-day the strange music has reached even the Church, frightening a Lord Melbourne and causing him to exclaim : " Do not attack the Church, leave it alone ; it is the only remaining bulwark against Christianity." This is a hard saying that the labour movement among the farmers, workingmen and social reformers of all 1 40 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR schools is the Church which is incarnating the New Conscience. But so it seems to be. It recognises the body as part of the soul, and teaches salvation for both. It extends into the social void and chaos of the new wealth the forms of order, peace and love. It is exercising the passions of greed and hate that are playing hide-and- seek in the interstices of our social reorganisation. It is demanding that the anarchy of business be civilised by the acceptance there of the principles of citizenship instead of Cainship. It insists that competition, instead of claiming a sort of state sovereignty, should come into the union and like all other social forces acknowledge the rule of the people. It is putting these doctrines, which are all old enough, into an every-day application in an actual organisation, and living them, really dying for them, as the workingmen and their women and children in many a strike have done. The labour movement thus shows itself to be walking in the way of salvation which so many are anxiously seeking. Uncouth, ignorant, despised, many of these men are. Vicious, too, we are told. But we can remember that to many of his con- temporaries Christ was only a glutton and a winebibber. They have no cathedrals except the blue sky that bends over the evicted and evictor alike. They have little art or music. These grow but slowly in slums and cata- combs, but history has seen them grow there while the art in the air above died. There is this mighty difference between the labour movement and all the Utopias. While a few clubs and drawing rooms are watering and warming their little hot- house Utopias with sentimental smiles and tears, the labour movement grows of itself outdoors cannot be stopped from growing. The learned prove it can't grow, the mighty swear it shan't grow and it grows. It NEW CONSCIENCE IN INDUSTRY 141 grows wisely, more wisely than the older brotherhoods of the Guilds of the Middle Ages and antiquity. "I perceive," says Ruskin, "the real cause of the decay of the Guilds of Europe to have lain chiefly in their selfish- ness and isolation." Our modern movement sails a broader sea. The Local Brotherhood centres in the National, and the ideal of the International organisation of each trade is on the way to realisation. The National Brotherhoods combine in the Federation of Labour. The International Trades-Union and other Workingmen's Congresses are making practical progress toward the international organisation of all labour. The farmers' unions and the workingmen's are allying themselves. The new nation the Internation is almost born, in which every man will be a sweater, but only of his own brow. In this broadening of these brotherhoods beyond the limits of calling and locality, in their universal demand for arbitration instead of war and strikes, we see enter that greatest personage of all the people absent hitherto at the council boards of the labour movement. In all this we have the possibility, the potency, the promise of a social regeneration with peace and prosperity. It was this John Burns meant when he said that the dockers' strike had shown a peaceful way of solving the social problem which it was thought revolution alone could settle. Such organisations as these of the farmers and the workingmen can be made the ribs of the state. The future appears to offer to us as an alternative to the labour movement a choice between a social breaking up in comparison with which the catastrophe of the old Pagan civilisations was but a summer lightning, a dead level of centralised, monotonous industrial organisation, a false socialism imposed on the masses by cunning Kings and Capitalists. These can be seen already at i 4 2 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR work, with their Imperial rescripts and Congressional Anti-Trust bills aimed at labour alone. This false socialism would arrest human progress indefinitely by a despotism beyond anything on record. If our present civilisation continues it must of necessity be centralised beyond all past experience. The whole world is becoming one market. Individual liberty, if it is to survive, must offset this high centralisation by an equally deep specialisa- tion of person, place and pursuit. This Labour movement this new Church and State is no dream of the twentieth century. It is a big fact of to-day the biggest fact. It has its poets, philoso- phers, prophets, friends, who have found in the suffering of the people the secret of literature. It has hundreds of students of economic science; fanatics as devoted as any petrels that ever flew the storm, a world-encircling labour press. On the first day of May millions of men, by a voluntary impulse thrilling across all the boundary lines of inter- national hatred, have poured into the streets of Europe and America, at a cost to themselves of many millions of dollars, to bear witness to the faith of their out- raged bodies. These figures bent, these hands har- dened, these faces aged, by millions, for you and me, will gather again and again in these streets. Let us go to them ; they will call us brother, sister. In the dockers' strike three things, making a new era in the social life of the world, as John Morley pointed out, happened for the first time in history. Skilled labour came to the help of the unskilled; the well-to-do came to the help of the poor; the world came to the help of the locality. There are dull and sodden individuals who seem to care for nothing above the low round of animal-like existence. But for us, and for our times, it is a salient fact that the NEW CONSCIENCE IN INDUSTRY 143 masses are outreaching for participation on equal terms in the good and the goods they produce. What puts the outreaching as an imminent and practical issue on the order of the day for to-day is the further fact that modern means of production men, machinery, land, science, good-will are ample to produce showers of gold for all, and another fact, that we the American and European peoples have, through the division of labour, the concentration of industry and the general experience of working without the eye of the master, acquired the moral qualities needed for working in masses for an employer not in sight. The public could step into the place of the absentee capitalist in thousands of indus- tries without the slightest jar to the machinery. There is one exception, and it is a very important one. Farming has not yet been consolidated, capitalised. It is still an occupation of small men with small capital. But the vortex of concentration has begun there, too. Greater than the waste of land, greater than the waste of manual labour, greater than all the other wastes of the wealth of King Demos to-day is the waste of the genius of the Hampdens, Miltons, Cromwells, who " rest their heads upon the lap of earth," unexpressed to the last, because "their lot forbade." Is there a right in every child to his opportunity a natural right? Why lose ourselves in these, as the great Stein called them, metaphysical abstractions? Enough to know that we, men and women, members of society, are the creators of social rights, and can give and gain rights without any other limit than that of the common consent and common co- operation. We, creators of society, can guarantee to every one of ourselves the preparations for entry into the race. "Must we dig sewers, or do scavenger work, or scrub isdewalks? Others are doing that for us. Must we i 44 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR do it for them, under your Golden Rule? Is the poet to be put to breaking stone because someone is breaking stone to make the road smooth for him?" This, triumphantly put, is the question which in one form or another is always shot forth as a poser to those who preach that the Golden Rule is as much the law of industry as of the Church or of politics. This is a test question. The answer is, Yes. Those who cannot give this answer, joyfully, con- fidently, betray that they do not understand the trend of their own times, and have failed to grasp either the moral or economic principles of our social life. They have neither foresight nor historic perception. The answer is, Yes. But the horror of menial work which underlies the question is of itself a revelation that the mind of the questioner is morbid to the last degree. First. A very great part of this nasty work is entirely unnecessary, and when civilisation becomes decent no one will have to be asked to do it. Second. Practically all the back-breaking work of the world can be done by machinery a great deal more than is done now under all our devices of suppression of the forces of nature by patents, monopolies, shut- downs. Machinery now, it is calculated, puts fifty artificial men by the side of every workingman ; it could as easily put one hundred by his side. Third. It will be a benefit, not a harm, to all, and especially to the finer natures, to take part in the coarse work of the world, refined and lightened as it will be. Fourth. The nobler natures scorn these exemptions. Nothing is so elegant, says Emerson, as to wait on your- self. Civilisation makes itself by the progressive assump- NEW CONSCIENCE IN INDUSTRY 145 tion by man of the heavy tasks once laid wholly on the backs of women. The Manual Training Schools put the son of the millionaire by the son of the stoker at the forge and the lathe. The sphere of manual training is constantly enlarging in our scheme of education, and the curse of labour is fading away like other superstitions. Labour has been a curse because we have cursed the labourer. With the abolition of slavery goes its philoso- phy of the curse of labour. Our modern joy of function, effort and fruit brings the revelation that labour is not a curse unless creation is accursed. Every stroke of labour is a stroke in the ever-renewed task of creating the world, and man. The common toil by which men build up the common weal is a true sacrifice something made sacred. It is as imperative to put an end to classes in industry as in the political and social life of the people. To abolish the distinction between rich and poor, between hand workers and brain workers, is as real a social need of the twentieth century as the abolition of that between the lords and serfs and master and slave was in the nineteenth century. All must be rich, as all can be, and all must be both brain workers and hand workers, with full and free opportunity guaranteed by the community to reach their highest possibility. History shows how true it is that those who hear these sayings and do them are like the wise man who built his house on a rock, while everyone who hears these sayings and does them not is like unto the foolish man who built his house upon the sand. The capitalists who administer the industry of mankind for palaces for themselves instead of palaces for all will find, are finding, that they have built on the sand as surely as the Southern slaveholder and the feudal 146 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR baron. The houses that have had firm foundations have been those like the family, the community, which have been built on the plan that those who take must give. The Golden Rule is conservative, not radical. It is of high ethical but slow intellectual intensity. It is prac- tical, not ideal. To do to others as we would that others should do to us is to make fraternal the state of society in which we are, rather than to advance out of it. The knight of the Middle Ages would be a faithful follower of the Golden Rule if he gave his opponent a fair fight according to the rules of chivalry. To kill fairly as he would wish to be killed that would be all he would get out of the Golden Rule. He would never dream of abolishing the tournament any more than a Frederick the Great would interpret it as a demand that he give up war. The Golden Rule inculcates that we are to give everyone the benefit of our present conception, not that we are to seek better conceptions. It is the maxim of the peacemaker, not of the reformer. It is the law- giver of an "ought," but not of the highest "ought." It says we ought to give others what we ask of them, but it stops short of saying that we ought neither to ask nor give such things as tournaments, duels, stock ex- changes, land monopolies. The Golden Rule tunes its world up to the pitch of brotherliness, but it leaves to innovating minds the task of conceiving and bringing about a better world for the brothers to share. Jesus, who gave the Golden Rule its last touch, did not condemn slavery. The Golden Rule is the ethics of the heart; there must also be what Salter in his "Ethical Religion" finely calls the ethics of the intellect. The social problem of any period will be found to divide itself into two parts. First, within the frontiers drawn by the ruling ideals to bring the people into a NEW CONSCIENCE IN INDUSTRY 147 brotherly practise of the ideals. Second, to change the ideals. In the competitive business world of the past century the aspirations have been of "making money," "winning a way," "going to the top," "business success," "buying cheap, selling dear." These rules of the game and the game itself have been as religiously accepted as true and good as the tournament in its day. Within the area of this public opinion the spokesmen of the Golden Rule, the preachers, the political economists, the legislators, have insisted that the game be played fraternally, but they do not question the game. They say to the competitive millions: Do as you would be done by, Give good measure, Work faithfully, Pay the living wage, Share profits, Arbitrate, Abolish sweating and child labour, Recognise trade-unions, Give the eight- hours' day. To these people the Golden Rule could not mean the abolition of the competitive system, because they believe the competitive system is good. It is not the Golden Rule calls them to the adoption of the co-operative system. Not until some other influence has made them see that co-operation is better than competition does the Golden Rule acquire jurisdiction. Then it says, Co- operate with others if you would have others co-operate with you. The Golden Rule is a law, and that is true of this law which is true of all laws. Its function is to enforce a pre-existing conscience. It does not lead but follow ; it is second, not first. It does not create the new conscience, it only applies it. More searching, more holy than the Golden Rule is that which commands us to inquire if what we desire for ourselves and others is a right desire. Its law is, Do what you ought, not Do what you would, whether for yourself or for others. But the Golden Rule, as our quotations show, was evolving even as it was being uttered. It grew from an 148 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR exhortation to love thy neighbour, that is, the brother Jew, or the brother Chinaman, or brother Buddhist, into one to love all men as thyself. It grew from an exhorta- tion to love others as thyself into the far finer word to love "as I have loved you," that is, perfectly. This is made definite in one of its latest versions, where we are told that to love as the Father loves is to keep His com- mandments, and His commandments are not grievous. Translated into every-day secular speech, this means that the law of love is that all are to seek the full develop- ment of all. "Love is energy of life," and it sets to work the powers of everyone to create in order to realise for all their highest possibilities of progress. Thus understood in its final form, the Golden Rule reaches the ethical expression it lacked in its earlier shapes ; and in its union of loving and keeping the commandments adjures us to do as we ought, not as we would. But when in obedience to the new conscience this rule, Do as you ought, becomes the law of a new perception, like the voices rising in the midst of slavery demanding emancipation, the Golden Rule becomes an explosive where it had been a cement. It disassociates that which it had associated. Its old order begins to break up, and a new order begins to form. In every society and every age this dissolution and reunion can be seen in operation around every "living" question as a vortex. That feeling in your breast which you believe to be most peculiarly and privately your own you may be sure is the very one which is universal among men. The appetites for power which the strong man, the capitalist, would persuade himself are his distinction are precisely those which are felt by his fellow-men. So horrible is the very thought to the capitalist that others may do to him as he is doing to others that every once NEW CONSCIENCE IN INDUSTRY 149 in a while we read in the papers of someone who goes to the madhouse, or commits suicide, or, almost worse, lives tortured in the horror of his fears that he and his family are going to the poorhouse. This panic the rich live in is the proof beyond doubt that they have not done to others as they would that others should do to them. Their apprehensive life is the confession of this sin, and the prophecy of the punishment from which the true gods never release anyone. "Fear," says Emerson, " is the herald of all revolutions. One thing he teaches, that there is rottenness where he appears. Our property is timid, our laws are timid, our cultivated classes are timid. Fear for ages has boded and mowed and gibbered over government and property. That obscene bird is not there for nothing. He indicates great wrongs which must be righted." Piracy was the first form of commerce. Our industrial war and piracy are also rudiments out of which will come the industrial peace we wait for. The Germany of Frederick William III., Stein and Hardenburg, emanci- pated its serfs because its enemy Napoleon had an army of free men, and he could be met only by a free people in arms. The passion of getting is not to be eradicated, but it is to take its next step and learn that for the would-be getter to destroy those who can give is to destroy himself, and that the only lasting way to get is to give. By this philosophy the pirate became the merchant, and Germany freed herself of the conqueror by freeing her own people. At the present moment our industrial life is a life of war. There is not yet indus- trially an American people, or an English people, nor any other people, for there is no industrial peace. But the same creative power in mankind which has begun these societies will continue them. This creative power 1 5 o MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR will extend the partial peace of politics beyond the territorial borders of our different countries, and give us the European peace, then the world peace. It will give us, in industry, the peace which is now the great aspiration as it is the great need of the people. The distresses of the industrial world are like those of a country ravaged by foreign invasion and domestic insurrection. Millions are without work; millions who are making daily bread do not get daily bread; hardly anyone knows what to count upon as to certainty of employment or of subsistence ; the people create property only to see it pass to others ; there is famine ; families are torn apart; there is, in the unnecessary death rates, a greater mortality than that of battles, and a greater maiming of limb by the machinery of peace than by that of war ; and cyclones of passion tear their way across the surface of society. This is war. The industry and finance and trade which are operated by the motive of getting rich which means precisely to get more than others, and to get from others, and to get without giving the equivalent is piracy. War has had its function in social development. The great terror that blackens the sky of the people to-day is poverty. War slays its thousands, but poverty its tens of thousands. War draws our blood once in a while, but poverty never lets go its killing hand. The fear of poverty is a haunting panic that clutches at the hearts of even the well-to-do. Poverty lines the path of life with ambuscades of every evil known to humanity ignorance, disease, hatred, fear, slavery, death even dishonour. Poverty is the greatest weapon to-day in the armory of tyranny. It does for the riders of the beridden classes what their swords did for the Spartan youth in holding the Helots down. In every banking parlour you can hear it NEW CONSCIENCE IN INDUSTRY 151 argued that the people must be kept down, since only thus will they be virtuous and society safe. But the same theory and practice of human nature which has discovered that horses can be trained better by not being "broken," and that property can be brought into better respect if every petty larceny is not made a hang- ing offence, is discovering that there is a better path to virtue and prosperity through expression than repression, through love than fear, through hope than despair. The ancients believed that the people could be made to work only through slavery; we believe that they can be made to work only through poverty. Such loyalty as that of a free people is not possible among the Persians or Russians, held subject by force, and it is beginning to be seen that people work well only as they work freely. When poverty is abolished, then the production of wealth in the world will really begin. When men can put forth their energies without compulsion, secure that the fruits shall be theirs, when every faculty is loosed and inspired by hope, joy, faith and love, we shall see for the first time a Commonwealth. If the multitudes of the business world are to become an association, instead of dissolving into a self -destroying mob, they must group themselves in strict observance of the Golden Rule as the supreme law of practicable society. How must industry be organised under this law? Is it enough that the employer shall provide model conditions in the factory, or mine, or field; shall share profits; shall live among the workmen? That is necessary, but that is not enough. The employer the employing class, or society for them must ask and answer this question. What would I like in their place? That can be answered by another question: What do I like? What the employer does 1 52 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR like is to be the employer; to organise; to be boss; to direct; to make money; to have distinction. He likes these because he is human. His employees, as they are human, would like them also. The Golden Rule in politics says that what we like we must give our fellows. If we like freedom, we must give freedom. The Golden Rule has no different answer to give for the government of industry. If you want independence, power, wealth, luxury, leisure, you must give them. By this Golden Rule of giving to all what you get from all, we have created all we have of enduring establish- ments of political life. Only by this rule can we settle ourselves in institutions of industry that will endure. Through the constant demolition and reconstruction of social institutions, through all the centuries, one thing hasl never been destroyed the will of men to abolish one by one the tenures which interfered with the mutual- ities of life together, and to create one by one the institu- tions of reciprocity. The genius to unite is what is needed now. The Time and the word wait on him. In the era of dis- cussion, striking out of new ideas, criticism, the genius of disunion was the ruling spirit, necessarily. What was wanted was the differentiation of thought to the uttermost possible. But now deeds, not ideas, are to be the events. Thinkers may separate; doers must co- operate. We have to begin, now, to apply what is ap- plicable of ideas, schemes, consciences, so lavishly elaborated by the poets, reformers, seers, whose era of wonderful and alarum utterance is just drawing to its close. Our day dawns to call us to do. Therefore, workers of all nations and all schools, Unite! The world belongs to those who unite. CHAPTER VII NEW CONSCIENCE TRANSFORMING POLITICS KILLING THE PARTY SPIRIT THE abolition of slavery has never stopped, the creation of the republic has never been intermitted. There was a time when to spare the conquered by enslaving instead of slaughtering them was obedience to the Golden Rule. That step up was no sooner made than the Golden Rule was revised to demand emancipation. That done, the unresting spirit of Redemption puts forward their claim to citizenship. Citizenship got, the citizen must have the Commonwealth. Beyond the Commonwealth lies unending a line of ascent. The persistence of the Golden Rule in its progress toward supreme jurisdiction can now be regarded as a verified scientific fact in the political history of the race. But political is but one department of social; industrial is also social. The law of the one must be the law of the other. Hundreds of millions of people by common consent have adopted as the rule of rules, naming it the Golden Rule that they are to do to others as they would have others do to them. The exhortations of Confucius and of Buddha are so close to this that it may be correctly described as the chosen ideal of the vast majority of mankind. To this they are day by day bending their lives. This by a very real though unorganised plebiscite they have adopted as the written constitution of human society. This they have put into action in a thousand 153 i S4 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR institutions, private and public, domestic and social, local, national and international. We create political life and get political rights by giving others what we want from them. Protection from invasion or insurrection, our vote, free speech, public education, justice, parks, water, all the advantages of that co-operation we call government, we get by giving. If you would have all others give you free speech, give all others free speech. If you would have all men tax themselves to defend you from invasion, tax yourself to defend them. If you would that others should build your pleasure grounds by the seashore, among the fells, along the river banks, that kings might envy, pay a park tax for such pleasure grounds for all. In fine, continue further in this path of "Love one another" which has brought you thus far. It is the ten commandments of good manners, of family life, of the law of contracts which demand free parties and full consideration of the political economy, which holds that service must repay service of the state, which taxes all for all. Both Franklin and, one hundred years later, the Bishop of Peterborough are credited with saying that the practice of Christianity and the existence of our society are incompatible. Of course the perfect practice of Christianity and our present social system could not co-exist a second. But another thing is also as true and as well worth dwelling on, for the building up of the people in that belief in themselves without which they will .never accomplish anything: Unless we were doing unto others, in a multitude of things, as we would that others should do unto us, unless we were loving each other, in many ways, our society could never have been built up to what it is, and could not now stand a day. NEW CONSCIENCE IN POLITICS 155 We discover by this examination that the Golden Rule is pre-eminently the working rule by which men are shaping their lives together. The Golden Rule is the me- chanics of love. The Constitution of the United States is a political application of it. When the question is how people shall get their letters carried, they form themselves into the people, establish the postoffice. The postoffice is one of the institutions of the Golden Rule, and as this is the code of love it can accurately be said that organised love is our letter carrier. Our problem is not to show that love is the law. That has always been admitted. What is to be the next harmonisation? is our question. Men being able to associate only by obedience to the laws of association, the Golden Rule is the supreme law of association. We speak of political peace, but the phrase is mis- leading. The life political is peace compared with riot and private war, but the methods of government by parties are essentially belligerent, the tactics of hate which seeks good for self out of injury to others. That they do not shed blood does not make them any the less war. In politics, too, the people are sighing for peace. They are as weary of the political campaign as of the industrial competition. This is apparent in the thought of the people on every side, here and in Europe. It is one of the keynotes of the English co-operative movement, the worldly success of which has been as remarkable as the intensity and radicalism of the hope of its founders, that their method might prove to be the salvation of society. One of the leaders of the movement concludes his important work on " Co-operative Production" with these words on "the best method of accelerating progress": "I think we ought," he says, " as citizens actively do, engage ourselves in the conduct i S 6 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR both of the local and imperial government with the object of gradually brushing away as an obsolete piece of machinery the method of governing the people by means of political partisanship. . . . The cry foi ' Bread-and-Butter politics ' is really the popular rendering of the view that all government should be a system of co- operation for mutual benefit." In these words we have one of those intimations of the future which are struck prophetic out of the common sense of the people by the hard knocks of their experience the most fertile source of true ideals. This purpose of using politics to put an end to politics "of engaging in the conduct of government ... to brush away the method of governing by political partisanship" is as yet felt among the people only in its first form of profound discontent and discouragements with party methods and results, but this is its first form. The most advanced political organisation of the English workingmen at this moment has as one of its chief objects to put an end to party government. Its writers and speakers constantly recur to this theme. This idea is not yet consciously expressed with the same clearness among American workingmen, but their hopelessness of the appeal to political action for the redress of their grievances arises from distrust of political parties. In vain do the newspapers and preachers and reformers call upon the people to use their party machinery to drive corruption- ists and monopolists out of power. In vain do enthu- siasts call conventions and organise new political parties. The people in search of reform will neither go to the primaries nor seek control of the controlling organisations of the existing parties. To use a phrase of Napoleon's, they appear to have become "exhausted by political passions." The lesson taught by all the past attempts NEW CONSCIENCE IN POLITICS 157 at popular government, expounded by all the anxious and sympathetic lovers of freedom from Aristotle to Washington, has been taught again. The first steps in progress have been made, but the progress has been more in the destruction of the old evils of feudalism and privilege than in the building of that which can perma- nently take their place. Plutarch tells us in his "Lives" how the Greeks used to elect their Senators by the voice of the people. The judges of election were shut up in a room overlooking the market place where the citizens were assembled. One after another the "favourite sons" were nominated by their spokesmen, and their party in the market place vociferously seconded their nominations. The judges above kept careful note of the volume, earnestness and intensity of the approving cries given each candidate. When the "returns were all in" the judges declared him elected who had, according to their ears, been given the best cheers. This seems preposterous to us, but the Greeks who chose their rulers by this gabble of the rabble are ranked by Galton as two grades above us in civilisation, or as much as we are above the Africans. This method of theirs does not seem more absurd to us than to our successors in civilisa- tion will seem ours of selecting the men who are to make streets, build waterworks, administer public sanitation, conduct national defence, finance and all the other functions of the common welfare. Anyone who has sat in the quadrennial convention of one of our national parties for the nomination of Presidential candidates, has seen the proceedings suspended for hours while in the packed galleries the factions of the rival candidates howled themselves hoarse in alternating competitive choruses to impress upon the delegates below the superior popularity of this and that candidate. Thus American i 5 8 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR democracy illustrates the methods of the Grecian. Our customs of stump-speaking, magnetism, partisan editorials, stampeding conventions, mass meetings, firing the popular heart, availability, and secret cabals and selfish syndicates working the puppet show from behind, are not, when one comes to think about them, vastly superior to the older Greek suffrage by shoutings. Our methods put the discharge of duties of vital public importance into the hands of passion, prejudice, whim and trimming, when the demand is for experience, courage, genius and character. In applied . common sense, the government of our public institutions is in this below the government of our private enterprises. How long would our banks and corporations last if they chose "magnetic" men by political campaign methods for cashiers and treasurers? Our political methods in truth represent the reaction against the preceding systems which they overthrew. These denied the right of the people to any voice. In escaping from this re- pression the people have swung to the opposite extreme, that the voice is everything. The people are fast learning by its results that this system does not express the will of the people. It nullifies the will of the people. To make it necessary that the people should say their say about all the policies and all the officials ends in making it impossible for them to say anything. The voter who has his living to make cannot spare the time to master politics. The ballot becomes a blanket sheet, and to find out the merits of the myriad candidates the bearings of the issues and the requirements of the multi- tude of officers is beyond the citizen. Only the specialist can achieve this, and only the specialist does, but the specialist thus far has achieved it for the benefit of a clique who have obtained possession of the government NEW CONSCIENCE IN POLITICS 159 with all the perquisites of patronage, contracts, privileges, jobs, boodle and dignities, so that the oftener the people are called upon to caucus, to delegate, to vote, the more completely are their functions abandoned. From the ward gang to the national ring this has been the evolution of party politics. In America, where the public affairs are the vastest, public questions the most intricate, and the public hand, theoretically, is on the rudder, the power of private "rings" is greatest. The average American citizen has, and knows he has, nothing to say about who shall lead his party or what the party shall do when in office. The administration of our parties, and hence of our state and national governments, is carried on by cliques for the benefit of cliques. The people are not in it. The real governors of the Govern- ment of this country are neither the people nor their official representatives, but the agents of private interests which, through their "legal representatives" and their lobbyists, prepare the tariffs, subsidies, contracts, grants, exemptions, appointments for office, and see to their enactment and confirmation. This is not the will of the people. It does not result from the corruption of the people. "The people are uncorrupted," said Stein, writing of the selfishness and rottenness of public opinion in Berlin in 1808, and this is always true of the people. The people cannot be corrupted. They are not too good, but there are too many of them and the public interests are much too great for the sinister special interests. However lumberingly, the public does in the long run outreach the private. We are only slowly evolving the machinery for a direct expression of the people's will. It was a great stroke in the road of society to invent representative government, political historians tell us. 160 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR It permitted society to expand not only politically but in all ways beyond the limits of the voice of the tribal herdsman of the day's journey. It has made the modern state possible. Another great invention in the machinery of representative government is taking place at the present moment, that which is now seen in Switzerland, by which in a large society of the modern world the govern- ment of millions is again made audible and by all, brought again within the voice of the herdsman and again within the limits of a day's journey. Through the Initiative and Referendum the voice of the people of the largest state can again be heard as clearly as in the market place of Athens. It enables the Town Meeting to put on national or even imperial purposes and yet remain a Town Meeting ; and in Switzer- land we have seen it evolved naturally and easily out of the Town Meeting. The most interesting thing about Switzerland is that there we see the people continually changing their fundamental law the Constitution to make it fit the changed circumstances of their life. The period which elapses between the proposal to change the Swiss Constitution and the change itself is only a few months. This telephonic current of response to the people's wishes as to the provisions of the Constitution is a far higher exhibition of democratic ability than anything to be seen in the field of constitutional change either in England or the United States. New Zealand has advanced beyond Switzerland in the economic value of some of its changes like the unemployed acts but in no country in the world is the supreme will of the people so quickly and wholly the law of the land as in Switzerland. The Swiss politicians under the referendum say: "All rests with the people," and they skulk the campaign when the people debate their laws. Through these debates the NEW CONSCIENCE IN POLITICS 161 people attain their political efficiency. The men and women in the towns are the equal of those anywhere, and on the average are certainly superior to the English or any other nation, but the people in the country certainly do not seem naturally capable of understanding such questions as these. It is the debates which teach them. The laws are given to them to study. Perhaps not one in five hundred studies them from the printed page, but they hold meetings and hear them discussed, and this way gives them the most serious study. It used to take the Athenians all day and every day to settle their few political questions by the public and private discussions in the market place. And they had to discuss no labour legislation, no control of corpora- tions, almost no public works, not one in a hundred of the matters which pass before our municipal councillors. Our voters have in their hands not only city government, but county, state, national, all complicated with huge responsibilities of social life of which the ancients had no inkling. As a mere question of physical powers, it is beyond the citizen to do his duty in this labyrinthine world. He must let it go, and he does let it go. He betakes himself of stern necessity to making a living for himself and his family, leaving politics to the politicians. But the plain man knows well enough that day by day the politicians are taking away this living he is trying to make, and that the sure end of it all will be that he will have to turn at bay and do to the politicians as he has always had to do to the monopolisers of power. But how ? He does not yet know. Meanwhile he listens with impassive discouragement to the exhortations of the conservative "to do his duty at the polls," and to the projects of the partisan radicals for giving him by count- less municipalisations and nationalisations ten times as MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR much politics to attend to as now. In Germany, where the people have not been " exhausted by political passions " and by political overwork, there is the possibility of popular enthusiasm for a socialist campaign. But the Germans, politically, are beginners; we in America are post-graduates. We have given government by party politics a century's trial, and the common sense of the people, unexpressed though it is as yet, knows at bottom that it has broken down. The apathy of the voter is paired with the inefficiency of the office holders as evidence of this. Government by party politics makes it im- possible for this country to have any settled financial, tariff or social policy. Party government is a sure instrument for those who wish to prevent the use by the people of their governmental rights to help themselves. A private individual who would change front in his business as our Government does in its currency, its foreign trade, its banking, would have a short career. Nothing but the prodigious riches flowing from union enables the nation to stand the drain of the waste of wealth by this continual building up to pull down. Party politics give the English landed interests all the help they want to prevent the reforms of English land abuses. Because of party politics the Tory and Liberal humanitarians of Great Britain cannot get together to end the reign of terror of the Turk. Several years ago M. de Laveleye declared that the Parliamentary system was working defectively almost everywhere, even in England, and Eugene d'Eichthal in his recent book shows that this is true still more to-day of France. What the situation is in America we can see in the deadlock of reform in every common council, state capitol, and at Washington. The highways of the great West, the Pacific roads, are NEW CONSCIENCE IN POLITICS 163 able to use party politics as they wish to obtain unearned appropriations of public lands, and to complete their power to charge monopoly prices for moving the people and their products. But the people, to whom the Government belongs, cannot use the Government to pro- tect themselves against these highwaymen. All they can do is to watch from their homes the cunning manipu- lations of the experts at Washington. To cope with these special interests is beyond the time or the ability of the people. The Government is "their Government," but it has become so highly specialised that only special- ists can operate it. Government by party politics has become government by lobby and by deadlock. To accomplish only the legislation that is wanted by parasitic interests; to prevent all government for the benefit of the governed ; that is the play to be seen at Washington, London, Paris and in the city halls. For how many weary years have the reformers of England been working through the laws to replace upon the land some of the tillers who have been driven off. When they get their allotment act through Parliament it has been hamstrung by "amendments," and is never able to do its work. In old Rome, where they had less politics, they did succeed in redistributing a large part of the public lands among the people. But in England and America there is no present hope that this would be possible. Govern- ment by party is not a means of settling things ; it is the best of devices for keeping them unsettled. The party in power reduces the tariff. The accident of a reverse in the general prosperity makes this party unpopular. No matter whether it were responsible for the reverse or not, out it goes. The citizen must avenge his sufferings and losses on someone. The missile nearest to his hand is the ballot, and with it he knocks out the administration. 164 Then the voter rules? No, he finds the new party does not reduce the tariff. Government is good in proportion as it gives us rest instead of change, peace instead of war. We cannot do without party, George William Curtis says. This is true, in that the people cannot surrender their rights to self-rule. But, as he also says, party is but a means to this, it it not an end in itself. The proposal to find some better agent, if not for all at least for the bulk of the work now done by party government, is a proposal to improve self-government, not to abandon it. Washington in his Farewell Address speaks of party as a prophet who foresaw the harm that would come by party, and as an observer who had seen the damage begun. His remarks show that his meditations had had a philosophic depth and that he had caught the truth that government by party in the chronology of social inventions is the first instrument the people find for their opposition to government by monarchy. Govern- ment by party is the method of resistance to government by person. Government by party has in its very nature something of the uprising, the insurrection, the tumult. It is an assertion of the right of the people to change their government; and to change it as often, if they like, as they change their minds. It bears the marks of being what it is the attempt to give order and form, organisa- tion, method, to the crowd who have come together to regain their liberties. It smacks in its processes of revolution. The revolution has been made peaceful, but it is revolution. The people have the right to have a new king every election day; they have the right, for good cause, to impeach and depose their elected sovereign. They can elect a high-tariff Congress in 1892, and in 1894 elect a low-tariff Congress. The people have found their will, and they mean to use it. Manifestly, all this NEW CONSCIENCE IN POLITICS 165 is but the first enthusiasm of escape from the evil system which altogether denied the will of the people. When the slave of the South became free and could change his domicile if he chose, he became a passionate pilgrim of travel. He would go up and down the land just to show that he could do so. As soon as he earned a dollar in one place he spent it for his railroad fare to the next town. As the Negro travelled to luxuriate in his right to change his domicile, regardless of the fact that the travel was a waste and harm, so the people, reacting from despotic control, have abandoned themselves to a riot and ecstasy of "liberty" of talking, voting, running for office, cau- cusing, changing rulers and policies, throwing public improvement; foreign relations, finance or any other interest into these hands, or those, or back again, to be well done, or ill done, or not done at all, for any reason that whim, or passion, or liking, or wilfulness, or "mag- netism," or the irritation of hard times might suggest, or for no reason. The truth is that this is the mere delirium of reaction. Washington's mind saw this, as he shows. "In govern- ment of a monarchical cast," he says, "patriotism may look with indulgence if not with favour upon the spirit of party." But when the individual has been multiplied by twenty millions there has been no immunity gained by the multitude from the same laws of cause and effect to which the individual is subject. To do as he wills, to be governed by resentments, partialities, to sport with his powers, to be whimsical where he should be wise, and changeable where he should not change, to spend because he has the means, and to do because he has the right these are maxims fatal for the individual and fatal for the people. The famous language of Washington with regard to the danger of party almost goes to the i66 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR length of declaring these evils to be inseparable from party. The failure of the American people to escape the evils of which he warned them has been clear enough to acquit of extravagance those who step over the small gap in Washington's statement and declare with the English co-operators and the Independent Labour Party men that government by party must be brought to an end. "Party," George William Curtis says, "is ceasing to be an agency of the people. It is becoming the instru- ment of 'the Machine. " : Again, he describes it "as merely a convenient but clumsy agency to promote certain public objects." Party threatens liberty in the same way that a stan'ding army does. It breeds a servility to itself which the heads of the powerful organ- isations are constantly tempted to use for their own selfish advancement. Mr. Curtis may be accepted as an authority upon the history of party spirit during the century that followed Washington's warning, Starting with everything that could qualify a republic to control its evil tendencies, we have failed. A survey of the ravages of faction from the first appearance of party government in the early republics to the present time certainly suggests strongly that there is in the form of government by party something radically defective. Not in the foundation principle that it is the welfare of all which the efforts of all, in government as elsewhere, must seek, and that what this welfare is and how to get it can be determined only by the voice and union of all. Not in this principle but in the methods of its application that this knowledge of welfare and the ways and means to it is to be got through the struggles of party. As the procedure of courts imitates the tactics of individual combat, the methods of party government NEW CONSCIENCE IN POLITICS 167 are a bloodless almost always bloodless reproduction of those of war. We speak of the political campaign, party struggles for the success of the party. We have thought that in government as in industry we could get the good of all as the result of the struggles of the parts. We have thought a selfish principle could lead us to an unselfish consummation. We have thought there was a self-acting beneficence in the world; that we were subject to "laws," and that we must be content to let these laws work themselves out, fatalistically confident that in the long run all would be well and that the glorious design of the Creator would be accomplished. This has been the fatalism of our past politics and political economy. But the new self-knowledge, a wider science and longer meditation is bringing us to displace this oriental fatalism forever by a creative conception of the powers and destiny of man. The science of society is what we make it. Political economy is what we make it. Politics is what we make it. Under the same sky and on the same soil and in the same years the Indian and the white man maintain political economies and politics as distinct as the complexions of the two races. We ourselves live under two distinct polities. In the one we get our food by making war on the war of weeds on grain, of hawks on chickens, of wolves on sheep. In the other we really live by proclaiming the peace of life instead of the struggle for life, and the struggle of the fittest (fiercest) to survive. We get poetry, art, beauty, happiness, by interfering to prevent the strong from crushing the weak and proclaiming the peace of home and fatherland. These are creative acts. They are the interference of a higher creative will with a lower; of a superior motive with an inferior. They are interferences with "natural law," unscientifically so called.! Do 1 68 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR not these precedents reveal a law of effort which must be progressively applied ? It seems not to be a mere straining after analogy to say that it is probable that we can no more leave our political destinies to be settled by the struggles of political parties for party advantage than we can trust our subsistence to the struggles of the weeds in the plains. The voter uses the party for his gain, and the party runs the government for the benefit of the party. This is the universal motive selfishness in its political expression, just as monopoly is the economic consummation of the same principle in industry. The struggles of parties are theoretically for the good of the state. Competition is, theoretically, for the wealth of all. But practically the results of the latter laissez faire have been such that modern civilisation has begun to move with great rapidity toward a political economy of co- operation. Our co-operative stores are private, and our municipal potato farms and national insurances are public milestones on the road to public co-operation. The changes in ideals and theory of life which are achieving this in the organisation of the common toilers are so deep that we may count confidently on seeing them revolutionise all our social life. Government by the play of self-interest will remain until industry by self-interest be given up. Striking confirmation of this is in the evidence we have shown that the co-operators and the socialists are independently and spontaneously agitating for the abolition of party government. A composite people like the American, by the very fact of its being composite, has brought to it the aptitudes to qualify it to operate the best features of the social life of all the nations from which it draws its recruits. Our national life resulting from a composition of peoples can be made as well a composititon of the abilities for NEW CONSCIENCE IN POLITICS 169 which each of those peoples has distinguished itself, and our social achievement can be made a composition of the best of their social achievements. The "checks" in the Constitution of the United States on popular power, such as the Senate the complicated procedure provided for making amendments to the constitution and the like are often described as proofs that the founders of the Government distrusted the people. It would be more accurate to say that they illustrate the distrust by the people of political methods by which the people were left at the mercy of their own caprices or passion. These checks were not imposed upon the American people. They were adopted by the American people. It was just such an act as when an individual frames out of his own experience or that of others rules for the control of a hasty tongue, an im- pulsive temper, a too great venturesomeness. Never probably has a system of government been put into operation among any people which has been so thoroughly discussed, weighed and approved by the people as that of the United States. The French provincial discussions, which produced the cahiers in which the grievances of the people of France and their ideas of the remedies were given, were not comparable as expressions of public opinion with the countryside, town, state and national deliberations of the American people upon the forms of the government they were about to ordain. The one fact that the Americans had had local self-government for a century- had given public opinion a sphere which it could find nowhere else. It was with their eyes upon the republics of Greece and Italy, ancient and mediaeval, and upon the Dutch Republic, and upon their own early political history, that our forefathers studied out their system of 1 70 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR checks checks upon the various departments of the government as well as upon the people. Their action was in the line of the direct evolution which can be traced through the growth of democracy from the earliest Grecian republics. Popular government has been steadily adding to the restraints upon popular action. Socrates was put to death by order of a mass meeting; Aristides was banished by a mere popular vote, from which there was no appeal. Confiscations were declared by plebiscite in Greece. It has become the will of the people to adjure such means of expressing their will. The proposal of the socialists, of the leaders of the co-operative movement, of the workingmen's party in Great Britain, to abolish govern- ment by party, looks to another creative act in the same line of the evolutionary creation of self-government. Because of a coming change, the people are heedless of the appeals to go to the polls and the primaries and attend to their political duties, which are being ceaselessly dinned into their ears by well-meaning reformers. It is because the people have tried to do by these political methods what cannot be accomplished by them that things have come to their present pass or, rather, impasse. The true remedy is not to go back to the impossible policy which produced these evils but to follow the forward event, for in that is the clue to the way out. The Boss and the Ring are the prototype of the reformers of the future. They represent the specialisation of functions. They are the result of the passing of executive administration out of the hands of the multitude, who are an unfit instrument, into the hands of a body compact enough to have a mind, a will, and to act upon them self-consciously. The Boss and the Ring are institutions to be adopted instead of being abolished, but to be NEW CONSCIENCE IN POLITICS 171 made public instead of private. It is a sad sight to see the public whipped up into a spasm of reform enthusiasm, only to find itself after its victory no better off than before. Tweed and the Tammany ring of New York were most gloriously overthrown by the people at the polls in 1870. But the people found themselves in 1895 more completely than before 1870 the victims of the rings, the bosses, the boodlers of Tammany. They rose in 1895, and the morning after the election the papers triumphantly proclaimed that the Tiger was dead again. But the Tiger lives and will live, for he is a necessity of the situation. Since the New Yorkers, from a lack of political science, will not get their business done by their own representatives it gets itself done by Tammany Hall representatives. Humanity can do a great many things, but there are some things it cannot do. It cannot bring its political energies up to revolutionary temperature every election day and every day between. People must dig, and bake, sleep, wed and die as well as vote and keep the eye of eternal vigilance always on their representatives. To discharge the political duties necessary to operate our Government by the present theoretical system would require that the entire popula- tion, like the Athenian freemen, should attend to nothing but politics. It would involve the strain of a perpetual revolution. In the anti-Tammany campaigns of 1870 and 1895 the people were worked up to a fever heat. Press, pulpit, bar, labour and commerce all took part. But no one could contend that, with all their efforts, they mastered more than a slight knowledge of the issues involved or of the personnel of the opposing faction. Nor have the results in either case been reform. After having been thrown into tumult in this way time and again, with no gain proportionate to the cost in wear and 1 72 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR tear, the people naturally refuse further invitations to go into convulsions as a cure for their political ills. They become "exhausted by their political passions." Perhaps it may be possible to rouse them to a resolute and passionate uprising, to use these political methods to make their further use unnecessary, abolishing politics by politics. But they will be very great and very fortunate reformers who accomplish this. Under a general reaction like that now visible against politics there is always some reason. The people not only refuse to entrust to their government, city, state and national, the new functions recommended by the socialists, but they are letting go by default their share in the government they already have. They find that the fruits of party adherents do not come up to the advertisements. Party politics don't work. There is something more here than betrayal of trust, personal weaknesses, incompetence of people. There is a defect in the system itself. It is contrary to common sense to make administration of great social functions dependent on popular favour, on some person, on popular moods, on ability of the magnetic man to hypnotise individuals and multitudes, on power of selfish syndicates to form themselves into a Macedonian phalanx and push their wedge through the body politic into place and profit. Partisan fury breeds as inevitably in government by party as avarice in industry by self-interest. Of course it is well enough to exhort people to do their best in a bad system while it is here moderation in all things but the prime problem is to find the better system. The merger of politics into education by the substitution of examination for election has already begun. This and the merger, also begun, of education into life will provide us a Work government instead of a Talk govern- NEW CONSCIENCE IN POLITICS 173 ment. The real universal suffrage will come only when education is universal and complete, when employment is universal, and freedom to choose any livelihood is universal. Election by examination is the beginning of the election by education, which Emerson prophesied. This is to be as momentous an advance upon representative govern- ment as representative government itself has been in the evolution of methods of self -steering by the people. This Work government will be much more a representative government than that chosen by the competitive shouting of our present system. Selected, instead of elected self -selected, first, by their aptitudes for particular lines of study and work and then selected by their achievements in the work of educating themselves along the lines of these aptitudes these representatives will represent the deliberate and intelligent will of the people, embodied in a system of universal education carefully built up to prepare the people to serve themselves on all sides of social activity. The offices will represent the needs of the people, as conceived by the people ; the officers will represent the people, as they have never been represented before. The play of selfishness in office seekers, of whim and passion in the electorate, will not be banished, but elevated to operate on a level infinitely higher than now. The will of the people will not be infringed upon. It will be the will of the people that does this. It will choose to express itself in this better way. It will be the forward step of a people reaching a new grade of social consciousness, and resolving by a united intelligence to abandon impulsive and shallow methods, as the indi- viduals who compose the people are learning such rules as thinking before speaking and not to act when angry or emotional. Our present system will seem as ludicrous 174 in the future as the elections by lung power described by Plutarch, or the Hebraic and Grecian method of choosing generals by lot. Perhaps in these days of accelerating consummations we may in this be our_own posterity, and achieve the reform in time to allow our ripe afternoon to laugh at the follies of the morning. The People does not mean a mere agglomeration of persons. Because a certain number of millions are enclosed within the borders of the United States they are not therefore a People. The People is, like most of our capitalised words, the name of an ideal. It is some- thing we hope to be. A multitude becomes a people as it becomes united in faith and works. There is an American people for peace as against invaders or in- surgents; but there is no American people for defence against the starvation or pauperisation of the victims of those who hasten to be rich. There is no American people for peace in industry. There is an American people for co-operation in carrying letters but not in operating railroads. We are a Postoffice People, a Police People, a War People, a Courts of Justice People, a Ballot People, and in things in most of which the nations have been people before us for thousands of years. But we are not yet a Telegraph People, a Railroad People, a Postal Savings Bank People, a National Insurance People, a Right- of-all-to-Employment People, though in one part of the world or another nations have advanced ahead of us to these unities of effort and participation. We of America are, for whatever reason, distinctly behind many other nations in many of such conscious collabora- tions on a national scale of the common resources for the common good. "We, the people," said our forefathers founding this Government the whole body of the inhab- NEW CONSCIENCE IN POLITICS 175 itants of a territory for the first time in history making each other equal citizens. But even these forward men failed to see that their People was only a Half-People, inasmuch as they left the women outside the pale of political humanity. Abigail Adams saw it, but the truth does not seem to have gone much farther. It does not appear that it penetrated the mind of her John Adams, though her letters show she deposited it there. The wisest of the fathers did see that in a land where the inhabitants were white and black the union of the whites alone did not make a true People. But Washing- ton, Jefferson and their associates did what they could, and called it by the best name possible. Half a century of maddening unrest and the blood of the Civil War were what it cost to pass the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendment to the Constitution and give the blacks the right to say with us, "We, the People." The fourteenth amendment admits to citizenship on the basis of the mutual recognition of manhood all adult males "without distinction of race." We have taken another step up toward the creation of our full ideal of the people. Most of the states, says Aristotle, which have made war their business in order to enslave others rather than merely to prevent themselves from being reduced to slavery by others, have been ruined as soon as they acquired a supreme power over those around them. Very shrewd and profound is this other observa- tion, and as luminous to-day as when he wrote it twenty- five hundred years ago, that that city is not to be esteemed happy in which the people have been trained to over- power their neighbours, for the same principle will lead every citizen who can, to endeavour to overpower his fellow citizens as Pausanius did in Lacedemonia, and as the class who have led the English in their foreign con- 1 76 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR quests have done to their people at home. The punish- ment which the English people suffer for making the Hindoos, the Egyptians, the Zulus their tributaries is that they are themselves held as tributaries at home to their ruling classes. Our philosophy of business, teaching the citizens to overpower each other, is as surely leading us to social disaster and overthrow. It is the business class who talk about " not looking to the government," who extol "self help" while they are continually hunting for government franchises and privileges and buying them by bribes from traitorous representatives of the people. To give the poor, the ignorant, the hungry, overdriven, leisureless, the suffrage and tell them to protect them- selves against the rich, the initiated, the worldlywise, the wellfed, the leisured, with the vote which requires for its effective handling wealth, leisure, experience, knowledge, and morals is a mere freak of extermination. It is the freedom we give the rat when we loose him into the ring where the terrier waits for him. Security of subsistance is the indivisible other side of the suff- rage. If the rich refuse to accept this, and resisting lead us back to feudalism, they will lose their wealth and themselves. The people will go forward and save both wealth and commonwealth. The People, when it has evolved itself to this stage of a union with no distinction of race or sex, will still not be The People. The People means union. Where there is disunion there is only as yet a crowd or, rather, two crowds. There are two nations Plato said, the rich and the poor. Although there are co-operations, reciprocities, on every hand in our industry ; although we do serve each other, even the syndicate and its oppressed customers^ still these co-operations are in the brutish stage. They NEW CONSCIENCE IN POLITICS 177 are unconscious as when the bee carries pollen from flower to flower, not thinking of the buds of next spring but only of its winter's honey. We do get food from the country to the cities, and commodities from the cities to the country, but with what stupidity and waste! All over the world are rising hundreds of co-operative stores, banks, granges, farmers' alliances and co-operative communities. All over the world the political people are steadily moving forward in the use of their municipal and national powers to increase the number of activities in which they work and share. These are new nerve centres of union which will expand until the local co- operative commonwealths will grow to be national ones. One union leads to another; political union will produce industrial union. Union is peace, and the people must have peace in all their relations with each other. This is the actual process going on before us. We have seen the municipality create itself, rising out of feudalism. Then we see this municipality taking to itself one function after another through the centuries until the affairs of a London are vaster and more complex than those of an ancient empire. When we hear the poet sing of the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World, we know that whither his genius has thrown its thought the common thought will arrive at last, and that his inspired song is but the first clink of the hammer on the foundations of the International Commonwealth. CHAPTER VIII THE NEW CONSCIENCE MANIFESTING ITSELF IN EDU- CATIONAL METHODS AND AIMS THE reform of government means infinitely more than substituting selection by education for election by politics. In the education by which men are to be qualified to serve each other and themselves, to reach their highest, and through their highest to lift society to its highest, the civil-service schools will have relatively a small place, no matter if all the nationalisations and municipalisations now proposed are accomplished. Social life will never again be narrowed down to a governmental function, as in Sparta or Peru or other communistic societies. The "individuality" which has been gained by the race for every member will never be surrendered. Civilisation will not return to the castes of India or the guilds of the Middle Ages, not even under the invitation of the most glittering and seductive Utopia. Competition can never be abolished. It is the economic expression of the individualism created by the emancipations of history we call modern times. Civilisation, cutting the fetters of caste, guild, status, custom, says to the citizen : "Go, Come, Trade, Work, Rest, Think, Speak, Vote, as you deem best." In the market this liberty is competi- tion. The evils of competition are not evidence of retro- gression but of advance. A new individualism has discovered itself one that can combine and it is exploiting the world until the world learns to combine. It is much that the selfishness and cruelty which once 178 NEW CONSCIENCE IN EDUCATION 179 expressed themselves in midnight forays and piracies now use lockouts and lobbies. We have created the environment which has made the qualities of the com- mercial thug necessary to worldly success. We have allowed public-made wealth to be privately appropriated. We are now the world over discussing how to change the environment so as to give the lead to those who have the wit and virtue, first, for the social creation of wealth and, second, for its social administration. Then we shall have bank Washingtons, railroad Lincolns, trust Jeffersons. We will not abolish competition, but we will not keep it the competition of the Iroquois and Apaches. There will still be competition when we have superseded politics and business by education. But it will be the kind of competition we have in school. The Peace of Labour we are to establish must be con- sistent with the perpetuation of the rights so hardly won, so precious, of each individual to come and go, to work or not to work, to work at this or at that, as his circumstances, his development, his own conception of his interest and his duty tell him to do. It is to be the function of society not to force him hither or thither, but to open the way for him to go hither or thither, as he wills or must, free from force. The whole theory of true reform is to set free the "inward perfecting principle within the individual and society," to use Aristotle's words, which when released from interceptions and oppressions can be easily guided to move to its proper ends. The Labour movement then which is to establish the Peace of Labour is concerned with all education that fits for the service of the state, and for all other social service. When with this purpose and ideal we survey the course which education is taking to-day, from kinder- i8o MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR garten to university extension, from the cooking, sewing, manual training to the polytechnic and art schools, we catch the inspiring fact that the very reform the reformers are crying for as if it were still in a far-distant future is being worked out by our own hands. There are great faults of ideal and performance, but with all these it is true that never before was education so near to life as to-day, never before were the people being educated into such a comprehension of the processes of nature, or into such a social sympathy, or under such creative ideals as to-day. We who live may ourselves see great fruit from this planting. The idea of training in the manual arts is already well along in its destiny of being universally applied. This alone will bring with it a universal insight into work, and the patience, skill and other virtues work requires, and a sympathy with those who work. It will so mix up in work the well-to-do and the poor, the leisure and the artisan and other classes, as to destroy the last vestige of that scorn of the labourer as a "lower order" which has blinded social perceptions from Plato's day to our own. To Aristotle's saying that no artisan could live a life of virtue, and our own refusal to pass Eight Hours' laws or raise wages, because the workingmen could not be trusted with time or money, are but different ways of expressing the same scorn of those who do the work of the world. The universalisation of manual training which will put the children of the rich and the poor side by side at the workbench and the forge is the beginning of an order which will put them side by side in life, doing the actual work for which the school has fitted them. When the well-to-do traveller knows that it may be his son or brother or friend who holds the throttle of the engine behind which he speeds through the night; when the NEW CONSCIENCE IN EDUCATION 181 passers-by know they or their neighbours may have dear representatives in any group they see at work on the sewers, or electric lights, or other public works; when by the expansion and application of the manual-training idea work has been made known to all, the movement will go on to make it safe, pleasant, profitable, social, for all. The philosophers, Aristotle, Rousseau, were like Emerson in pointing out that the state must be built directly upon the school. The statesmen, Stein, Turgot, Hamilton, were alike in favouring the same idea in the actual ad- ministration of the state. "That which contributes most to preserve the state is what is now most despised," says Aristotle, " to educate children with reference to the state." The objects to which this legislation should tend, Aristotle further says, should be labour and war, in order that the people may have rest and peace. The end of war is peace, and of labour, rest. This education he enforces should be taken care of by the state, and it should correspond to the nature of the government. This view of education is made modern by the rapid extension of governmental functions, and by the new institution new for us, though not for China of requir- ing educational examinations for admission to the service of the government. The addition of collective functions to the government forces civil-service reform, and this forces education. The same duty which puts on the state the task of education puts on the state the task of providing an opportunity of using the education. Education for the public service is the expansion of the civil-service examination idea. By the siftings, promotions, revela- tions of aptitudes, and the like, of education, selection may be made to take the place of election. Both the mental and political life of the people are waiting for some such impulse as would be thus reciprocally given. i8 2 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR The social ideal involved in such a system must be higher than that we now follow. Industry by syndi- cates for self-interest and government by party for self-interest keep the people and the country poor and distracted, and hold out of action the nobler motives which would produce nobler and greater wealth. The historic line of development of education is to make it coextensive with life, as we may see by comparing the Persian scheme of teaching the young to " ride, shoot and tell the truth," or the Aristotelian curriculum, read- ing, gymnastics, music and painting, with the modern instruction. The historic line of development of government is to make it more and more the organ of the power of all the people for the benefit of all the people. These two lines of Politics and Education have met in the Civil-Ser- vice examinations, in the military schools and naval establishments by governments. The theory of educa- tion has advanced beyond that of a preparation for life. Pending this consummation the nearer results already apparent are a great gain in comprehension of the high qualities demanded for the accomplishment of any good work, and, following upon this, a great gain in social sympathy between those who have learned this and the workers. From the point of view of its social importance manual-training is the successor, in evolution, of the abolition of slavery, serfdom, caste. But with this great significant difference. Those were abolitions, negative. This is construction, positive. Those said that the workers should not be forced. This preaches that work is a blessing, that it is the great creative function, and opens the way for all men to enter upon their greatest inheritance in its enjoyment. Under slavery, serfdom, caste, the manual-training idea could never have emerged. NEW CONSCIENCE IN EDUCATION 183 The abolition of slavery marks the end of the old; the manual-training school begins the new. Society, demanding of it no better constitution than it has to-day, no more light than it has now on the culture of man and the objects of life, is pitiably, wickedly, wastefully derelict in the care of its young. The covey of quail or the pack of wolves at least bring up their broods and litters in a natural habitat, and teach them all the little they know of the science of life before turning them out into the world. The baby quails and infant wolves are better off than our children, relatively. More natural is theii youth, more complete is their preparation. We are outraging our children's lives at just the point where the brutes perfect that of their little ones. We do not teach them what we know nor give them what we have. Even the children of the rich are violated in their most sacred rights. We know that the child is a plant, an animal, that needs pure and fresh food, including air, clean dirt, full activity and beauty of sound, scene and association. These we can give them all; not ours only but all. The schools for the children of the very rich that are growing up in country places are the precursors of all the schools of the futuie. When all our public schools are such schools, and there are such public schools for all the children of the community, we shall have at last begun our national life. But the school is only a small part of the education of the child. To make the scheme of education complete the eighteen hours the child spends out of school must be on as high a plane of life as the six hours in school. The families and the communities must give to all the people the same purity and peace of life as to the child. The community must go into the country scenes and i8 4 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR country virtues as well as the school. This movement has begun in the suburbanising of our city populations. But we have not yet begun the suburbanising of our schools. We have all the sanitary, hygienic, physiolog- ical, aesthetic knowledge we need. We know that every child should live, and grow, and study in clean fields and beautiful places. We have all the physical science, all the mechanical appliances, all the financial wealth and machinery to put our children and ourselves into the environment needed. If Chicago were expanded to-morrow into a city of gardens one hundred and twenty miles in diameter it could sustain a population of 14,000,000 with only two to the acre, and we already have the means of transport of persons, things, and communication to make this vast population one family. We already have locomotives which would guarantee that no one should be more than sixty minutes from the centre. The telephone and the pneumatic tube are in our hands. Aristotle could only dream of the machinery that might some day come to remake the world nearer to the heart's desire. We have the machinery, and the secret of our immediate future is that we are about to put it into the social and spiritual service of mankind. The individual inventor, capitalist, entrepreneur, has done his part in introducing it. Society will now apply it. Steam and electricity have been worked like the slaves, to make wealth ; they are to be used to create welfare. Steam and electricity applied to the manufacture of social soul will increase their products as the slave does when made a citizen. The kindergarten, the manual-training school, the fashionable country school, the suburbanising of our cities all these are the germs of the new educational movement which will make human nature natural and society social. NEW CONSCIENCE IN EDUCATION 185 If it is true that to reach our highest development we must become as little children, education must be lifelong. Education must be life, and life must be education. "We must begin with the children" to found the new commonwealth. Our pretended guarantee of an educa- tion for every child must be made a real guarantee. This education, public, universal, should offer every child the opportunity of instruction theoretical and practical, mental and manual to fit it for the public service. If, after the method of composite photography, we should make a type picture of the modern community by blending all its features into one general aspect, we would be amazed at the extent of its activities and would gain a new conception of the laggardness of our modern education, advanced as we think it, and as it is compared with that of former periods. Our present system is altogether incompatible with the prosperity and liberty of the people, and of the mis- guided few who think their wealth and power are secured by it. The education of the people is confined to the mere rudiments, and even these are but meagerly obtained by a large part of the most necessitous population in all our cities. The higher education of our colleges and universities is becoming the luxury of the well-to-do and the workingman's child who gets into college will soon be an estray. In England entrance to the higher branches of the public service is possible only to those who have had a university training, as only those can pass the examination. The dependence of our colleges and universities upon the gifts of the rich is most disastrous. American colleges have become centres of the radiation of silence and darkness on the most pressing problems before social scholarship. The questions of American social life most urgent to-day are questions of the use of social powers to establish i86 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR social peace. The archives of learning are overflowing with the contributions of past and contemporary ex- perience to the answers to this question. But there is no class which is contributing so little to make the public further familiar with these accumulations of human experience as the professors of political economy. There have been enlightening books on the railroad question, the trusts, municipal ownership, the labour movement, but very few of them from the professors to whose de- partment these fields of research belong, and their deliver- ances are decreasing in number and strength. As it is not safe, if they are liberal, to say what they think, they prefer to say nothing. Our educational system and our political system run athwart each other. Our politics say that all shall rule; our educational arrangements say that only the few shall rule, and they could not be better planned to prevent that general spread of intelligence and training by which alone the common people could fit themselves either to think, and vote, or to discharge the duties of office. Full education, to-day, is still too much a privilege of a few; this makes the power of intelligent participation in political life, even for the simple act of voting, still too much the privilege of the few. This political privilege and educational privilege are two of a trinity of privileges, the third member of which is the privilege of wealth, or welfare. Selfish education > selfish politics, selfish industry, these are the three persons of the Baal of our modern world. The people look with apathy upon the attacks now being made upon the common schools by the selfishness of sectarian fanaticism, preferring the advantage of its church to the advantage of religion ; and by the selfishness of the taxpayer, grudg- ing every cent spent by the community; and by the selfishness of capital, which does not want too many NEW CONSCIENCE IN EDUCATION 187 children put into school, since that would take them out of the labour market. How our modern worship of wealth manufactures poverty is nowhere better illustrated than in our treatment of child life, the fountain of all wealth. Given chance to grow, learn, ripen, the child of our stores, factories, gutters, could earn tenfold and be tenfold to itself, its parents and the world. But we have not yet the "business sense" to gather that wealth. When the poor parent wants dates we let him cut down the palmtree on which his future supplies of dates and ours depend. There would be no apathy about the depredation on the schools if the schools were made what they ought to be, the gates through which every child entered the Elysian fields of a full life. It is the special work of modern times to have broadened education nearer to life. One of the best differences between early times and our own is in the enlargement of education by innumerable schools, which prepare the people for life in special directions. Modern life is infinitely more complicated than early life, but educa- tion has done much more than merely to broaden in proportion. Our education covers all the ground of Greek, Roman, Mediaeval education; has added many entirely new features corresponding to additions to modern life, and, besides, has put upon its schools much of the preparation for life work which the ancients never thought of asking the schools to do. Penelope and her maidens learned to weave from their mothers and nurses, but now the science of fibres and machinery and many household arts are taught in technical schools. The manual-training, polytechnic, trade, scientific, mining, agricultural and other such schools are broadening educa- tion nearer to life on all sides. Through these schools 1 88 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR a selective choice of the officials of the common welfare in industry is made. Special instruction for those who are to serve the people governmentally has become a considerable de- partment of our education. One of the facts of sociolog- ical science is that popular government favours popular education. This is true from the times of Aristotle and Plato. The emancipators Stein and Wilhelm von Hum- boldt founded the University of Berlin. The Puritans established the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and Harvard College almost simultaneously. Hamilton organ- ised the University of the State of New York as almost his first work after the American Revolution. The French Revolution signalised itself by organising the great system of government schools, the famous Polytechnic in the centre, which now educates those who wish to enter the government service. The French Republic now has for the education of those who wish to become its officials a School of Bridges and Roads, a School of Mines, a Forestry School, a Telegraph school, a School of Hydro- graphy, a School for the Manufactures of the State, a Powder and Saltpetre School, a School of Agriculture, a Stud-farm School, a School of Archives, a Colonial School, a School of Modern Oriental Languages for con- sular candidates. These schools are supplementary to the Polytechnic. The Polytechnic is the general govern- ment school, and its graduates pass, according to the career they have chosen, into one or the other of these special schools. Besides these, which might be called Schools of Peace, there are more than half a dozen schools of war by land and sea. The manufactures of the state, for which there is this school in Paris, are tobacco, matches, gunpowder, saltpetre, Gobelin tapestry at Paris, Sevres pottery, tapestry at Beauvais and mosaics; NEW CONSCIENCE IN EDUCATION 189 in addition to the School of Manufactures at Paris, there are special schools in connection with the porcelain works at Sevres, the tapestry works at Beauvais, and at Paris, the Gobelin tapestry works and national mosaic works. To crown this series of government schools, French educators and the French Republic have been working intermittently for a hundred years to create a School of Administration. The Polytechnic and the schools asso- ciated with it have special reference to the engineering and industrial services of the state. The School of Administration would prepare for the higher duties of government in foreign and domestic policy. This school was first proposed after the Revolution of 1789. An attempt to set it in operation was made by the government which came into power with the Revolution of 1848. It failed, as the government workshops did. The work it was to have done is now done with fair success by the School of Political Sciences at Paris. This is a private undertaking, but its instructors are almost all officials who occupy the chief places in the government departments, and a very large proportion of those who enter the service of the state are its graduates. Its relations with the government are such as to make it almost a public institution, and it is practically the great civil-service school of the state. The organisation of these schools is democratic. The scholars in the national schools of the Old Regime, which educated for the army and navy and for the care of the bridges, were drawn wholly from the privileged classes. But examina- tion for entrance to the Polytechnic is open to all under the same conditions. While its tuition is not free, so many free scholarships are granted to promising students as to amount in some years to about half the total number. Students at the special schools, with but one or two 1 90 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR exceptions, are paid salaries for their support instead of being called upon to pay tuition. In the porcelain school at Sevres, for instance, workingmen's children are taken at twelve and carried through a course of seven years. The second year they receive a salary of one hundred francs, and this is increased year by year until the last year they are paid one thousand francs. In many cases courses of travel and study abroad are also provided for them. The Governments of Prussia and Austria have taken charge of the task of educating those who are to enter their service, but not in the same way that France has done. The public service is entered by examination, and promotion also is largely made upon examination. Candidates are not prepared for the entrance examina- tions, as in France, at special schools. As the schools and universities were already in the hands of the government in Austria and Prussia, all that was needed was to arrange the courses of study with a view to the examinations, and this has been done. One of the characteristic features of the Prussian system is that the candidates successful at the examinations must pass through a probationary period of practical work in addition to the scholastic training. The Prussian state thus prepares its citizens for service in its industrial-political tasks. These include the administration of the public domain and forests, the state bank, the royal porcelain works, salt mines, state railways, the lottery, public works, state medical and veterinary offices, the postoffice, and the public schools. There is also a naval commercial institute.* The expenditure of public money in the United States for the public-school system, the agricultural colleges and * NOTE Mr. Lloyd's incompleted notes cited many more instances of technical educa- tion, notably those instituted by the German and other European Governments, NEW CONSCIENCE IN EDUCATION 191 the state universities is even more than proportionately larger than that in any other country, because it has been our ambition to prepare each child for citizenship. We have made advances in specialised training for teachers, for mining experts and for a dozen other pro- fessions. It now remains for us to carry this work on and to consciously supply the educated statesman for those departments of governmental activity in which we most deeply feel the need of the expert. With all the enthusiasm for public education which the United States has always displayed, it is quite possible that in spite of our size and confused ideas as to the functions of government we may be the first nation to achieve election through education. A new culture has been born, too, which takes the next step, inevitable after the three R's have been made the common culture. It does more than to insist that the little children of the poor now turned away from the primary school in all our great cities shall be taught before a cent be spent on high schools bread before pie. It insists that no culture is culture which leaves the hand side of the mind uninstructed, repudiates the old system under which minds could not shake hands. It knows that the money power has left its mark on our schools and colleges, and finds it in the discrimination between rich and poor, in the expenditure of all school funds in the utterly materialistic character of teach- ing the curriculum containing no religion, no human- ity. It opposes the sinister and selfish plot to put schools under the control of one institution, itself a great landowner, money-owner, man-owner, and on the ecclesiastic side the most subtle instrument of the money-power. This new culture insists that from primary school to university, at the very foundation of 192 at the very foundation of learning and through all its warp and woof shall be taught the principle of that religion which makes every man his brother's keeper and which refuses to regard labour as a commodity. It repudiates that fatuous self-conceit which would carry the teaching of the universities down to the working people, but would regenerate the universities by carry- ing up into them the ideals and knowledge of life held by the working people themselves. Culture is more than science, more than letters, more than mathematics. It is the science of man's aspiration, the laws of growth struggling for room amid great inert masses. It is knowing how to use science and letters in a more un- iversal application. Culture is not to become more learned than others but to make others as learned as we. True learning is to be found more in men than in books, more in the living than dead, more in our thoughts than in those of others, more in being than seeming, more in justice than erudition, more in the recognition of the brotherhood, fatherhood, motherhood, sisterhood of all men and women than in any superiority of man. The new culture will seek not to produce a sect of learned but to distribute all learning ; it will know that it is as true in learning as in property, that any private good is a delusion. The new culture will not read Browning or talk philosophy to itself but to others. It will not pump up its philosophy from its own little Summer schools, but will go forth to seek it among all men, and will find in the en- franchised masses with their new freedom, new dignity, new growth and new love depths of it that the solitary philosopher or dilettante never dreamed of. A great many things that pass for culture to-day will before long, I hope, be remembered only as forms of self-indulgence and selfish- ness, not less cruel because more refined than the appetite NEW CONSCIENCE IN EDUCATION 193 of the sweet girl graduates, professors and society leaders of Rome for the studies of life and death in the Coliseum. We begin to see that it is not to little children alone that Froebel's ideas are applicable. His gospel of child- hood teaches that free creativeness is at once the means and end of human education, and that the spirit of play is the best in which to learn and work. Our colleges are adopting the elective system. Democracy and popular education have gone a good way toward realising Napoleon's vision of "Every career open to ability." We are beginning to understand that the lives of our successful men are a perpetual holiday. Not because they do not work, none work so hard, but because they are working out of free creativeness. To Napoleon, war ; to Scott, romances; to Vanderbilt, money-making; to Wendell Phillips, eloquence; these were play, and none are so blessed as those who are working to make creative- ness free, like the great reformers, emancipators, the Christ, the Luthers, Pestalozzis, Mazzinis, Garrisons. Chil- dren are learners, and the wise man never thinks of his education as finished. The average age at which boys enter college now is about seventeen instead of fourteen, as a generation or two ago. Graduate courses lengthen the life of study. Physiologically, man matures more slowly, and the period of childhood is longer, and adult life becomes a graduate course to carry farther the lessons begun in youth. A new joy will be added to life when, as learners, too, we have become as little children, and the conscious organisation of society, approaching more and more the model of the school, makes pupilage last with life. As nature in all its books is always turning new leaves, man should always be opening his mind to receive new truths, and lending his hand to bring it to fruition. We do this now feebly, one by one, or in little i 9 4 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR societies, as the farmers learn of each other in their country fairs, but there is in this only a faint gleam of what the pleasures and gains of learning will be when we have organized it not only for all people but for all ages, and have made all trades and professions schools, and have raised the school age to the limit of life. The greatest promise of our future is that the growth shall never be full. This further growth must be along the lines which stimulate the further growth of others. Only through others can we live, only through others' best can we become our best. What the community pro- duces for us is only those products which we exchange, and only those people whom we love. One cannot be rich alone. The spirit of this growth is not more important than its forms. As things are ordered in this world, we might as well look to see life without matter as to hope to cherish the spirit without forms. The flight of forms, one institution succeeding another in our efforts to ex- press political or industrial or artistic progress, proves the supreme importance of forms. As much of our political disaster obviously results from an attempt to express a new spirit through outworn forms, it is therefore the duty of the state to provide such education for its citizens as will enable them readily to devise new political machinery. Communism was the form in which the social love of the first Christians expressed itself. It is a form possible only in simple states of social existence. A family can be a commune. A band of believers, small enough for everyone to touch and know everyone else, and enthusiastic enough for all to be one, can be a com- mune. When a nation's development has gone so far that its complexity becomes simplicity again the commune begins to reappear. It does not, as in the early days, characterise the whole of the social mass so simply NEW CONSCIENCE IN EDUCATION 195 that it can all have one quality. Modern communism appears in concentric circles or in strata. As in this activity or that, the citizens become of one mind, with one consciousness, one will, and one common purpose, the commune comes. In communism each contributes to a common fund according to his ability and shares according to his need. As civilisation progresses, that which is produced by the common effort and shared by the common need is steadily enlarging. Modern nations are communistic as to their armies and navies, their courts, their highways, their national libraries. The legislature is a communistic institution. It is sup- ported by all according to their ability as taxpayers, and it at least theoretically gives its efforts to each class of the community according to its need. Modern municipalities are communes as to police, the fire depart- ment, emergency hospitals, street lighting, parks and the other things which all unite to make and use. Sanitary inspection is communistic. These institutions are not communistic but commercial in their relations to their employees. But as to the general body of citizens they are communism. Each is a common fund established and maintained by all, according to ability, for the service of all according to need. In some of the courts for some of the services fees are charged ; these are exceptions to the communism, but trifling ones. Side by side with these communes have developed functions in which the people unite to produce, but the enjoyment of which each must pay for. Street-car lines, gas companies, power companies, waterworks, owned and operated by city government, are not communisms; they are com- mercialisms. But they have a constant tendency to become communisms as the community grows richer, and science and co-operation reduce cost. Mayor Pingree 196 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR of Detroit urged that city to make its water free, as old Rome did. Sidney Webb points out that it would be better, as the perfection of city services, like street-car transportation, increases and the cost decreases, for the community to lessen its charges instead of trying to make money, and hints at a time when they may be performed for nothing. If run for profit to the point, as advocated by some, of providing all the money needed for the expenses of government, the effect would be a great social discrimination. Upon the people who rode in the street cars, burned the gas, etc., mostly the poor, would thereby be put all the taxation. Enormous values would be added to the real estate of the rich by these improvements, but this wealth would escape contributing its share to the general fund. All these considerations and others will push our cities on from municipalisations to communalisations. It is the busi- ness of public education to make a sane transition. The appearance of machinery in farming, the passing away of small holdings, the bonanza farms, are all signs that the production of food the oldest industry is slipping out of the hands of the small capitalist into those of the large capitalist, evolving from the era of competition into that of combination. That transfer brings into sight the possibility of superseding the large capitalist by the largest capitalist the state and "nationalising" agriculture as it has already done in nationalising agri- cultural education. The fish of the Great Lakes used to be caught for the market by independent fishermen, each going out with his little smack and nets. Now a great concern, with fleets of steamboats, expensive machinery, square miles of nets and acres of cold storage has driven them off, and ships in bulk and at all seasons to all the markets. Of course this is " progress," but two NEW CONSCIENCE IN EDUCATION 197 of the results are attracting attention. First, under this regime the fishing grounds are being destroyed and, second, it is more and more impossible to get fresh fish or palatable fish to eat. They are all frozen for storage and transportation, and have to be thawed out to be cooked, and the natural flavour is thawed out likewise. When all Africa belonged to six Romans, and the small farms of Italy had been merged into great estates, the latifundia and the free farmers, displaced by slaves, had betaken themselves to the city, Roman agriculture had reached the stage toward which we seem to be tending. One of our schools of philosophers assures us that the consolida- tions of modern industry under selfishness are but inter- mediate steps toward the assumption of all by all for all under the unselfishness of the state. The Roman example suggests that consolidations may, like that in the fish business of our Great Lakes, be of a kind that kills, and that when the new political altruism is ready to take charge of "Business" there may be no Business left. There are significant signs of exhaustion in the oil, gold, natural gas, lumber and other reserves stored up for us by nature. More than once in history a people's soil has been used up. If we wait for " natural evolution ' ' to bring us to the consummation by which private con- centration is to become public concentration, may we not wait too long? But if we will recognise ourselves as the creators of social evolution, and will by a conscious and timely effort of the social will introduce the higher energy of the public good into the mechanism of industry, we may save the day. As an educated public opinion abrogated slavery so we must educate the public toward the abrogation of selfishness. The Romans did nothing and there are no Romans. The new secret of self-interest is to do for others. If we will but give a tithe of our self-seeking 198 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR and self-destructive business energy to caring for our children and our unemployed, we can save them, and ourselves and the state. Every child should be reared and educated on and by the earth. Every man should have work. We have but to put our schools on the land and to establish our unemployed in labour colonies on the land, to set ourselves far on the way toward reconstruc- tion. School farms and labour farms could be made to do more than furnish the models of a better social organ- isation. On them could be produced food, raw material and, finally, manufacturers, which would be a considerable factor in the supply of the needs of the community. If we had hope enough and ideals high enough we could organise our schools so that the youth could with the joy of play and creative effort produce a great part of the necessaries of life for the community. These would not be "free," they would be bought at the price of the cost of the schools. With ten machine men ready now to work for every citizen, and with many times that number to be had by removing the obstacles of monopoly, it would be feasible for each citizen to add to the common stock during his young years of overflowing energy at school and college, as an accompaniment of his studies, at least as much wealth as he would need for his subsist- ence through life. There are always thousands of young people eager for associated effort; exertion is a delight; creative work would know a joy impossible to gymnastics, the wearisome manufacture of muscle for muscle's sake. Competition with the established industries could be avoided, partly by confining the work of each such farm to its own support, making things only for use, not for sale, and partly by opening the way to other activities for those displaced. The men and energy so displaced could, had we but social organisation, be easily found NEW CONSCIENCE IN EDUCATION 199 in work to supply some one of the countless unsatisfied wants of the people. This displacement from old work and re-establishment, but only partial in new, is going on now in every direction on account of new inventions, consolidations, etc., but with unspeakable crudities and cruelties as a pestilence thins out a savage population. These are making our industrial society resemble in its daily march the flight of an unorganised rabble of misery. Even the most conservative admit that this rout must be organised somehow ; it will not organise itself. Other difficulties there are, of course. But only along the line of some such creative policy can we get social reconstruc- tion. One line in this social landscape can be seen converging the line of education as a substitute for politics in social mechanics. It is to education the education of books and life we must look for the power to raise men to the free will of goodness. Socialists, demanding that the will and welfare of all rule the labours of all, have recourse to the state because it is the only actual organisation in which all meet. To say that socialism is governmentalism is as if one were to define the farmer as a rake. The rake is only one of the tools of his work. The socialist is one who believes that the contact of men in industry must, like all human contact that is to endure, be made a society an association of friends. He will use the government as one of his tools. He is endeavouring to replace the supremacy of selfishness by that of loving service, the principle of friendship. Since the fundamental principle of the state is that it exists by all for all, the socialist naturally sees in it his, at present, best instrument. There is in human affairs another great institution which is based on the same law the Church. But the Church 200 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR persists in regarding some other world than this as its scene of realisation. The Church as universal where the state is local, and as wholly of love while the state is partly of force, has but to enlarge the geography of its beatitudes to include this world and it can take its place as the state of states. Nations would then hold the relation to the highest social institution that the communities now hold to the nation. That highest social form would be the Church, universal, uniting all in love and labour. Government has another institution seldom referred to by radicals, except to be damned, which is capable of boundless usefulness in Reform the Army. There is no necessary antagonism between military organisation and liberty, nor between the military organisation and devotion to the good of others. The second point is illustrated by the Salvation Army. The first finds con- firmation in one of the most remarkable episodes of modern times. There was at least one standing army that stood for liberty, the Puritan army of Cromwell, which Cromwell cheated out of the Commonwealth Republic it meant to establish. It was from the army from the 'rank and file of the Ironsides first came the proposals on which Parliament acted when in 1649 it abolished the House of Lords as "useless and dangerous," and abolished the office of King as " unnecessary, burden- some and dangerous," and established in their place the immortal Council of State, and put upon it the task of the "settling of the government of this nation for the future in the way of a republic without King or House of Lords." Had the aspirations and the plans of the Army not been thwarted by the prejudices and ambitions of its leader the English Republic would have preceded the American Republic by one hundred and twenty-seven NEW CONSCIENCE IN EDUCATION 201 years, and there would probably have been no need for the Americans to establish an American Republic. In our army, as was shown in the Civil War, we have a nucleus which can be expanded instantly to any size needed, and can be used for any kind of work. Soldiers can build railroads as well as kill men. They could dig ditches to irrigate the American desert as well as to make fortifications. An army mobilised to create wealth instead of destroying it could be certainly self-supporting under the economical and efficient methods of our Amer- ican system. A call for volunteers among the unem- ployed for a peaceful war with such enemies of themselves and the race as starvation, disease, dirt and poverty would be answered by millions. The military power of conscription is available for dealing with the chronic tramp. Only by organising really and adequately the opportunity for work can society get a clear moral right to compel those to work who will not work voluntarily, and when society has created this opportunity for all it should put the relentless but merciful hand of compulsion upon all who would shirk. If millions of men were willing to leave their work in 1861 and volunteer to go to the front to kill and be killed, we cannot doubt that the millions who are now out of work would volunteer, if given the chance, to join the army of the commonwealth to save and to be saved. We not only have in our hands in our schools, courts, cities, armies, state the levers that can move our world to better uses, but we have the places on which to rest the levers. Not even the will to begin is lacking, we wait only the word. Our individualism will never surrender itself. Asso- ciation is the secret of modern progress, and modern personality demands a form of association which will not force upon the citizens unwelcome contact with others. 202 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR nor the unenduring surveillance and militarism of a policed industry, unendurable if policed and platooned even though the industry be by and for all. This freedom of individualism and harmony of association can be had only in our present conditions through the state. Through it we can run street cars, gas companies, public libraries, laundries, music halls, in co-operation with all our neighbours, and yet be free to come and go regardless of their prejudices and magnetisms. To do creative work, to be released from the crowds, to be freed from fear, to create as long as life lasts, and to have life a perpetual school; to get back to the simple but most expensive luxuries of pure soil, unsmoked sunsets and bread and sleep that need no tonics; to stand face to face with the beauty of the morning and the smiles of an uncorrupted and unsuppressed fellow- man this is the future the Coming Religion is praying for, and that the new education may achieve. CHAPTER IX A NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY PREDICTING A NEW WEALTH CHRISTIANITY was a new political economy. It was a vast economic revolution. It was a war against the wealth, the relations of labour and capital and the social position of the people of the old order, as well as a war against its art and government and religion. It gave their own souls to the masses, and it was the first to write their names in honour upon their gravestones and call upon posterity to remember them because they had been "good workers." The pagan world taught that labour was incompatible with virtue, but the new political economy established a brotherhood, the church, within whose boundaries the poorest was equal to the highest and richest. It made him eligible to rise to the proudest posts the slave could become pope. The bands of brethren carried around the world the doctrine by which it taught men to live laborare est orare to labour is to pray; work is worship. Revolutions do more than never go backward. They never cease to go forward. One good revolution, like one good turn, deserves another. Christianity came out of paganism and the republic came out of despotism. Something comes out of Christianity and the republic better than either. Whatever this may be, it will not be less a new political economy than Christianity was. It will, like it, be much more. It doth not yet appear what we shall be, but the fountains of the great deeps of opinion are being broken up in political assembly, the 203 204 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR synod, the laboratory, the parlour, the studio, the work- shop; sciences, constitutions, manners, livelihoods, the- ologies, art and arts all are whirling on to new consum- mations. We are in the rapids of a new era. The world has already, though young, had many calendars. There are others before us; perhaps near. We have had one Son of Man ; we are to have many millions, as many millions as there are men. The coming for which the world is now waiting is not the second coming of one Son, but the coming of all the sons of men, a perpetual advent in every good man and every good deed. Every good day a Sunday and every good book a bible, every good man a redeemer. That economic era which found a soul in the common man has for its next step the spiritual era now rising to guarantee that soul a body and a society fit for a soul's habitation. Christianity gave him a place in the congregation of the righteous; humanity will expand that congregation into the commonwealth for which the republic has been an initiation. Christianity made men brothers in the church ; humanity will make them brothers everywhere and in all works and fruits. Christianity promised the workers heaven; hu- manity will fulfill that blessed promise by putting into every man's hands every tool needed to begin to build that heaven here. It will make for him a calendar in which this world is dated as the next world and each to-day as an anniversary of the life immortal the life we are living now. Christianity pointed to a creator afar off; humanity adds the revelation to each loyal member of its working hosts of a creator also within himself, and to the people of a divinity within themselves to shape their own ends. The economic era, which we reckon from the year NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY 205 A. D. i, has spoken in the language of the sacred mys- teries, clothed itself in the robes of angels; has housed in temples, and has protected its holy mission by all the awe-inspiring illusions of ecclesiastics. The spiritual era on which we enter, that which will expand and fortify the divine already declared in man, revive and carry to a more glorious fruitage all the emancipations of the past, lift men to use for their daily chores the heavenly fire that only. God has been able to handle, has been delivering its message in the humble accents of the economist and the reformer. The body is a stage of the spirit; the economic and the spiritual are in- separable. Turgot said: "God, by giving to man wants and making his recourse to work necessary to supply them, has made the right to work the property of every man; and this property is the first, the most sacred, the most inprescriptible of all." This right to work is the right to worship. The clink of the anvil and the hum of the harvest field, the music of the poet and the meditations of the inventor are chords in the anthem of creation and the hymns of praise. The utterance of life is a song, a symphony of nature. God made; man makes. In being born to labour, man was born creator. It is the toiling millions in the field and forest and study, on the sea and shore and in the city, with the spindle and hammer, the plough, the pen, gathering the fruits of the earth, rearing the races of men and animals, exploring, inventing, pruning, combining, cross-fertilising, re-creating men who are the incarnation of God, the only true and universal church. The kingdom of heaven is not to be taken by storm but by day's labour. Honest labour, useful labour, labour under the law, is the spiritual utterance of the energies of 2o6 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR man. This is a sacred right as Turgot says, " the most sacred of all." The right to do the divine will must be as bravely upheld as the right to pray to it. The "holy wars" that have been fought to maintain the right to worship according to the dictates of conscience are not a whit more holy than the struggle to establish all men in their right to do, as the ten commandments say, "all" their work. The right to pray, the right to think, the right to vote, the right to work this is the line of march of the crusaders of progress. Around the world begins to roll the roar of the multi- tudes preparing to establish each other in that right to freedom of faculty and opportunity; that right to equal ownership in land and labour and the other "commons" of the people; that right to be, to grow, to love and be loved, to serve and be served, to create and be created, to teach and be taught; that right to rest which is all summed up in the old phrase, the right to work. The proudest crown of Europe carries on it the motto, " Ich Dien," I serve. All tne titles, all the property, all the franchises, all the vested tribute-rights have no other legal sanction than this that they serve. The oldest book in the world the book of Ptah Hotep, the Egyptian gives property no better title than this, that it is a stewardship for mankind. The people, too, demand this privilege of the ruler of England, this right to serve and be served. They are starving for the lack of services from others ; they are suffocating with the energies denied utterance in service for others. "The right to work!" "The right to work!" "The right to work!" What is the source of this "right"? Its source is the same as that of all the other "rights of man" the up-welling soul aspiring to be more. Like the right to pray, to speak, to associate, this right to NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY 207 create the destiny the multitude knows it can create and for which it sees in all the overflowing riches of man and nature all the needed raw material of manufacture, is a revelation from on high the heights of man. It is written in the holy scriptures of the people's aspirations, where every other right was found prophesied. This Holy Word speaks from generation to generation in humanity's outreaching aspirations the aspirations of a creature which lived in the water and aspired to breathe the air, lived in the air and aspired to be a man, became a man and aspired to be a people, and, become a people, will still aspire. I think, therefore I am ; I aspire, therefore I am a man; I am a man, and therefore create; I create, and therefore have a "right to work." Dante's universal mind lays the foundation for the whole structure of international democracy and the universal church in pointing out that the realisation of humanity's possibilities cannot be attained by any one man, nor single family, nor single neighbourhood, nor single city, nor single kingdom ; only the entire multitude of the human race can operate it to its highest powers; and it is the proper work of the whole human race to set in action its whole capacity. Therefore the con- scious people, aspiring to be more, lift the banner of the new crusade, the new revelation, the new command- ment, the new state, the new religion, the new political economy, and prepare to establish as the next great institution of civilisation the right to work, of all, by all, for all. The men of honour who could be overcome, Crom- well knew, only by men of religion, were like the men who are to-day denying the people's rights. They are men of honours, not honour; honours of possession, franchise, vested right, office, good society. They 208 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR can be overcome only by those who have a higher faith, a more passionate motive, a policy that sweeps in the reinforcing support of the whole people. Those who hate a system worse than they hate the devil will always overcome those who only love it as well as their dinner. Those to whom life is a worship are invincible before those to whom it is only a dicker. All its thinking men knew that Athens was rotting in the days of Pericles and Plato and Socrates; and the question all the men of action and philosophy were de- bating was how could the city be saved? Only, said Socrates, by rinding a new moral inspiration. It is to the new conscience that the world always turns for the way out. But the " men of honours " sneer at conscience. It is "good in theory" but it is "not practicable." The whole basis of modern industrial society, and that is to say the whole social basis, rests on the cynical scepticism that conscience and business cannot be reconciled. Business is business and must not be interfered with by transcendentalism. So chivalry was once chivalry, and kingship, kingship, and not to be called to account by fanatics. All the wickedness and cruelties and wastes of the private wars and despotism and popular slaveries of the world of the common toil are kept vested by the athe- istical doctrine that the heart of humanity is so bad that. Tennyson's golden year can never come when "the good of all shall be the rule of each." The reformer is a poet, a creator. He sees visions and fills the people with their beauty; and by the contagion of virtue his creative impulse spreads among the mass, and it begins to climb and build. The history of mankind is the growth of one new conscience after another. Man suppresses passion after passion and achieves virtue NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY 209 after virtue. He makes the self-interest of the lower strike its flag to the self-interest of the higher. Among some savages, Parkman tells us, any squaw is the legitimate prey of any buck who can catch her as she goes to the spring or looks for firewood ; but civilised man is harnessing the strongest of the dynamos within him and putting his sexual self-interests under the control of the individual conscience of chastity and the social conscience of courtship and marriage. Men have learned by hundreds of millions to give up the self-interest that rages for private vengence, and the lawsuit is substituted for the vendetta. Stockholders of the English coal companies subscribed in 1893 to the funds of the miners who were striking against them for the living wage. Man, who has created these sexual, legal, social and a hundred other consciences of patriot- ism, etiquette, the home, can by so much the more easily rise to the virtue of preferring the public good to private advantage the economic conscience. "We wor- ship the soldier," says Ruskin, "not because he goes forth to slay, but to be slain." Men die for their country, their friend, however sweet it is to live. Mankind has never been so low that it did not breed its due percentage of those who would die for their tribe, their gods, their lovers, their trust. "The glorious company of martyrs," says the prayer-book. Every member of that glorious company is an immortal witness to the safety of the appeal to the economic conscience. Every martyr, every patriot, every friend who has laid down his life for his friend, every hero, everyone who helps his neighbour at the table before himself is a pioneer, a prophet or a disciple, leading the way to the golden year in which the " good of all shall be the rule of each." Our gods, our heroes, our patriots, our pure ones are 2io MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR our representative men and women, and our worship of them is a revelation of the godlike, the heroic, the patriotic, the pure in us. Travelers see abroad what they bring within them from home, and the worshiper discovers himself in what he adores. A mankind whose literature and religion are nothing but a commemoration of those who have ruled their own spirits has written on every page of its past its conquest of self-interests, passions, prejudices. Preachers of pessimism and the gospel of despair tell men that in their economic lives together they can never obey any higher law than that of their natural ferocities, appetites and selfishness. The cure for such pessimism and despair, as for all doubt and discouragement about the human future, is a long look backward. A long look backward shows us the first recorded whisper against slavery, the protest of a few impractical Greeks, mentioned by Aristotle, 2500 years ago, gathering strength with every age, going on from emancipation to emancipation, with gigantic historic steps that no barrier could arrest. A long look backward shows the woman, the child, the labourer, all the last ones, becoming first. It shows us the republic broadening itself from experiment to experiment, every breakdown a lesson; the Greek republics bettered by the Italian, the Italian by the Dutch, and our forefathers taking the good of each and adding their own. A long look backward is the best answer to those who would push down and back man, aspiring to rise out of the animal stage of business and industry, a worse than animal stage; for as Darwin, Kropotkin and every philosopher have shown, animals give each other mutual aid and have a conscience above self-interest NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY 211 "Those communities," Darwin said, "which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best." Civilisation is simply applied con science. Like Launcelot Gobbo, all men are distracted by the conflicting voices of Conscience and the Fiend ; but, unlike Gobbo, men in the long run stay by conscience. It is hard to account for the martyr, but you can always count on him. The white corpuscles in the blood science describes to us as the defenders and martyrs of physical welfare. If an invading microbe threatens a wound or some failing organ the white corpuscle hurries to the spot and battles with him to the death. It is the dead bodies of the white-plumed knights of the home guard in the blood that we see flowing forth from wound or sore. Their maneuvres in the struggle display almost human intelligence. They do more than maintain the wager of battle with hostile germs. If an organ of the body is cut off by accident from the supplies of blood and nutriment that would ordinarily come to it, the white corpuscles, notified by some mysterious telegraphy, hasten to the relief. They can pass in undiscovered ways where the blood cannot go, and they throw themselves in millions into the beleaguered spot and offer themselves there as food to be eaten to maintain the local life until health or death decides the issue. They are the altruists within. Man, who is operated by altruists within and worships altruists without, need not listen to those who tell him he can never become an altruist himself. George Smith, of Coalville, was born one of the brick- yard children among the dreary clay pits of the County of Stafford, England. He was one of the swarm of little ones who began their life in the brickyards at six years of age, carrying on their heads 40-pound lumps of clay, as big as themselves, or toiling about the hot 212 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR and exhausting flues fourteen hours a day, and, in addition, often working all night at the kilns. Once, after doing his usual day's work, this child had to carry brick and clay all night back and forth between the makers and the kilns. That night he carried a total of five and a half tons of clay, and in doing it had to walk fourteen miles. From his fifth or sixth year to his eighteenth year George Smith traveled more than 80,000 miles in connection with his work more than three times around the world. His sufferings lighted in him the fires of a passionate resolve to save others. He began to agitate, to write letters to the press, to plead with such influential men as he could reach. He had educated himself by the light of the kiln fires he watched at night. His "Cry of the Children" and other appeals by pen and speech caught the ear of the public, and the public compelled parliament to act. Laws were passed bringing the slaves of the brick- yards under the protection of the awakened social con- science, and a new source of wealth a fuller manhood and womanhood for these ravaged children was opened for England. The old political economy had been unable to see the financial folly of burning out the red of the cheeks of its children to burn it into the red of the bricks and tiles. While he was working for others with such wonderful energy and success, Smith had been faithful and successful in his own work. He had risen to be the manager of an important concern in the brick business, where he was making a large profit for his employers. He had a beautiful home with green lawns, avenues of trees, gardens full of fruit, a porter's lodge ; he had his horse, carriage and coachman. He did not rest with his victory for the brickyard children, but turned at once to rescue NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY 213 another large class of children the miserable boys and girls of the canal-boat population beaten, overworked, wandering up and down with the canal boats over the thousands of miles of English canals, sleeping in the cubby holes of the boats; uneducated, forlorn. The sorrows of these children had entered into his soul and he pledged himself to set them, too, free. But the spirit of vested interests roused itself to strike him down. His employers one dark night called him before them and demanded that he give up his work for the children or his position. " I cannot stop my work for the children," he said, and they discharged him. George Smith went out of his handsome house and beautiful grounds and, step by step, descended through every grade of poverty. He was made a bankrupt. He had to take his family to a wretched hovel which could not keep out rain or cold. His children had no shoes to go to school. They suffered for food and were glad to get red herring for Sunday dinner. " Scandals, lies, persecution, temptation, aching head, sleepless nights, insults, snubs, hunger, fatigue, sobs and poverty" these were the ransom he and his family had to pay for his devotion to the cause of the human wreckage of the canals. But he kept on with the devotion of the religious enthusiast he was an apostle of a "right to work" that shall be worship, not profanation. In his diary for the last day of 1876 he said: "Made a bank- rupt : got a commission to inquire into the canal question." Here again he was successful, and after six years' hard work lecturing, writing, lobbying constantly in the House of Commons, his bill was passed and the canal-boat waifs were brought in under the same legal shelter he had got for the brickyard children. But there was more work to do. He had rescued 2i 4 MAN, THE SOCIAL GREATOR thousands of little children from cruel bondage in the brickyards; he had made education and a decent life possible for tens of thousands of children in canal boats ; and now he turned to bring into the tent of civilisation the children of the gypsies and traveling vans and shows who were growing up into the very scum of the earth. In this work he died, poor, but famous and be- loved; known throughout the length of England and beyond ; listened to by Parliament, the press, the public ; honoured by testimonials in which the queen, men and women of title and commoners were all glad to unite. His only title was that by which he was known up and down the Midland counties, where he had gone on his mission of emancipation "The Children's Friend." He sprang from the poor; he lived and laboured, night and day, among the poor; and he died and made his grave with the poor. The martyr, like the inventor, is the best investor- Palissy, the Huguenot potter, burning up his furniture to keep his kilns going; Goodyear, impoverishing himself to win the secrets of rubber ; Garrison, giving his country the free man who can do twice as much work as the enslaved labourer; George Smith, causing men and women to grow where there would else have been only runts were far better economists than the men who derided them. The world has advanced to the point where it hunts for inventors, and waits respectfully for the revelations of divine truth made by a Morse, a Stephenson and a Tesla. A little more social science and, instead of persecuting them, we shall similarly hunt for reformers, and shall cherish as our most precious social functionaries the geniuses who can tell us how to make better machines and run them better. The martyr, the pioneer, the NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY 215 hero, is the genius who sees first and does first. We have only to read our histories to know that we can always be sure of men who will throw themselves, like the white corpuscles of the blood, where they are needed , as George Smith did, and as all the company of martyrs have done, and to know that we cannot prevent them. Fire, hanging, torture, crucifixion, nothing will keep them back from giving up their lives for the greater life of which the news has reached them. Of all facts to be reckoned with in this world of facts they are most real. The martyr is the pioneer of welfare. The martyrs, the Socialists, the labour agitators, the strikers, the anarchists, the profit sharers, the co-operators, who are teaching us the industrial conscience, are the precursors of the joys and prosperities of the co-operative commonwealth. The advantage of all is a greater good to the individual than any dividend he can get from his own poor selfishness. The martyrs have been the leaders who saw this truth so clearly that they had to live it though they died for it. Conscience is first a martyr, then a millionaire. The Quakers and the Shakers renounce the world and all its pleasures only to find themselves overflowing with riches in a few generations. The Pilgrims and the Puritans turn their backs on the treasure of Europe and establish in poverty and a humble spirit an empire which soon comes to outdazzle all others. It is one of the paradoxes of human affairs that a new welfare always has to be thus ushered in by a new woe. The religion of labour, which preaches the spiritual sacredness of man's economic energies, has, and will have, its full roster of martyrs. Many classic words have to be spoken to inspire the classic deed, but the classic deeds are already numerous on the records of the people in their upreachmgs to lift themselves into the 216 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR air where they will be able to live a larger life the life where they can serve and be served with all the riches of human nature and other nature. Every faculty of man is a commandment to do its work; every gift of nature is an offer of grace. To keep men from using these faculties and these resources is to disobey commandments as sacred as any written on the Hebrew tables of stone ; it is a refusal of grace and a denial of God. An economic system which heaps up idle money in the banks and idle men in the streets is spiritually a sin, economically a waste, and we will make it legal outlawry. No right is vested, no law valid, no government con- stitutional, no person to be respected, that stands in the way of the determination of mankind to realise its full self. The resolute heart of humanity, which has never hesitated to annihilate churches and governments to save religion and patriotism, still lives and is still resolute to save. The Hollanders, under William of Orange, resisted Phillip II. in the name of the emperor. They were loyal to the empire of justice and right, to which he had become a traitor and a rebel. The Puritans of England argued that when the king broke the covenant of kingship he ceased to be king, and they abolished him without compensation. Milton and Vane, with their matchless wits and knowledge of the lower and higher law, supplied the commonwealth with all the arguments it needed to justify itself for turning "regal bondage into a free commonwealth," in Milton's words. "The king himself," said Milton, "had unbound us." The covenant with him, he said, had been to preserve the king's person and authority, in order to preserve for the people the true religion and true liberties, not " to bring in upon our consciences a popish NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY 217 religion; upon our liberties thralldom; upon our lives destruction." The people, therefore, "took themselves not bound by the light of nature or religion to any former covenant from which the king himself had more and more unbound us." They were "bound by the law of nature only, the only law of laws truly and properly to all mankind fundamental; the beginning of all government; to which no parliament or people that will thoroughly reform but may and must have recourse." Man's nature is one through all its energies those which feed the body as well as those which feed the soul. We can unlock every argument used in the past for religious and political liberty and find therein the substance of all the arguments needed for economic liberty. Our covenant with capital was for stewardship, and the covenant has been "unbound." The stewards have changed their duty to feed and clothe into a right to tax. The children of the poor march by regiments every morning in every city to work for the stewards who ought to be working for them. Millions of men have the stewards shut out of our mines and our factories, our woods and our fields, not because human necessities have had enough but because their treasonable avarice has not had enough. "Ancient foundations," said Vane, "when once they become destructive to those very ends for which they were first ordained and prove hindrances to the good and enjoyment of human societies, to the true worship of God and the safety of the people, are for their sakes and upon the same reasons to be altered for which they were first laid." Milton's books and Cromwell's battles were arguing the cause of the American people to-day in 218 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR the conflict with the powers which are choking our spiritual life by choking our industrial life. The institu- tions of the economic world exist only as the churches and kingships existed for the good of the people. The public good is the only warranty deed for any property. The legislatures, common councils, courts delegates of the people can only quit-claim. They can convey only the rights they were authorised to convey. They cannot alienate the inalienable. The "survival of the fittest" is our doctrine. The one fittest to the environment will survive in that environ- ment. In an atmosphere of carbonic acid gas corpses are the fittest. In an atmosphere of degeneration degenerates are the fittest. Among the Thugs of India, or the trusts of America, the best Thug is the fittest. The "fittest survive" is an expression which should never be used by a scientific man before a popular audience without making it clear that the word fittest is used only in an evolutionary, mechanical, not at all a moral, sense. It means that among the cruel, the cruelest; among the mean, the meanest; among the greedy, the greediest; among the selfish, the most selfish, will survive. The phrase and the doctrine it covers leave unchallenged the power of man to change the social environment so that a better kind of fittest shall survive. Man has changed the social environment, and the fittest at once change correspondingly. There is a power in nature called natural selection which can produce new kinds of plants and animals. There is a power in society of social selection which can create new environment and make over again men and communities. Social selection is already at work every- where in the world of organised humanity. Arthur Young, travelling through France on the eve NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY 219 of the French revolution, has left in his "Travels in France" descriptions of the misery of the people that have been quoted for a hundred years and have become the picture of the degradation of the people under the old classical regime. Everyone has heard of his woman of Mars la Tour who, standing by the roadside, dreary and forlorn, told how hard the times were and how heavy the taxes and dues to the lords and seigneurs. He took her for sixty or seventy, her back was so bent and her face so furrowed and hardened by labour, but she was only twenty-eight. To what are we to attribute, he asks, the misery that crushes these poor people? "To government," is his stern answer. Wherever he goes through "Sunny France," Arthur Young has to tell of fields and houses of misery. "Wastes! wastes! wastes!" he cries "a country possessing nothing but privilege and poverty." He had hardly written the words when the privileges were swept away by the revolution. A centennial edition of Young's book was published on the anniversary of that revolution, in 1889, edited by one who spent the summers of fifteen years in going over every step of the journey of one hundred years before in order to report on what difference there might be between the "fittest" who survived in the eighteenth century and those of the nineteenth. The country has been turned into a garden ; the slaves of one hundred years ago are happy, well-fed farmers owning themselves and the fruits of their work. Filthy villages have become splendid cities without a beggar. In some districts so great is the change that the nineteenth century traveller describes it as "Utopian." There is "distribution of well-being without a parallel in any part of Europe." Where in Maine and Anjou, Young found the peasants 220 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR living in cave dwellings hollowed out of the rocks, there are now farm houses handsome enough for villas. Where Young found the widow, described by Carlyle, gathering nettles in the rain for dinner for her children, of which the Marquis takes his third and calls it "rent," there is now a land overflowing with milk and honey, where " the poorest eats asparagus, green peas and strawberries every day when in season." Where the aged woman of twenty-eight poured out her woes to Young, his successor of to-day is entertained by a rich farmeress who wears a fashionable toilette on Sundays, gives her children the best of educations, and when her daughters marry has dowries of thousands of francs for them. To what is this startling transformation due? We answer in the same words that Young employed: "To government." The fittest that survived in 1789 were so different from the fittest of 1889 because the environment had been made different. A new social selection had been brought into operation. There had begun to be a people, and the people had begun to will and create. " Scientific" is the word conceitedly arrogated to them- selves by the dull people who assume that they know the laws of currency, trade, and the other departments of social economy, and quote these laws against every proposal of reform. Any scheme for doing things better is dismissed as a "violation of the natural laws," "the inevitable laws." There is no surer test of the title of scholars to be called cultivated, than whether they have mastered the fact that in social science the "laws" that rule men are the laws that men make. There are as many codes of "laws" in this department of natural science as there are sets of dominant ideas expressed in the order of social science. No man is scientific who does not grasp the truth that the "laws" of currency, employ- NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY 221 ment, wealth change as the ideas and ideals of men change. The man who proclaims as "laws" that is, as calculable series of cause and effect the methods that men have followed and pushed to one side as "unscien- tific" those who insist on discussing whether these laws are "right" is himself the most unscientific of investi- gators. He disregards the most potent force of all those in his field. The only thing certain about what he calls laws is that they are certain to disappear, and that the moment they began to be called laws they began to cease to be such. It is in the protests, exhortations, prophesies of the men he derides that the germs of future institutions lie. The only true science is that which listens even in political economy to the whispers of the poet and the reformer, and classifies that which IS only as a bridge between that which was and that which is to be. Within a comparatively few years the continent of Europe has been overspread with a network of Raffeisen and Schultze-Delitsch and other co-operative banks work- ing among the poor. There are thousands of them, and their deposits and loans amount to thousands of million of dollars. They are the most successful, the safest and best banks in the world. Their social and moral results are a marvel. Under the magic inspiration of the chance to get a fresh start in the world, " the idle man becomes indus- trious ; the spendthrift thrifty ; the drunkard reforms ; the haunter of taverns forsakes the inn ; the illiterate, though a grand-father, learns to write-." Priests confess that the co-operative bank has done more to evangelise the people than all their ministrations. "Paupers struggle off the parish list and live on their own labour." The Government of Italy, in the hope to tame the 222 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR disorderly hosts of gypsy squatters in the wild forest stretches of Venetia, gave them land out of the the public domain. The gypsies, having no means of cultivating the land, turned themselves loose again on the world. Loans of money were made to them, and the "gypsies settled down and became decent and orderly folk, and the wild forest has now become a civilised and pro- gressive district." Where the people's banks come in hovels and mortgages disappear, the usurers have to leave the country, the tavern-keepers fail. The people become better men and better neighbours. Where there used to be grudging, envy and delight in each other's troubles, there is now fellow-feeling. The people have learned that they are bound together by a common interest; that their neighbour's hurt is their hurt; their neighbour's good their good. The Hungarian diet sent a deputy, Professor von Dobransky, to investigate the work of these banks. "I have seen a new world," he said; a world of brotherhood and mutual help, where everyone is the protector and assister of his neighbour. The seventy-two communistic societies of the United States, as described by Charles Nordhoff in 1875, had accumulated $12,000,000 of property, an average of $2,000 each for every man, woman and child. In making this the communists had not had to work painfully hard ; they had had more comfort, better insurance against want and demoralisation, better schools for their children and far less exposure for the women, the aged and infirm than their neighbours. Land near them rose in price. They made work a pleasure. They were unusually healthy, and were found to be the most long-lived of our population. They kept out of debt and never speculated. The greater variety of employment widened the faculties. No one was a servant of anyone else, but was served NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY 223 by all, and so had comfort, safety, brotherhood and inde- pendence. The life was higher and better and pleasanter than that of the mechanic and labourer and farmer of the outside world. Their reputation for the honesty of their goods was worth, Nordhoff says, "at least 10 per cent, over their competitors." There was a spiritual value in this economic redemp- tion. To begin at the bottom of godliness, all the com- munists were found to be remarkable cleanly. Selfishness and greed were restrained; self-sacrifice encouraged; the happiness that comes from the moral nature cultivated. The communists were chaste and temperate ; remarkable for their humanity and charitableness; their animals always better cared for than is usual among their neigh- bours. Always failures? Only within these communities has there been seen, in the wide borders of the United States, a social life where hunger and cold, prostitution, intem- perance, poverty, slavery, crime, premature old age and unnecessary mortality, panic and industrial terror, have been abolished. If they had done this only for a year, they would deserve to be called the only successful " society" on this continent, and some of them are genera- tions old. They are little oases of people in our desert of persons. All this has not been done by saints in heaven, but on earth by average men and women; for, as Nordhoff says, "all the successful communes are com- posed of what are commonly called 'common people." 1 One of the fetes at the coronation of the czar at St. Petersburg was to be a feast on the great plain near the palace where everyone of the loyal million who had come from all parts of the empire was to be fed and to receive a souvenir of their new White Father. Long before daybreak the plain was black with an eager mass pressing 224 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR forward. The whole multitude got into irresistible motion toward the gates shutting them out from the splendours within. It was a huge, wild, unmanageable assembly, everyone crazy with desire and with fear that he might be too late or too far away. The crowd wrinkled up into ridges of broken humanity like the ice in a jam in the polar sea. The roll of the killed and wounded was like that of a battle. To snatch a sweetmeat and a cheap bauble the people trampled each other to death. But even this rabble without leaders, or the faculty of leadership in their poor heads, treading each other down into the clay from which they sprang, did not keep on forever. There came a moment even for them to stop and turn. When shall we turn? Every one of us knows from books and life countless cases of social selection and the creation of environment, like those recited a moment ago, of the power of man to make and mar himself and his fellows, to bind and loose. How long are we to go on, like the miserable peasants at the coronation, for the hope of a toy and a goody we do not get, grinding each other into agony and extinction on the very plains where we might live as a people in brotherhood and plenty for all? The ex- periences, good and bad, we have recited do not prove that only the few can live together as friends. They prove that the many cannot live together any otherwise. The old political economy cried: "What shall I do to be saved?" The new political economy says : "Save and you shall be saved." Organise into the life of the people. "It is more blessed to give than to receive,'' and the progress in wealth, independence and the higher life will be illimitable. When each one serves all he is served by all, and the energies released from grosser cares will mount into loftier reaches of the spirit. NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY 225 "The communion cup for all!" was the cry of the German peasants who rose under the inspiration of Huss and Wy cliff e in the fifteenth century. " The communion for all!" must always be the cry of the people. We must establish ourselves in the right to utter to its fullest every faculty, and we can do so only by establishing each other. The new political economy teaches that all are cut short when one is cut short; that there can be no over- production or over-population as long as there is under- consumption; and that the right of all to work must be held sacred as long as there is a want unsatisfied or an energy unexpressed that is, forever. No man has liberty of conscience who is dependent on the will of another for work. There must be no mediator between nature and man but the whole people no more in industry than in religion. There are 10,000,000 unnecessary deaths in Europe every year. There are 10,000,000 unemployed men and women in Europe amd America. We are still pagans, and every one of these tens of millions of men and women, dead or idle, is a sacrifice to the heathenish gods. Every one of these unuttered men and women might be producing wealth in which we would be sharers; they might be defenders with us of the common rights; might be our brothers and sisters. This " production, distribution and exchange of noble- ness" is the subject of the new political economy, and it has for its function to find for men the economic footing which will enable them by being noble to reap the nobleness of other men. The communes are its pioneers. They are the monasteries in which the light of the new faith is kept burning on the mountain tops until the dark age is over. These little societies must be generalised into a society which will, like them, ex- 226 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR tinguish the degrading dependence of the many on the few for a chance to work and for a share of the product. It must, like them, create the economic equality which is the next step in the historic series which has begun with religious and political equality. America has been two centuries of opportunity. Its free lands and open careers have given us an intoxicating taste of freedom from dependence on others for the right to be. But there are no more Americas except in the virtues we can create and exchange, and in the wealth which follows virtue sometimes too fast for the virtuous. We must now get by our will what we have tasted by accident. Man, who evolved his body out of the dust in the image of the Good, is evolving the body politic, and is now about to take another step forward in the task, fortunately never ending, of its creation. The people is making itself. There never yet has been a people; never yet a republic. A people, according to Browning, is the rise of the many to the completer life of one. This vision of the many become one has been held up before the many by all the bibles ; and the many, little by little, are moulding themselves to it. Every new evolution is an ecstacy, and life is a composition of ecstacies. In the bliss that follows the stop of a raging ache we get word of one of the hundreds of Edens in which we dwell, unnoticed because habitual. Heaven lies about us, as our Virgils and Dantes and Miltons have told us, circle on circle; but these circles, as the poets have not always said, rest on the earth. We have in every response which we can educate the powers within us to make to the calls from man and nature without a new possibility of paradise. Our predecessors have builded for us a heaven of freedom of opinion, so to-day we can broach our theories NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY 227 of God and government and society with no fear of a Claverhouse and his dragoons clattering down the rocks upon our conventicle in the glen, or of an Alva and his men of i>lood to drag us to the inquisition. Hardly a suggestion even of what Lowell calls the "mosquito martyrdoms." Feudal Europe was a hell; every castle a little hades of alternate fear and ferocity. We have abolished the gentleman with the sword by his side, and the chivalry who rode the people down, and the baron with his right of private war ; and in the domestic peace which prevails we have an earthly beatitude which only Armenia and the frontier between the Apache and the Sioux can enable us to realise. All the political economies, contracts, land laws, all the self-interest theories of the rich and the capitalist, have always said: We exist for the people, as the kings have always addressed their people as their "children." The most strenuous doctrinaire of the right of the bargainer, of the title of the possessor, does not fail to say: We provide employment, or This is for our skill in super- intendence, or, This is our Supply for your Demand, or, This is the reward of the Thrift, Abstinence, with which we save and use the capital of the Community. These kingly, aristocratic, capitalistic pretensions are not solely hypocrisies; they are the confessions of a duty felt if not fulfilled. Love is the stuff of all our rules and forms of our public and private associations. Property is held and transferred by will, deed or sale only as the common will directs, and always subject to the social will, as the superior of the single will. This superior will taxes its inheritance, sale, income, importation, regulates it as by sanitary and factory and employers' liability, and Irish land laws; appropriates it as by 228 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR eminent domain for the common use. The law holds that all men are equal in rights. The law has made real through its bankruptcy enactment the saying, "Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest," which, even while we have done it, we have supposed only a god could do. Our political Constitutions have no foundation except the general welfare and the consent of the governed, and give an equal vote to men of every variety of strength and weakness, good will and bad will. Down to our table manners, the essence and foundation of our social institu- tions, even of slavery, is the progressive incarnation of love. Love is the ideal, and the real is the progressive compromises it makes with its other half self-interest. The reconciliation of individual love and social love with each other, of individual self-interest and social self- interest, of both kinds of love with both kinds of self- interest this is the life of all for all. Every act of life, like every act of the plants or the planets, is a compro- mise. If we don't like the word compromise we can say composition. To go anywhere, to do anything, we have to balance. We cannot by any smoothness of phrase nor cunning of panacea save ourselves the trouble of making a new decision at every crisis, and every act is a crisis. The political economist thinks he has made the social world simple by throwing away sympathy. But he has only made it impossible. The transcenden- talist thinks we have but to deny self-interest and we will find in love the universal solvent. But the solvent has nothing to solve. Self-interest, the competition of self- interest, are as right as love and its self -surrenders. Love makes for the centre, the people. Self-interest for the circumstance, the individual. Love unites, self-interest separates. NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY 229 It is education which can select and prepare the civil service of the communisms and free the spirit for the anarchies. Until we get to heaven the progress of com- munalisations must, if the balance of society is to be kept, be accompanied by an equal popularisation of private property. Every one of the people must own something of his own. Society must not become centripetalised. There must be individualism as well as socialism, home rule as well as national rule. There must be independence as well as interdependence. Every citizen must have his field, his home, his separate things, to be administered by himself alone. His personality, his self-reliance, his sense of private power must be more than kept intact, must be cultivated and developed, if he is to be fit to meet his fellows in the co-operative activities. There must be a corner for everyone, a retreat where he may exercise his volition instead of submitting to that of the majority, a solitude where he ceases to think as one of the com- monalty for the common welfare but occupies himself with the nearer and more intimate concerns of his own property and own personality. We must be men as well as members. Only out of such stout stock, each revolving about his own centre as well as revolving with the other bodies of his system, can we get the true society. Even the co-operative associative habit of mind runs into vices as distinctly as does the individualistic; each can be kept true only by the correction of the other. Society must do, as every creature of the commonwealth of nature has done in order to survive in its ascent from the slime keep creating itself. Progress means anarchies as well as communisms. Under communisms, as long as they are developing upward, society and the individual express their progress in a series of anarchies which are the complement of the communisms just described. 230 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR If the story of Abraham's turning from the sacrifice of Isaac to the sacrifice of a ram providentially at hand, caught in a thicket by his horns, is a romantic and highly personified account of the social change by which the Israelites gave up human sacrifices, it adds another illustration to many from the history of China, India, Japan and other countries. The Lawgiver of the universe, representing the new social will, interferred with the command to Abraham, "Lay not thine hand upon the lad." But we now need no interference from the state or any authority to deter us from human sacrifices of that kind. Even though the law against crimes must remain on the statute books for the restraint of those who cannot restrain themselves, millions of good men and women have reached the anarchic stage where no force of the state is needed to keep them honest, and pure and loyal. Civilised society could thus be sociolog- ically mapped out as containing within itself enlarging areas of communisms and anarchies the material progress expressing itself in the communisms ; the anarch- ies being the consummations of the moral growths. A catalogue of the anarchies or achievements of uncom- pelled goodness would be what the mathematicians call "the reciprocal," or inversion of a list of the wickednesses mankind had grown out of. In a catalogue of the com- munisms we would find the industries to which mankind had succeeded in applying the principle of brotherhood. Projected to their consummation, these ideals would indicate that Heaven, or the perfect earthly society, would be materially all commune ; spiritually, all anarchy. There could be neither without the other; each exists only by virtue of the other; there could be no individual acts or social acts without both. The only strength love has it gets by overcoming self-interest; the only right- 231 eousness self-interest has it learns from its antagonist, love. Selfishness and altruism, competition and socialism, will each persist as long as the other one of the pair persists. Progress is made up of their successive com- promises or harmonisations. These forces fight, as men and nations do, for peace the peace of the family, the clan, the nation, the church, of slavery, serfdom. All these have been pacifications. The unresting forces, the moment one contest is decided, begin another. Man is forever harmonising liberty in organisations, and breaking up organisations to get liberty. " Ohne Hast, Ohne Rast." The battle in our day is for the industrial pacification, the social arrangement which shall best balance the existing ideals. Every man having illimitable progressivity of desires needs all he wants. This he can get only by drawing upon all the resources of nature, including fellow-men; hence every man is indispensable to every other. Herein lies the true political economy which can harmonise all reveal new resources of wealth. CHAPTER X THE CHURCH OF THE DEED LOVE, THE RELIGION; WORK, THE WORSHIP; HUMANITY, THE CONGREGATION; THE GOLDEN RULE, THE CREED. THE politics and political economy of our fathers taught us that the way for the people to be safe was to allow no one ruler or capitalist to become great. This popular belief is at the bottom of the opposition, first to corpora- tions and later to combinations of corporations, irre- spective of whether they do right or wrong, simply because they are great. A better science is growing up, to teach that instead of preventing others to become great the people need only to become greater themselves, and this the people can clearly be seen doing in every part of the world and in every department of the common life. What we are witnessing in the appalling riot of immorality in legislatures, in industries and in public opinion in all provinces the Church, the university, the press does not indicate a decay but a great enlargement of morality and intelligence. So moral have the masses become that a great enterprise like a railroad can be planned, financed, completed, operated, receipts and expenses balanced and the net profits of millions for- warded to the owners in the four quarters of the globe, all by hired men owning none of the riches they create and transmit. The very existence of republican govern- ment, with all its abuses, implies an extraordinary morality among the people of all classes. There is immorality, tyranny, cruelty; but it is the immorality, tyranny, cruelty of a moment of a moment of intoxica- tion. It has been pointed out that the whole of the 232 CHURCH OF THE DEED 233 preceding eighteen centuries of our era in invention and discovery, in the creation of wealth, in intellectual advance, have not equalled the single century we are leaving behind us. Such a shifting of population, of industries, of opportunities has never been witnessed as was opened to the European race, of which we are but the vanguard, by the outburst of human activity in the exploitation of the continent of America, and the other still greater continents of steam, electricity, chemistry and other new territory acquired from nature by man. "The settlement of the Continent of America," says Henry Sumner Maine, "is the greatest achievement in the history of our race" and the achievement is not finished. There was no social organism that could ac- complish this. It had to be done by the pioneer instead of the community. The capitalist grew into a corporation and the corporation into the corporation of corporations the Trust. These gigantic fortunes appearing everywhere are not the creations of the rich; they are the fruits of these new values of man and nature, and chief among the values are the moral qualities which two thousand years of Christianity and Democracy have produced. These great millionaires are not creating wealth but consolidating wealth created by the people, including themselves. These strong men, escaping from the old social forms to create another, believe that their strength and their work give them the right to be a special Provi- dence, with a special morality of their own. They are obeying their law, which is to push their power to the uttermost. Their immoralities and tyrannies are a minor fact. The great fact is that the world is being unified, and that new wealths of men and nature are dis- covering themselves every day. These men are unifying the world through brutality. Punish the brutality but 234 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR accept the unity and better it. Even the briber, the corrupter, the exploiter, the assassin of competition and competitors are the individual and individualism gone to seed. The great fact is not the exploitation of wealth, even though criminal ; the great fact is the wealth which invites exploitation and which reveals a vast access of new moral and intellectual and material force. The Roman Empire built the roads on which Christianity afterward traveled to destroy the Roman and create a greater empire. We are passing out of the "Wonderful Century" of material progress into a wonderful century of a higher and finer growth built on this material pro- gress. In every part of the world we can see the people be- ginning to follow the pioneers, the capitalists, with a higher form of wealth. Having been co-operated with passively by the capitalists, they are now beginning to co- operate actively of and by themselves. Having been organised by the property and franchise and privilege seekers, and having been paid money to vote against themselves, they are now beginning to organise them- selves, to realise in a legitimate way the money value of their votes. They are doing this by politics, municipal and national, in a dozen countries, and by co-operation the world over in all industries. English co-operation in half a century has enrolled one-sixth of the population of Great Britain. Some towns are almost wholly co- operative and able to vote themselves into a local co- operative commonwealth whenever their people decide that the day has come for co-operative politics. There are towns where the principal stores, factories, banks, bakeries, laundries, slaughtering establishments, building companies, and in fact most of the economic framework of the life of the people, is in co-operative hands. If the CHURCH OF THE DEED 235 old order of capitalism should fall away, there would be discovered standing within it this new order ready to take its place. These workingmen have made themselves their own employers, and there are hundreds of establish- ments making millions of dollars worth of goods in which the workingmen are not only wage earners but share- holders, sharing in profit and management. These men have had the practical success and the actual experience which would qualify them to officer and administer a Co- operative Commonwealth, if by some lucky accident it should happen to come in England to-morrow. This co-operation is constantly spreading. What co-operation is doing for Ireland is one of the wonders of the age. Co-operation has increased tenfold in Belgium in the last generation, and almost as rapidly over the rest of the continent. Italy is interpenetrated with co-operative societies of all kinds, in the country as well as in the cities. Europe is overspread with co-operative banks whose capital is in large part only the moral qualities of the people, and the poorest people at that, who are borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars on their mutual pledge to stand by each other. In the United States there are found among the workingmen mutual insurance companies and building societies, and in the West are farmers' buying and selling and agricultural and creamery co-operations. The slow and steady awakening of the people to the money value to themselves of their own votes in municipal matters here and abroad is a political initiative of the commonwealth. This movement grows logically, as great social movements always do, and proceeds first to give us pure government in city and nation. This is the first indispensable accompaniment, if not preliminary, to the use of the government as an agency of such func- 236 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR tions as light, heat and transportation. Every step toward pure government is inevitably resisted by the monopolists, for it is a step toward preparing the govern- ment to displace them. The same logic of the democracy which makes purer government the beginning of municipal commonwealth makes municipal commonwealth the beginning of national commonwealth. The common sense of the American people is evidently going to learn the lesson of national ownership through municipal ownership. The national political renaissance we all hope for is clearly to be seen forming in the renaissance, the country through, of a civic consciousness and a civic conscience which a study of the election returns in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia and other cities makes plain. America is a very great country, and large bodies begin to move slowly ; but though slow to rise, the Americans are quick to act once they have risen, and the final velocities of this movement in America will more than make up for the initial deliberateness, as was the case with the slavery question. In Switzerland we can see the development of a people whose social march has not been interfered with by the "Industrial Revolution," as Toynbee calls it. The Swiss have not been whirled into cities and trusts and into great contrasts of wealth and poverty. In New Zealand, on the other hand, we can see the reaction of a people whose progress was thus interfered with, and which had to rise in political revolution to break up the grip of monopoly and to redress the social balance between wealth and democracy. For five hundred years the flag of democracy and human liberty has been kept floating over the Alps by a people whose social and political forms remain in some ways almost primitive. Progressing CHURCH OF THE DEED 237 along the lines of a normal march at the steady, old- fashioned pace of their forefathers, these simple people, by the use of democratic powers, by cashing in political institutions the money value of their own votes, have created forms of social wealth which are not to be paralleled elsewhere. Cities like Zurich and Basle have met the exactions of the Coffin Trust and of extravagance in funerals by making the whole business of the interment of the dead a function of the municipality. The political party which accomplished this reform had for one of its planks that every man had the right to be born, to be married and to be buried free which was their version of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The city provides the coffin, carriage, hearse, grave, tombstone everything except the epitaph and the ser- mon perhaps because in Switzerland there is no extrav- agance in these. The richest manufacturer and his poorest factory girl go to the grave in the same hearse, and can go in no other. In Switzerland, as in some other countries, the great banks found the needs of the peasants, artisans and smaller business men beneath their notice. They pre- ferred to use their funds for the "high finance" of the stock exchange and the railroad and the real-estate speculator. The democracy of Switzerland by politics, that is by discussions, elections and laws, have estab- lished state banks in a number of cantons. They found the capital for these banks in the cantonal treasuries, which had been filled by the mediaeval oppressions of the country folks by the burghers, and by the reformation which squeezed out of the monasteries the money they had previously squeezed out of the people. These cantonal treasuries were in investments earning money to relieve the large taxpayers of the cost of government. 238 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR The people voted to use the money to give themselves banking facilities. These cantonal banks will loan sums as small as two or four dollars. The cantonal bank of Schaffhausen by law must give to artisans or to mechanics or farmers who want to borrow to buy tools or a piece of land or a cow, or to take a little contract the preference over any large borrowers. The cantonal bank of Zurich is by law forbidden to be run for profit; it must charge only enough to pay its expenses, and as profits accrue the rate of interest must be cut down. A co-operative bank at Bagolino, in the mountains of Italy,| is accumulating a reserve, so that by and by it will be able to loan without interest. Here surely wealth is becoming commonwealth. The railroads of Switzerland, privately owned, were the cause of specula- tion on the Bourse. Their charges and management were unpopular; they had troubles with their men which led to strikes, causing the public much inconvenience and irritation. They were largely owned in Paris, Berlin and Frankfort, and the Swiss thought that in case of war foreign ownership of their highways would be a great danger; and they thought, too, that such necessities of life as highways should not be operated for private profit but for the good of the whole people. After many years of discussion, and several elections, they have bought these railroads back from the private owners. The Swiss people not only agitate and elect, as other democracies do, they also legislate, pass laws of their own and reject laws of the legislature as they will. Other countries have public ownership of the railroads, but none of them, not even the Australasian, got them in this way by the intended conscious use of their demo- cratic powers in direct legislation by the voters. The distillers' ring manipulated downward the price CHURCH OF THE DEED 239 of the produce it bought from the farmers and manipu- lated upward the price of the spirits it sold to the people. To keep their spirits up in another sense, the people met this ring by making a state monopoly of the sale of alcohol. In the case of some of these Swiss democratic co- operations, where the political power is used as a money maker for the community, the origin is found far back in private co-operations among the people in early times. Thus the cantonal insurance of cattle and against fires, now a public function, dates back almost centuries to the voluntary unions among the people to protect themselves. The private co-operations have ended in public co-operations. The story of the transfer of large areas of private enterprise by the New Zealand democracy from the empire of the exploiter to that of the public servant is so long, so important, that it is impossible to do more than hint at it. The New Zealanders have carried out their policy of breaking up great estates in the land by purchase, condemnation and taxation so well that land speculation in New Zealand is dying, and no one now dreams of founding or attempting to found a landed estate, which, until the people themselves interfered, was becoming the fashion in New Zealand as in England. There is a coal trust in New Zealand, and in fact it covers the whole of Australia. It does what all coal trusts do. Probably the most notable thing done by any legislature in the world, or by any legislature in the past ten years except in New Zealand, where they have been doing nothing but notable things for ten years, was the step taken by the New Zealand Legislature with regard to this coal trust. The government was granted a large sum of money and given all the needed authority 2 4 o MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR to buy and operate coal mines and coal stores. It will first supply its own needs for its railways and public works and buildings; it will then sell to the public. Similar legislation to deal with the flour trust and other trusts is under discussion. New Zealand owns a large interest in the principal bank of the colony, and Premier Seddon and his most influential supporters do not hesitate to advocate on every suitable occasion the establishment of a State Bank which shall enable the people to ad- minister for their benefit the credit which comes from the people. The compulsory arbitration of strikes and lockouts, which has spread from New Zealand to New South Wales and West Australia, and is destined to spread all over Australia and from Australia all over the civilised world as the Australian ballot and Torrens Land System are spreading has an even. deeper signifi- cance than its determination that the barons of labour and the barons of capital shall no longer be allowed to settle their differences in the style of the private wars of mediaeval feudalism. This deeper meaning is that it is a conscious and intentional interference by the people to make more equal than otherwise possible the division between the workingmen and the capitalists of the profits of their joint toil. The Colony of Victoria has adopted instead of the compulsory arbitration law, a Minimum Wage Law (an Anti-Sweating Law) which has the same commonwealth motive the preventing an employer from taking that full advantage of his position which he might, and to ensure the workers a better share of the wealth they create than they could get by their individual economic prowess. If an employer in New Zealand kills or injures an employee, he has to pay a fine into the State Treasury as well as to make compensation to the victim or his family. CHURCH OF THE DEED 241 The wealth of the careless or inhuman employer is trans- muted into the commonwealth by a double contribution to the wage fund and the exchequer of the nation. In many ways in the provinces of land, labour, money, business, transportation, in the problems of the slums, millionairism, pauperism, the unemployed, usury, the housing of the people, the trusts, banks, tramps, specula- tion, congestion of cities, the depopulation of the country, New Zealand and Australia have used the political power of all the individuals to lessen the economic power of a few of the individuals, in order to enlarge the wealth of all. There are eighteen classes of millionaires known to us in the United States who are rendered hereafter impossible in New Zealand. The wealth that here would be that of the millionaires in railroads, sleeping cars, telegraphs, telephones, life insurance, coal mining, express companies, land speculation and other private wealth is there become, or becoming, commonwealth. I count among these eighteen classes of millionaires as only one class the rebate millionaires those created by receiving special secret rates on the railroads, enabling them to drive their competitors out of business. If the rebate were abolished in America which the Interstate Commerce Commission tells us every year has not been done it would abolish at least twice eighteen classes of millionaires. For more than half of our great fortunes have had their source in this secret spring.' The Australasians have gone beyond negative inter- ference with wealth into the field of the positive creation of commonwealth by the use of common resources. They give a bonus to new industries. They make patents, as in mining, open to all at cost. They provide pro- ducers with land and with money, and give railroad 242 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR transportation to persons and products at cost, sometimes free. They carry lime free to the farmer and children free to school. They do all that other nations do in the way of expert instruction, they teach the people how to form co-operative societies. They go into active partnership with the farmers, advancing part of the cost of the creameries, grading export produce free, giving free storage, and in the case of South Australia even estab- lishing at the common cost a state store in London for the sale of export products. They even slaughter animals and poultry destined for the foreign market. They share the cost of finding and opening mines, and dig wells as we would make roads. They help sugar planters to build sugar mills, and directly interfere between the transportation monopolies and the public to insure shippers lower rates. In all these and other ways the democracy of Australia are pooling their powers as citizens to increase the wealth of the citizens and the state. Their use of public powers is a companion picture of the use of private powers by the co-operators of Europe and America. These two hemispheres, the public and private co-operation, make up the sphere of the commonwealth. And this commonwealth, private in the case of co-operation, and public in the case of the demo- cratic industries like those of New Zealand and Switzer- land and Australia, and some, not all, of the municipalisa- tions and nationalisations elsewhere, is evolving itself so as to suggest very forcibly to the scientific observer the interesting possibility that the commonwealth, as it has higher, wider and more ideal motives than the private wealth, has also a higher economic value that common- wealth can make more money and keep it better than private wealth. There are phenomena in the field to indicate that the co-operator and democracy are not CHURCH OF THE DEED 243 poorer but better business men; that there is a better political economy than the political economy of individual self-interest, and that is the political economy and self- interest of all the individuals ; that the business man, the capitalist, was good enough as a pioneer and as a scout for the people, but he cannot produce wealth fast enough nor well enough to be a permanent figure in any part of the business world where the co-operator or democracy can enter in. This is a complete reversal of the ideas on which we have been bred. Let us look at some of the facts. The workingman without capital or business experience enters the fields of manufacture and commerce, and, in the face of the most determined competition of the established and successful business men in England, France, Belgium, Italy and all over Europe, builds up the really magical palaces of industry we find all through Co-operation Land, as in Manchester, Glasgow, Turin, Milan and Brussels. The business man, as in Glasgow, Brussels and scores of other cities, organizes to make war on the alarmingly prosperous co-operator, and the co- operators prosper only the more and find this attack so stimulating that they try to beguile the private traders into further hostilities. Every device of capitalism, every device of business cunning, all the tricks of compe- tition have been used to destroy this new school of wealth in vain. These workingmen survive and conquer. Commonwealth has a vitality wealth has not and cannot get ; for it has not and cannot get the economical, spiritual, intellectual secret of that vitality the vitality of the self-interest of the many as against the self-interest of only the few. The only credit banking where there is no panic nor bankruptcy nor defalcation is in the people's banks of 244 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France and Ireland. There are practically no losses there. Their transactions amount to hundreds of millions of dollars, with practically not a cent of loss, although a very large proportion of their loans are made "on honour," because the borrowers are too poor to give any other security ; but that proves the best. When the People's Banks come the usurers go out. When the New Zealand Government divides among the people land taken from the great landlords, the produce of the land in meat, wheat and other products increases fourteen times, to say nothing of the greater wealth created in the life of the people. New Zealand finds profitable work for men whom private enterprise leaves idle, and especially makes producers of wealth out of the old men and the soft and incompetent men whom the capitalist in his busiest days throws into the waste heap of the labour market. In New Zealand the well-settled policy of the government ownership of railroads opposed to the policy of Germany is that the roads are not to be run to make money but to serve the people. As rapidly as the profits increase above the amount necessary to pay the interest on the money borrowed to build them, rates are reduced. The political economy of democracy uses these roads to dis- tribute the unemployed labour at cost to the places where the work is to be found, instead of leaving it in the centres to depress the rate of wages and standard of life of all other workingmen while dying its own slow death. If the manufacturer does not get his labour so cheap, the loss of his wealth is more than balanced by the gain to the commonwealth in the lives and labours of these rescued citizens. When one contemplates the wrecks of panics and militant competition, the unemployed, the pauperised, CHURCH OF THE DEED 245 the idle land, the shut-down machinery, the concentrated wealth, the luxury, the answer must be that Government with all its blunders and crimes does not do so badly as that. Business in the United States every ten years kills and cripples more people than our government did with its Civil War. This is a great understatement. The roll of the dead and wounded of one business alone, the railroads, is as great every ten years as that of the Civil War. Where the capitalist is the administrator the world of industry is ravaged by labour wars whose cost, as Labour Commisioner Wright tells us, is hundreds of millions of dollars, and there is beside the bigger butchers' bill, as Lord Kitchener would say, in the lives which have gone out through starvation and despair. The only region where this fratricidal extermination of lives and values does not occur is in Co-operation Land, where there are very few labour disputes, and in the democratic territory of arbitration, where there are none. New Zealand displaces the sweating contractor and constructs its public works by the direct employment of labour, with no middlemen, and the returns show that the work is better and more cheaply done than under the old system; and the same results are reported from Australia, where a similar system has been adopted. One of the most important railroads of New Zealand runs beside and in competition with a private road with abundance of capital and expert management, and the public opinion of New Zealand is practically unanimous in favour of the Government purchase and operation of this private road. The co-operators of Glasgow entered the most de- pressed district of labour, that of the " Song of the Shirt," where private enterprise says it must sweat to live. They 246 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR put the women " with fingers weary and worn" into work- rooms lighted and made healthy with all the modern im- provements, and put the wages up to the true Union rate and competed out private employers. Although any body of men in Switzerland have the right to propose to the voters a change in the laws, and the Government must make the change when voted by the people, no one in Switzerland has ever dreamed of calling, by the initiative, for a vote to take the telegraph and telephone systems of Switzerland out of the hands of the Government and put them into the hands of private enterprise. Government is more responsive to public opinion and preferences than the capitalist, and has greater resources out of which to make improvements, for it has no dividends to pay and can do business at cost. The gifts of government bonds to railroad corporations in the United States take the form in New Zealand, South Australia and other countries of grants of money to any producer who can produce. As a better government has come up from the people than came down from the kings, so a better industry appears to be coming up from the people than came down from the capitalists. In truth, here as in government, this industry of the people is the logical proper sequence of the other first wealth, then commonwealth ; first pioneer, then community ; first the capitalist, then the people. All this is not accidental. Commonwealth is the true wealth and will, district by district, supplant private wealth, because it has its roots deeper in the springs of permanent human success. That wealth which is operated by the intelligence of all, that is, democracy or co-operation, must have more intelli- gence than the wealth with only the intelligence of the capitalist or the corporation. Where industry brings its fruits to all it must have a higher working power in the CHURCH OF THE DEED 247 zeal and happiness of all. If industry can be expedited, cheapened, bettered, by removal from the individualism of the owner to the larger efficiency of the corporation, as we are assured, why not still more expedited, cheapened and bettered by removal still further to the largest corporation of all the whole people. What is fascinating and triumphant about these facts is that they prove that the moral, the ideal, has a money value, and they intimate that it is likely to de- velop a higher money value than the non-moral or im- moral. The structure of co-operative values in Kettering, one of the towns where the co-operators are in a majority of the whole population, and where they own houses, banks, stores, factories and many other kinds of property, to the amount of hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling, rests principally on the ideal devotion of a few men in the last generation to the creed of brotherhood in industry and democracy in property. Chief among them was an old Chartist who, after a hard day's work in the routine of his own livelihood, would labour until midnight or later on the affairs of the Co-operative Society. He received no compensation. His motive, as he often expressed it, was to leave the world a little better than he found it; and there were thousands of such men in the co-operative movement of England, Ireland and the Continent. Anseele, with ability to organise anything from an army to a trust, organised the co-operators and trade unions and reformers of Ghent, building up a golden net of industries from the studio to the political party for six dollars a week. Buffoli, the captain of co-operation ni Milan, earns his living by working for a railroad and builds up the co-operative enterprises of Milan after hours. Only the ideal can hire these men at these prices, 248 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR and money alone at any price could not get out of them the work the ideal does. A vision of commonwealth, of brotherhood, of love, realised in a world of property, capital, work, business, has seized the souls of these men, as in the first years of our era the vision of a heaven and a Saviour beyond the grave, possessed the apostles and disciples. It is the same vision, only it has moved its quarters to this side the living side of the grave and offers its heaven to the people now. It is still a religious enthusiasm, but a religious enthusiasm come to keep store and run primaries and manage legislatures. It incarnates itself not in one workingman but in multitudes of workingmen. It is the political economy of salvation, and would be, if anything could be, the salvation of political economy. In England alone the balance of the division of property between the working people and their employers and purveyors has been redressed to the extent of a diversion of $35,000,000 a year to the workingmen as co-operative profits, which would otherwise have gone into the pockets of the merchants and manufacturers. In the last half century no less, probably, than a thousand millions of dollars have been thus saved to the people. The co- operative movement is creating a state within a state, a commonwealth within a world of wealth. In its banks alone it has administered hundreds of millions of credit with a success which it would never have been believed that the common people could have achieved in the most difficult province in the business world, the province of credit. All this redistribution of wealth, this new direction given to economic forces with vast and visible results, as chronicled by trustworthy observers in the decrease of drunkenness and immorality, gains in character, thrift, CHURCH OF THE DEED 249 hope, intelligence, is the incarnation in an economic realisation of the inspired and prophetic love for humanity which burned so pure a flame in Robert Owen and in the Christian Socialists like Kingsley, Thomas Hughes, Ludlow, Maurice, and in the humble but immortal pioneers, the weavers of Rochdale. Spurred to their enter- prise by bitter poverty, these sublime men put on their first programme, in their little back room used for a shop in Toad Lane, that their purpose was to help their fellow- workers form other societies, to found industrial cities, and to reform government and education. Their capital of brotherhood, plus a few pence, has grown into a business of $350,000,000 a year the greatest economic marvel of the nineteenth century, far more remarkable than the trusts and gigantic aggregations of the ordinary commerce. The latter has only grown higher powers of an old institution, but in co-operation there is some- thing new in motive and something new in results. The co-operators are only men, and their movement to-day shows the plain signs of that loss in intensity which always comes with extension. But no one can go among them, read their literature, hear them speak in their meetings, see the sacrifices that they make in money and energy in their devotion to their propaganda by journals, lectures, personal effort, and not be stirred both as an idealist and an economist. " It is a real piece of the Kingdom of God actually arrived," said an Oxford visitor, after seeing the co-operative work at Kettering. On the front of handsome buildings in England, put up, owned and operated by co-operative men and women, one sees carved in stone the motor words of the movement "The Helping Hand" "Unity" "Equality" "All for each and each for all." And these fine sentiments of brotherhood are backed up by advances in cash, not as 250 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR charity, but on a strictly business basis and with what is better than money practical assistance in the work of organisation. As a result, to-day in that town a hundred women are sitting prosperously at work, owners in their own factory, who until that " helping hand " was stretched out were wage servants of the most depressed sort. These government railroads and public works built by the unemployed, these cantonal banks, these co-operative mills, stores, creameries, look as prosaic as any other property; but scan them closely and you will see that their framework is solid with the principles of brother- hood and their covering splendid with the threads of a new cloth of gold. Mankind is adding a new blush to its equipment of blushes the blushes of chastity, of shame for the traitor and the cruel. Men are beginning to feel as much shame when they see a strong man do violence to his neighbour in the market as when they see such outrage in the street. They are becoming capable of the economic blush. A new sense of shame is reaching industry and politics, the two regions where we of little faith never supposed it would arrive. No one who has ever really grasped the unity of all truth could have ever doubted that this would be the result of human experience. Wealth is then only the cruder form, the primitive form, in which men serve each other. It is not to be denounced, for in itself it is good, and in its place it is legitimate, honourable and ethical. Private wealth will always exist ; it will be the pioneer of the human evolution, treading the new ways, going where individual qualities are indispensable, as in the conquest of the North Amer- ican continent, where the community cannot lead- Private wealth will always exist for the material basis the sustenance of those provinces of the personal life too CHURCH OF THE DEED 251 intimate to be permitted to pass tinder any kind of cognizance from without. The vast extent of the unemployed, the vast amount of work undone, shows that even as Captains of Industry, even as leaders of economic development, the present captains are derelict, and that new aims, new ideals, new energies, new leaders are wanted. The Captains of Industry, the railroad men, have been selected by the unconscious but no less potential will of society as leaders in the industrial work which has been characteristic of our time. When that is done and certainly the main features of the scheme for overlaying the world with steam boilers and electric batteries, Boards of Trade, bazaars, and the apparatus of high finance has been done a different work presents itself, that is, to prevent the benefits of these fruits of human ingenuity, talent, inspiration and the generosity of nature from being made the preserve of a few. That has always been the tendency. The strong in every community have always sought to take for themselves the larger share of the conquests and inventions made by the people, to which the people as age succeeds age assent with less and less heartiness and ask for and take more and more. The work for reform, redistribution, justice, is now pressing. These works, as part of the common heritage of the commonwealth, must be administered for the common benefit. Society will exert its right to choose other leaders. The very men who lead so successfully in the ferocities of competition would under a different system be equally eminent as leaders in good works. Their love of excellence and of approbation would keep them as much at the head n a race to be best as in the race to be richest. These men, these merchants, manufacturers, lawyers, possess 252 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR every intuition of goodness, truth and beauty of life as strongly as do the men who preach, teach, rhyme or reform. If they are still competitive, it is because the society which brought them up has taught them to be so. It is important to remember that the present wage sys- tem is absolutely new but one hundred years old or less. It has produced enormous benefits to employers, and to society so far as the latter is benefitted by reproduction in vast quantities and at depressing prices for certain things in iron, wool, etc. But it cannot last, nor be wished to last, if for these it sacrifices things more precious, things for which men have always cared more than for excess of things to wear personal independence, health, home, life, leisure. It cannot stand comparison with the system that preceded it if it is less advantageous in these respects. Private property being individualism, and its abolition being socialism, the two are correlative and must yield to each other just as rapidly as experience and necessity dictate. Civilisation is a growth both ways an in- tensification of private property in certain ways, an abolition of it in others. The home property is likely to become more and more individual or familistic as against the community, but those forms of property in which the welfare of others is more concerned than that of the owner will be modified or abolished. The wonderful development of the modern individual out of the rudimentary monotony of the tribe or animal life, has gone on with an equally wonderful development of the socialisation of the postoffice, the administration of justice, wagon roads, schools, currency, police and war all of which used to be entirely or partially individual, The higher the individualism the higher must be the socialism. The resultant of these opposing forces o CHURCH OF THH DEED 253 socialism and individualism must be determined by each age for itself, but history shows plainly how the lines advance on each other. The commonwealth, co-operative and democratic, will always be enlarging its borders, taking up new tracts of property prepared for it by the pioneer work of capitalism. The commonwealth the world over is manifestly now preparing to take up from the monopolists all such public utilities as gas, light, water and transportation monopolies, just as it has already taken up the roads, which "were not so long ago private property. The curves of our present evolution seem to indicate that over large areas the movement toward commonwealth will remain non-political and will simply be co-operative. There is an evident tendency in England toward co- operative farming, though not yet fairly launched. The success of co-operation in Ireland shows how this may lead to the settlement of the Land Question in England by land resumption to establish co-operative land owning and cultivation. The co-operator can buy the land and make money out of it, where the present landlord system can have but one eventuality, the ruin of the land- lord, the tenant and the labourer. Co-operation and democratic wealth on the one side, and capitalist wealth on the other, use much the same instruments of business; there are the same processes of industry, employment of labour, the display of goods, salesmen, stores, railroad ticket offices and the like. The two differ in no essential respect but one, and that is essential enough. Co-operative and democratic business are done with an avowed reference to the welfare of others. The people of New Zealand, in running their railroads, in disposing among the people the lands they have taken away from the large land owners, in loaning money from 254 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR the Treasury to the farmers and workingmen to save them from the usurer, explicitly refrain from any attempt at making a profit. All these operations have been profitable, but as the profits have mounted the people have reduced their charges. It is their settled policy thus to lower their railroad tariff, their land rents and their rates of interest. It is specifically enacted, in the New Zealand law putting the government into the coal business to break the coal trust, that as rapidly as profits increase above 5 per cent, the price of coal is to be reduced to the consumers. One and two dollars a ton on every ton of coal burned in New Zealand will thus be legislated. The coal burned in New Zealand hereafter, by this legis- lation, by this recourse of the New Zealand democracy to the money value of their own votes, will be diverted from its previous flow into private wealth into common- wealth. The co-operators in Belgium do not even make dividends in money, as the English co-operators do. Their most highly cherished purpose is to help each other, and especially to make money for a democratic propaganda. In Belgium, consequently, we see the most unique spectacle in the social movement of to-day. The people have established a co-operation far more noteworthy than that which deals in goods or money. Emerson says there is nothing a reformer hates so much as another reformer. But the Belgians have made reformers co- operate Socialists, Trade Unions, Co-operators, Friendly Societies, are all united in one common movement to trans- fer the control of the industry of the state to the people. Their co-operative stores and bakeries and manufactures have been established and are carried on to find the money for democratic propaganda the only place in the world where reform is making the money to carry itself CHURCH OF THE DEED 255 along. Their great man among many great men, Anseele, says that to be economically successful the co-operator must be a reformer, and the success of his work, which has built up in Belgium a democratic party relatively three times as strong as that in Germany, proves also that the reformer to be successful must be a co-operator. Here is a large body of actual experiences, gathered from all parts of the world and from private as well as public effort, co-operative as well as democratic, showing that the altruistic motive can be made a working force in the production, accumulation and distribution of wealth, and, the evidence seems to show, can be made a force superior to that of the smaller self-interest of personal and corporate wealth. In the coming crash, which must follow the insane wars of troops and tariffs and all the insensate suppression of wealth involved in property become monopoly and opportunity become privilege, those countries will have the best chance of survival which have the least wealth and the most commonwealth. What oak there is left in the timbers of England is co-operative. That co- operative one-sixth of the population will be the saving remnant that will save the rest. The wealth created by a thousand men under the motive power of the self- interest of the capitalist is not, and cannot be, equal to the wealth that will be created by the same men under the motive power of co-operation or democracy. The system which comes nearest to calling out all the self- interests and using all the faculties and sharing all the benefits will out compete any system that strikes a lower level of motive faculty and profit. The capitalists are the co-operators that were ; the people are the co-operators that will be. CHAPTER XI THE RELIGION OF LABOUR WE know that John Wesley had a religion. He was a doer of right and an undoer of wrong. He faced the rage of mobs and the anathemas of bishops to carry the gospel to the multitude left outside the Church by the Church. And like another who had compassion on the multitude, he fed, healed and comforted them as well as preached to them. In his banks for the poor he was a pioneer of the people's banks, which are to-day the chief glory of the wonderful co-operative movement now bringing economic redemption to the peasants and work- ingmen of Europe. It was the sins that were new and fashionable and the sinners that were great, rich and successful that he gave his attention to. He was not looking for endowments. He was a religious genius and could detect that sin of sins, hatred of brothers, in any new disguise of greed. When slavery and the slave trade was a rich and re- spectable "business," followed by the greatest, even by governments, defended by the Church, the courts and the professors of divinity and political economy, he denounced it with a fervour like that which scorched the Scribes, the Pharisees, the lawyers, the rich of another time. In the middle of the eighteenth century Wesley coined phrases and forged weapons against slavery which every abolitionist was using in the middle of the nineteenth century. Slavery was so unquestioned that even the evangelist Whitefield engaged in it, being at the same 256 RELIGION OP LABOUR 257 f time slaveholder and revivalist. But Wesley in 1772 thundered against it those immortal words, since quoted millions of times, "that execrable sum of all villainies." This was fifteen years before the foundation of the Society for the Suppression of the Slave Trade, sixty-six years before the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, ninety- one years before our Emancipation Proclamation. John Wesley said to the men of his day who ground up the poor in what they called "business": "Thy hands, thy bed, thy furniture, thy house, thy lands, are stained with blood." What would Wesley say, if he were here to-day, to the death rate in the sweat shops and on the railroads? "Men-buyers are exactly on a level with men-stealers," declared Wesley. What would he say to-day to the rich men who fill the cotton mills of Georgia and the silk mills of Pennsylvania with babies, often working all night child-buyers who are men-stealers, stealing from these little ones , and so from all of us their future manhood and womanhood, their fatherhood and motherhood, and their citizenship? There were men then, as now, who manipulated the markets to ruin their neighbours. What Wesley said to them would he not now say to Wall Street and all other such streets? " None can gain by swallowing up his neighbour's substance with- out gaining the damnation of hell." No one ever accused John Wesley of preaching only "the simple gospel." He did not contribute to make the Church itself the greatest gravestone in our churchyards tomb of the fidelity of preacher and people alike to the teachings of Christ until no stone and epitaph in all those rows is so dumb in its silence, so false in its utterance, as that mausoleum of the promises of religion the Church. This was the John Wesley who brought us here, and this was religion. Religion is the joining of all men 258 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR together in doing right and undoing wrong the love of God and man. By their fruits ye shall know them religions as well as men. The religion of labour is not a new religion. It is the hope and prayer of labour, which is the people, which is the poor that out of its pain, poverty and want it may be shaping a new loving- cup for the old religion. Our Mayflower Pilgrims had the courage to begin the pilgrimage out of England into Holland, which continued to Plymouth Rock and Independence Hall, because, as their Pastor Robinson said : " They were persuaded that God had still greater truths to break forth out of his Holy Word." Before leaving the sweet fields and homes of England they made the Pilgrim's Covenant of 1602, under the sacred rafters of Scrooby Church, " to walk together in all the Lord's ways made known or to be made known." The religious news of to-day is that this pilgrimage is still continuing, and is becoming a new crusade to carry the banners and the cross of the old religion into the new worlds of modern business and industry. This is the Religion of Labour. Its texts texts of love, of the God- hood of Man, and the Manhood of God are all old. What is new is that with all their failures men have harvested success enough out of their past covenants of the Family, Church and State to give them courage to try a new covenant, which will be the greatest covenant of all. New truth is breaking forth and men are learning to walk together in many new ways, "made known and to be made known" in public life and private. Modern democracy is the first-born son of the liberty that came with Christ, and the first-born son of Democracy in Government will be Democracy in Industry. First the freedom of the worshipper, then the freedom of the citizen, now the freedom of all men as workers. RELIGION OF LABOUR 259 Co-operation in England, on the Continent, in America, is a covenant by which the people "walk together" by owning together their own farms, mills, banks, factories, dairies and stores. The methods and motives of industry are being revolutionised; the people employ each other. All are shareholders, and all share the profits, ownership and management. The working women who can be seen in the morning at the bench in the co-operative factory, in the evening sit as Directors on the Board of Direction of their own factory. These working men and women are lifting themselves from hirelings to part- ners. In Co-operation Land we see Business set to music, democracy, the Golden Rule and the eleven commandments. Politics is a covenant of public co-operation by which citizen is supplying citizen with light, transportation, justice, defense, education and many other necessities of life by democratic ownership and operation of, by and for the people. In these co-operations of the farmers t and workingmen, and voters, the predominant motive is not profit, but service for service without profit, doing as you would be done by, bearing one another's burden, love in business. It dawns on man that here at last is one of the "still greater truths" which was "to break forth." Men can lead the life of love together in the world of work. It is literally true that in these co- operations, public and private, in these stores and mills and banks of the covenant of business by co-operation, and in these municipalisations and nationalisations, which are covenants of business by democracy, every principle and nearly every method needed for the democ- ratisation of wealth, that is the Christianisation of wealth, has been tested and found practicable. We do but need to do everywhere what some one is doing 2 6o MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR somewhere or other in these experiments. We do but all need to do what a few are doing. We do but need to generalise our partial and local co-operations into a greater whole. The chemist trying to make some obstinate liquid crystalise throws into it a few crystals of its own sub- stance, and instantly the whole mass crystallises as if its atoms, charmed into obedience, rush together to be in harmony with their visitors from without. The perfection of the few perfected the mass. It has been so before among men. It will be so again. These co- operations, democratisations, brotherhoods may seem few, but they are crystals and crystalisation is contagious. Labour is not a class, labour is the whole people, and its gospel is the gospel to which all the great and good, under whatever name, have dedicated theselves. It is the same eternal cause to which Emerson devoted himself in his words, "the eternal cause of the advancement of the Kingdom of God in the hearts of men." To advance this Kingdom of God into the unevangelised territory of trade, commerce and industry, is the mission of the Religion of Labour. The very heart of democracy is love of God and neighbour. The republic, equality, citizenship, doing as you would be done by in govern- ment, is the political side of Christianity. The Religion of Labour, doing as you would be done by in the world's work, is the industrial side of Christianity. We thought two thousand years of martyrs and patriots had made us free. We find ourselves so hard pressed in our affairs that we cannot maintain the old freedoms unless we win new ones. We must have freedom of access to land, to credit, to tools of industry, to employ- ment, to our fellow-men freedom of access to all nature. The people can be religiously free only if they are econom- RELIGION OF LABOUR 261 ically free ; the hermit, the mendicant friar are the excep- tions that prove the rule. Only by freedom of access to nature can all be free of access to nature's God. Only by such freedom can we be free to give or withhold our- selves as citizens ; to say yes or no to bosses or billionaires and be politically free. Only so can we have that liberty to buy or sell, ourselves or our commodities, by which we may be economically free. The people who are too busy, and too poor, and too honest, as labourers, workmen, clerks, shopkeepers, professional men, to give nights and days, money and energy to the city hall, the primary, the party conven- tions, the lobby, are only the beasts of burden of politics. Not until they make themselves their own masters in their business, their industry, their livelihood, masters of their own time, their own money, their own opinion, their own wills, can they be masters in their government, or in their churches, or anywhere. Slave anywhere is slave everywhere. You cannot make a rope of sand, an army of sheep, a democracy of cowards nor a Church. Of course not every one is fit to give and take with us the reciprocities of a republic. There are "weaker peoples." Our circumstances are imperial, and becoming more imperial. But in a Christian empire every fellow- man must be either citizen or child. In either view of the life together, whether we be paternal or political toward them, the things we are actually doing to the poor the red, yellow, black and white poor at home and abroad, in government and industry, are damnable. If we are not to steal, not to kill, if we are to " love one another," if we are to do unto others as we would that they should do unto us, anywhere, we are to do it every- where in the railroad problem, in labour disputes, on the stock exchange. The only rule possible for Christian 262 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR capitalists, if they organise to deal with their miners through presidents and general superintendents, is to permit their miners to organise, to deal in the same delegate method with them. To put the doctrine of the Religion of Labour into actual practice there is already a piety organised, at work, in different cities and countries, those which are most democratic, embodying them in city traction, in railroad- ing, in land reform, in borrowing and lending money, in manufacturing commodities, in buying and selling goods, in employing labour, striving to realise intentionally the earthly meaning of heavenly words. This is the religious news of to-day. London takes municipal possession of street-car lines and equips them with the most modern machinery of traction; builds the underground trolley, for which the private companies had not the enterprise; raises the wages of the men, shortens their hours, gives them a six-days' week, and carries the people short distances for a cent. This municipal capitalist substi- tutes the general welfare for selfish profit. The city of Glasgow does likewise, and enters its surplus from city-owned and city-operated street cars in its book- keeping under the heading, "The Common Good." By the motives which the community obeys, by the fact of being a community, it substitutes the equalisation of welfare in place of the creation of traction millionaires, and the transportation business ceases to be business and becomes a successful experiment in applied Christianity. In the democracy of New Zealand the people unite as a nation to release each other from the money trust. They borrow money cheap in London at wholesale to lend it again at retail to the workingman and farmer at cost. They buy and operate at cost coal mines, railroads and yards, to deliver each other from the coal trust. They RELIGION OF LABOUR 263 do this avowedly to abolish those twin curses of civilisation the millionaire and the pauper. What is this but doing, as a nation, as you would be done by? What more Christian way could there be of making good the Divine Command to the rich young man, to sell all that he had and give it to the poor, that is, the people. What more Christian method of getting at work the Divine Impreca- tion, "Woe unto you that are rich. Woe unto you that are full." The same antipodal democrats of Australasia tax land and make the tax progressive, tax incomes and make the tax progressive, tax inheritances and make the tax progressive. The more land, income, inheritance a man has the more he pays, both actually and relatively. Thus these New Zealanders are making good in fiscal science, the Biblical requirement that "unto whomsoever much is given, of him much shall be required." The same people are using the railroads owned by the people to carry the school children free; and to carry the unem- ployed men with their children and wives to places where their fellow-citizens provide them with work, and land, and homes. We other peoples who do not do these things, which our Swiss and English and Scotch and Australasian brothers have found the way to do, are to that extent less Christian because less democratic, and are less peaceful, less happy, less prosperous. We give to a few for private profit highway privileges that are the property of all. We submit in the province of transportation to powers over which we have no control. The land, the laws, the forces of nature, the charters that make a railroad, should be exploited by mutual effort for mutual development. We allow them to be exploited by the few for the good of the few and a false good even for them. We see the fruit of the labour of all drained away by extortionate freight and passenger charges, 264 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR into exorbitant fortunes for billionaires, and if things go on so much longer there will soon be trillionaires. We let the social product be embezzled, divided into excess for all excess of wealth for some, excess of poverty for most. The Swiss democracy have been re-establishing the people of Switzerland in equal rights on the railroads, making every citizen an owner, giving every citizen a voice in making the fares and freights he pays. They have installed "doing as you would be done by" as the freight-rate maker and the passenger-rate maker instead of private desires for dividends. Meanwhile we look idly on while our common property in the streets and highways becomes the estate of fewer and fewer, greedier and greedier, and our rights on the highways follow our property in the highways. The appalling fact is established by the reports, appeals and protestations and alarums issued to the American people by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which has been faithful unto death its own death that our railroads between the States are now making their own rates and charges as they please, and deciding for them- selves with no interference by any court or other authority what they will take from us when we ship freight or ourselves. The Commission tell us that we have no remedy to-day for extortions on the highways no remedy in damages; no remedy in criminal prosecution; no prevention by Congress; none by the Interstate Commerce Commission or any other authority. The Interstate Commerce Commission was instituted to protect the people of America in highway rights and justice, which no people till now have surrendered. The only power left to it by the corporation lawyers, and the United States Supreme Court, is to investigate RELIGION OF LABOUR 265 our wrongs and report the result of its investigations to itself. This is one of the slave trades of our day, and we must be Wesleys in moral courage and the economic insight and foresight with which we meet it, as he de- nounced the slave trade when it was a rich and respectable business. If history has any lesson it is that mankind are cease- lessly outgrowing their institutions all of them. The genius which invented can reinvent. The same authority that gave the old can give the new. All institutions are transient. They serve the day, and then give way to better contrivances for expressing the ideals of the world. A new sacrifice is being discovered or invented, as you choose, to be added to the uplifting mechanics of social reciprocity association or the friendly life together of the men in the world. This is the making sacred of the common toil by which men build up the common weal. It would repeal the curse once pronounced upon labour, and have men crown it as a blessing. When work was done by slaves, philosophy, justifying the social arrange- ments, declared labour to be a curse. This was to say, as people say now-a-days, if men are poor it is because they deserve to be, it was to apply to modern life the outworn view of Aristotle. But modern science, divin- ing the secrets of development, has it that exercise of faculty is a pleasure, that "organs, senses, affections, passions" are for use, not for atrophy, and that labour is a blessing. The new law of selfsacrifice says, let us keep labour a blessing by making it free. Free that is, obedient to the laws of life. One of the first of these is that all who share the fruits shall share the efforts that produce it, and vice versa. They who eat shall sweat, and they who sweat shall eat. The Labour movement halted and failed of support 266 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR while it spoke in terms of a special class and of restricted motives. But, if based on a universal motive, it be- comes spokesman for all and will evidently speak with authority. To be a monopolist, or to submit to monopoly, or to allow our brothers and sisters to submit to monopoly, is wholly and irreconcilably inconsistent with "doing the will of the father," or "coming unto me," or trying to "be perfect," which is loving God, and wholly irreconcil- able with "doing as you would be done by," "bearing one another's burdens," which is loving your neighbour. It is our guilt in all this, not that of the other man, which is our first and greatest concern. It is we, the people, who are responsible. The beam is in our eye. These kings of the world of " Get-Rich-Quick-No-Matter- How" are our representative men. They incarnate the false gods we have put in the place of the only true God. It is our applause that makes them possible. If we would all refuse them our -hands and our smiles for one day, they would be on their knees asking what they could do to be saved. When we go to the "bargain" counters to buy the bodies of little children and starving women bleached into snow-white tissues for our backs "goods" that ought to be called "bads" we are shop- lifters in the worst sense of that word. If millions of com- petitive capital are ready to furnish street-car rides for three cents, and if the people could give them to them- selves for one cent, as in London, we are worse than the traction millionaires in sitting passive as we do, in allowing working children and workingmen, the people, to be charged five cents. The millionaires are true to their nature, but we are not true to the nature we profess of Christians and Democrats. We and we only have the power to stop it all. RELIGION OF LABOUR 267 The Religion of Labour has its ten commandments. But they are the same old commandments. "No new commandment but an old commandment which ye had from the beginning." "Honour thy father and thy mother." There is but one people to-day that has made so much as an approach to honouring its fathers and mothers the Australasian people who give their destitute old fathers and mothers old-age pensions. "Six days shalt thou labour." The people of Switzer- land have been democrats longer than any of the rest of us, six hundred years, and ought to be the best democrats, as they are. They remembered the commandment for a seventh day of rest, by giving it by law to the employees of the railroads. Private enterprise found the fourth commandment "impracticable," but the democracy of London and Switzerland can obey it and make money, and make something better than money manhood and that is the Religion of Labour. " Thou shalt not kill." The democracy of New Zealand runs its railroads so humanely and conscientiously that in some years not a single passenger or railroad man is killed. On the railroads of this country in one year there were killed 8,588, and wounded 64,662, the death roll of a war. The Religion of Labour says: There is never any disobedience of the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" if it is not disobeyed when such needless slaughter occurs because the laws requiring life saving appliances are disregarded, because men are overworked, because grade crossings are not guarded, because incompetents are put where life depends on competence, and because profits instead of being devoted to improved service are spent on more palaces, more yachts, more game preserves, more consolidations, more legislatures and other luxuries. 268 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR "Thou shalt not steal." "Thou shalt not bear false witness." "Thou shalt not covet." Christ sternly, publicly and without any "if" attacked the rich as rich. He drove the stock brokers and Board of Trade men of his day out of the Church, he denounced the rich men and their lawyers for devouring the poor, he disputed with the heads of the Church in public, and went about proclaiming everywhere the divinity of man as superior to the divinity of institutions. From Moses and Aaron, who organised the great brickmakers' strike of the Israelites in Egypt, and beyond St. Paul, the preacher of sedition in the streets, the Hebrew prophets and Christian apostles and their successors, have dealt with the contemporary practical questions in ways familiar to every household. We are arrived at the issue for which all the other social questions of history have been but preliminary. We see upon us the supreme issue to which all our en- franchisements of voters, emancipations of slaves, re- formations of Churches, have been but opening skirmishes. Here it comes the issue of the ages the issue between riches and religion, between riches and democracy, between the rich and the people. There has been no history which the poor have not written, and by them and for them is now about to be written the greatest chapter of all not to make the rich poor, but to make all the people rich. To be good Christians we must make good Christ's denunciation of wealth, and this we can do by making it commonwealth. It would be hard to find an honest dollar in what we call "wealth." Wealth is not the home, farm, shop or savings of the poor man ; it is riches, excess. It is an unfair share of the general product RELIGION OF LABOUR 269 which was made by the co-operation of all. Or, it is held in order to give to its obtainers or inheritors a welfare superior to the general welfare. Or, it was accumulated by getting more than was given. Or, it consists of what was the property of others got from them without their consent or even knowledge, and very often in violation of the law by stealing, in short, in the blunt language of the ten commandments. Or, it is enjoyed by its owners in luxury, and a misemployment of labour, and a closure of the resources of nature to the people, which forbids all the children the little ones or the grown-ups from that fulness of life by which alone could they "come unto me." Such wealth is wickedness, and its wealthiest are the wickedest. They and we, who are their accomplices and accessories before and after the fact, violate every com- mandment of the eleven or cause them to be violated, which is worse. We are guilty even under the seventh, for by misery and injustice, which are inseparable, we stimulate, as the statistics show, every form of social vice, which instantly begins to disappear the moment justice comes in. As our era of civilisation had its root in the expansion of Judaism into Christianity, so the era about to dawn has for its fountain the expansion of that Christianity from a religious to a political, industrial, universal force, operative every day in all affairs instead of only on Sunday and in the narrow circles of action commonly included within "religious matters." The idea of re- ligion is to be expanded until the people firmly grasp that to be "religious" is not an occasional virtue, but that as a matter of fact our religion is with us at all times, in every deed, word and mood, and that the question is really between a good religion and a poor one. All the 270 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR words, God, Christ, Heaven, Hell, Church, Bible, Religion, Sunday, Worship, Holy, must be expanded beyond their present contracted, darkling, bent-neck superstition and made open, every-day, matter-of-fact, common-place, familiar, household words. To make the most of our- selves, human and divine, to help others to make the most of themselves, to recognise that we are not getting our best unless all our neighbours are getting their best, to create the institutions which will make it possible for all the people to lead this life together this is Demo- cracy and Christianity. This Democracy and Christianity are now moving forward to civilise and sanctify the largest of all the fields of human association the common toil. This is the Religion of Labour. As in the old times, the Church and the State are again to become one. History repeats itself, though on higher levels, and again politics will be religion and religion politics, as in the cities and states of antiquity. All art and all arts were once sacred mysteries, monopolies of the temple. In the social enthusiasm we can see coming they will regain their sacred meaning, more sacred than ever because no longer monopolies but the common opportunity of all the people. We separate art and life for the same reason that we have to have special buildings in which to spend our religious moments. The art gallery and the church are our ugliness and our atheism made manifest. They prove that our love of beauty and of righteousness are "worlds not realised." These buildings are the mausoleums to which we go to worship, in our tributes to the dead, the resurrection we hope for in them and in ourselves. There comes a day when we shall live our religion and our art. In that day we shall have no exclusive temples of holiness and beauty, but every building, like every RELIGION OF LABOUR 271 deed, will be dedicated to the good and the beautiful, not for worship, as something beyond us, but for use in this or that daily expression of the productive energies of the common life. Piety and the artistic will be our constant companion, and will embroider and sanctify every garment and every tool. Men dwell on tragedy because they feel within, that their destiny is to achieve its opposite; they write of oppression because their hearts contain fountains of brotherhood urging utterance. As the race grows self- conscious of itjs mission and destiny, its literature becomes less fatalistic, and the creation of joy for all becomes more the theme. Jesus himself is our greatest literary man, He whose sayings have been repeated by more tongues, whose stories have been told oftener, whose teachings have caused more changes in human institutions than those of any other who has walked among us. Nature ranges from its lowest bass of mere law and fate to highest octaves of love and will. There is no justice, no pity, no yielding, no pause, no response in nature. The wind that would cool the fever does not blow; the rain that would save the first crop of the new colony does not fall. Upon the Puritans, as soon as landed upon Plymouth Rock, descended a killing winter of unusual severity. Man may labour faithfully and intelligently and get no produce. The unblinking moon gazes with equal eyes on the sad and gay. The stars glisten as brightly whether you sink or swim. The sun rises behind clouds on your wedding morn, and rises in smiles when you are weeping over the loss of all that made life dear. The violet by the mossy stone, half-hidden from the eye, yields its precious virtue as gladly to the hand that has sinned as to the pure. But the touch of the hand of man, the look of the human eye, the smile 272 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR sometimes the mere sight of a face never to be seen again, fills us with hope, belief, strength and inspiration. If sympathy, justice, and rectification are part of the scheme of nature, they are carried out only through man, since, although God is expressed by all nature, it is by him alone that is expressed the principle of will, freedom, love, response, the idea of personality as opposed to that of force,, law, system, destiny. Growth, love, justice, liberty, brotherhood, are absolutely inconsistent with worship of institutions. These essences or spirits seek to realise more perfectly the aspiration which, although it embodies itself in forms, must in the fulness of time disembody itself to reach higher expression. The worm first builds the cocoon, then dies within it to wait for resurrection and a new form or institution of higher beauty. The Christian disciples and the Pilgrim fathers held things in common. We think of ourselves of having fallen from the heights of that early faith. The com munism of the early Church did not begin to approach the communism which has become as a matter of course with us, who take from every one according to his ability and give to all according to their need schools, water, police, libraries, highways, sanitation, and the rest. Modern democracy, the rise of the people to power, has put into the hands of the doer of good and the righter of wrongs a tool the reformer in Wesley's time had not. That tool is the free democratic republic, through which the power of all can be used for the benefit of all. Democ- racy is the use of all the resources of nature by all the faculties of man for the good of all the people. The reformer to-day is thrice-armed; to personal effort he can add political effort. He can socialise, organise the doing of good. He can institutionalise the Golden Rule. RELIGION OF LABOUR 273 What Wesley's "hands found to do" he did; to-day he would be our greatest doer of democracy. In the pro- gressive democracies, which have made public property of the railroads, life insurance, telegraphs, telephones, street cars, express and scores of other businesses, indi- vidual riches have been made impossible to that extent by converting wealth into the commonwealth of the free state. The way to make the revival of religion continue long is to make riches democratic, riches of, by and for all the people, riches of the Golden Rule. The next Messiah will be a collective Messiah, said a great modern liberator, Mazzini, martyr of Italian freedom, and prophet of freedom in all ways, economic as well as political and spiritual, for all men. This collective Messiah will be the whole people, democratising itself and its wealth for the next redemption of the world. Our central problem is to regenerate the indi- vidual, and the' proof that an individual has been re- generated is that he proceeds to regenerate things about him and that's Democracy, and that's the Religion of Labour. The free state, the republic, is the only instrument, the sole organisation, through which universal obedience to the laws of love may be made practical for all. The idea of this state is already becoming sacred to millions of people, for through it, and through it alone, all can serve and be served. For the greatest of their hopes the people are turning, the world over, to the greatest of their instruments, the free state, democracy, by which every citizen may love his neighbour though he know him not. Democracy has always existed, as St. Augustine says of Christianity, but Christianity was significant because it was action. It took the fine phrases of the Stoics and Epicureans in earnest and began putting them in practice. 274 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR What had been of the philosopher became of the people, so democracy is beginning to be conscious that its truths are of wider application than government merely; or rather that government is of a wider destiny than military and police defense, and can be used as a positive pro- gressive instrument for the conscious creation of the public welfare. The theory that all persons and all properties are responsible to society has always existed. The people became democratic when the idea dawned on them that kings were the subjects, the people the sover- eign; that kings were representative; that the people instead of being dependent on their goodness had a right to see that kingly functions were so organised that justice, defense, should never fail, by virtue of the lack of virtue in the bad king, but should move forward, operate with all the precision and certainty that socia organisation could give. The advance of this self- conscious, creative, social Will into the fields of human association, hitherto left, like old kingships, without social control, is Democracy in action or Socialism. Socialism is the work of the proletariat only in the sense that it is the work of that pauper which lives within every one of us who, either by being oppressive or being oppressed, is disinherited of the best wealth that is most truly his the wealth of full communion with a full fellowship of full fellows. The people have already used their powers of government to take private property for parks, but have not gone to the point of using them for the livelihood of the people. The luxuries they must have; the necessities they still do without. Man, the only reforming animal, has to be coaxed and forced along his own chosen path, like some spoiled child to its own pleasure. But reforms are prevented by the lack of tact of reformers. Men are summoned to reform RELIGION OF LABOUR 275 as if it were something new, never done before, wrenching to all the habits, and customs and institutions. Reform is change, and yet not change, for it is the clearest dis- closure of history that constant change is the unchanging law of humanity. We have experienced enough, re- corded enough, become self-conscious enough now to be able to look back over our course and see that certain things are as sure in human movements as the certitudes science has made known in rocks, crystals, grains, flowers, heat or chemistry, and we are well able with scientific confidence to project the curves of social movement into the future. We know that war, once universal, is shrinking away. An irresistible hope, undauntable courage, rare confidence, will certainly possess mankind once they have grasped the surface and innermost facts of their own nature. A day of moral and social transformations as rapid, wonderful, beneficent is before us as those already made in the mechanical, physical world. There may be a brooding period between like the Middle Ages' great sleep, during which Europe absorbed and digested the Greek, Roman, Christian civilisation. The people have always been dreaming of heaven, and they will make the dream come true. The people who dream are the people who do. It is a tremendous fact of the public opinion of our day, not yet fully understood, that hundreds of thousands yes, millions of men in the civilised countries, in America and Europe, are calling for the literal interpretation and actual realisation here and now of the promises of religion. They want heaven in their time. Benches of Bishops and Houses of Lords may declare it irrelevant, impracticable, blas- phemous. But processions of voters in every capital emblazon the demand on their scarlet banners. The people are searching the Bible for material for constitu 276 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR tional amendments, and the Sermon on the Mount has become a campaign document as it was meant to be. What ethics are varies with the circumstances. For him who has lived below its level, it is ethics to join an established religion, as St. Augustine did. For him who finds that established religion is at last too narrow, it is ethics to leave the established religion, as Christ did. We need no sect to preach ethics pure and simple. Men have always sought to be better. What we need is those who will tell us what in each case arising is ethics. The principle of ethics has long been indisputable. Our religious problems are the applications. Art is nature consciously creating itself, and all our arts are anticipations We paint, model and make music in the constantly defeated, constantly renewed attempt to become the masters of life The innermost inspiration of the artist, whether poet, architect, orator or other maker, is to seize more life and make it better. Their rivalry is to personify the "principle of perfection" which Plato saw at work in the nature of things Realism is the demand, never silent since art began, that art be brave and take each day the one step along the shortening path that separates the picture from the reality. The artist keeps Humanity's courage up and saves the world from heartbreak over the misfits of its actual performance. These beauties, heroes, prophets, loves and songs never die, and have never lived, but they make it appear what we shall be. The beauty and strength we dream to-day we will be creating to-morrow. We will paint red into the cheeks of the living, hope into their eyes, beauty into their forms and souls. By the help of marbles and ochres and whistling reed the creative within us has been making for itself the imaginings which it is to embody in nobler material than stone or paint or cadences. RELIGION OF LABOUR 277 Already long at work among us, though few have the faith or the eyes to see it, is the art of arts, the art that unites and consummates all, these other arts, the art social, colouring, modelling, harmonising mankind into living pictures, statues, songs and temples. The sky is full of starless spaces, unfathomed pools of the ocean above. No eye can find a ray in those abysses; not even with the help of the telescope. But the astronomer, firm of faith in the science that tells him there is life there as everywhere, puts a camera in the place of the human watcher at the end of his great tube. All the night through this unwinking eye of glass and metal, in the common acids of a photographic plate, are printed infinite revelations of unseen splendours. Suns and moons, galaxies of star dust, embroider a blue beyond our blue with golden circles of light beyond our ken. Discovered, recorded, mapped by their own light in the midst of impenetrable gloom, they are filed away in millions on the shelves of all our great observatories for the patient study of future geographers of the sky. There is a firmament beyond that firmament. There, too, in the soul of man are the radiant worlds of love we know, worlds of home, country, friends, and interspersed are the dark and vacant stretches of business where we are told men are struggling together and must always struggle together in unloved and unloving labour. But here, too, science verifies in prosaic records the visions of all our divine men, that there is no such vacuum in the nature of man. In the cold type of the articles of co-operative societies, the charters of Federations of Labour, the Pilgrim's covenants, the ordinances of cities, the laws of states, the constitutions of democracies, the awards of arbitration courts, the statistics of common-school education and the decreasing death rate social science 278 MAN, THE SOCIAL CREATOR photographs the catalogue of the stars the eye alone failed to see. In those formal documents are recorded multiplying forms of public and private brotherliness, brotherhood domesticated and brotherhood municipalised and nationalised, brotherhood vowed and brotherhood voted. We cannot pray best on our knees.. To worship, we must keep by the side of our Christ, withstanding with him the temptation of the kingdom of this world, going about doing good, healing the sick as he healed them, having compassion on the multitude as he had, and finding bread to strengthen them to hear and do the truth, with him driving the thieves and money changers out of the temple, and with him ending the divine service only with life, if life ever ends. In statutes and reports from government printing bureaus are officially stereotyped day after day, year after year, the unending processions of divine constella- tions becoming human institutions. The progress of events has eyes the eye of man has not. So far are we along that to comprehend the destiny we are creating we need visions no longer; only vision to see in the real sky these multiplying lights of the Jife together, touching every point with glory. The municipal, state and national composite photograph will give a startling sense of the extent to which collectivity among men has already developed. The morning stars once sang together. On the day when the truth breaks upon man that these myriads of worlds are but one world, and that the lesser common- wealths of home, town, country are members of a great commonwealth, all men will shout together for joy: "Thy will is being done on earth." The religious adventures of one era become the habitual RELIGION OF LABOUR 279 virtues of another. The sore consciousness of our world to-day, of its evils of greed and selfishness, is the sure sign that we are travailing into a new conscience, and through it into a new and finally unconscious happiness of brother- liness in labour. No man can be truly religious who believes in the God of yesterday or rests in the God of to-day. There is no salvation save in the God of to-morrow. Date Due DEC 3 o iy/b Rj FEU ! 1976 RfCD J< IN 2 6 1976 PRINTED IN U.S.*. CAT. NO. 24 161 3 1970 00137 7008 A 000 634 837 9