V
Capitalism is material, gross, ugly. Yes, but it has a soul—toleration, liberty, fraternity. And this, like most souls, is not so much in being as in becoming. It is only in the most highly capitalistic centers that even business has partly freed itself from elements of personal oppression. There is no state nor city in which the fraternity of labor is more than an emerging fact. Under capitalism, workingmen are brothers, but there is still a vast deal of the Cain and Abel in their feelings toward one another. Remove the pressure of capitalism at this instant, and the lessons of fraternity would quickly be forgotten. Relax the profit motive, and mankind would again stand forth in its pristine narrowness and bigotry and cruelty. Conceive for a moment that the United States were now under Socialistic management. With what spirit should we greet the oppressed of other lands, fleeing to us for refuge? We should probably judge of the problem in terms of dividend and divisor: so much food, so many mouths; let not the number of mouths be increased. To be sure, there is an economic fallacy lurking in this syllogism; but when has an economic fallacy ever been crushed except by weight of a brute class interest? Our workingmen are brothers of those of England and France and Germany, under the pressure of cosmopolitan capitalism. But the natural attitude of a group of Socialistic nations toward one another will be a coveting of one another's rich mines and fertile provinces. At least such will be the natural attitude until fraternity, imposed by capitalism, has descended from men's lips and entered into their blood.
There is a wise saying in Karl Marx's Critique of Political Economy (Preface): "No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society." What Marx said of the material embodiment of capitalism, we can apply to its soul. Capitalism is growing toward liberty and fraternity. But the immense distance we must traverse before this goal can be attained is evidence of the vitality that remains in the system. Were capitalism to be abolished today, the hard-won gains of the last two centuries would vanish. But by this very fact it is proved that capitalism cannot be abolished today.