Other forms of this robbery are what are called “trusts” and “corners.” They have been trying, I see, to make a corner in wheat, and another speculator has been able to checkmate the original speculator by pouring in millions of bushels of wheat. But people are not fed any better whichever speculator wins; it is only a problem as to which of the two should be able to make the largest profits; and then the trusts are built up, whereby a few men are able to make enormous fortunes and kill out all the smaller men. Now our American brethren are getting a little tired of that, and they are trying to find out some way in which they can prevent it—some Act of Congress, some law which should prevent the trust. But what law can you possibly pass to prevent the trust, which is only the natural outcome of competition gone mad? What can you do to prevent that without crippling also every one of your industrial concerns which are based on the same principle of cut-throat competition? There is where the deadlock comes in again. The whole thing is built up on one man fighting against another, one man trying to overreach another, one man trying to make better bargains for himself, no matter what happens to his neighbour—that is the whole method of what we call our commercial system. If that be so, how are you going to interfere with its natural outcome, with the inevitable result which grows out of it?—the same principle, only carried a little to excess, and so shocking the conscience that was not shocked when people were ruined piecemeal, but is shocked when they are ruined by hundreds and by thousands; yet each one of those who were ruined piecemeal suffered as much, his lot was as unfortunate. How, then, can you cripple the excess without undermining the whole? There is another of the problems which are set, and yet in the very midst of it there is a gleam of a brighter future, for in that great alchemy with which the mighty Chemist of the world’s laboratory changes the forces that destroy into forces that construct, there are signs that these trusts which have grown out of the greed and selfishness of men will really be organisations of industry which will be useful to the community in the future, when Brotherhood has replaced competition, and when thought for others takes the place of only thinking for oneself. And so we see possibilities even in the midst of the troubles.

Let us glance at another side of this problem—the attempts which are being made to improve social conditions in newer countries, as they are called, say, Australia. In Australia the working classes have got everything that they are asking for here; it is called the working-man’s paradise. Every boy of twenty-one can vote; think of the magnificent freedom of it! Every girl of twenty-one can vote; what more would you have? No need of agitation there. But, unluckily, the boys care much more about football than they do about questions in Parliament, and the girls, perhaps, are thinking more of bonnets and hats than of the way in which their votes ought to be cast. They have all got the vote and they do not know what to do with it, and that is a very common thing. It does not occur only in Australia. Has it ever struck you that you are paying in happiness for what you call liberty, if you mean by liberty the right to cast a vote? No matter what your qualifications, that is quite outside the question; no matter whether you know anything about the questions, that is not of the least importance; no matter if your head is as empty as ever it can be, it counts just as much at the polling-booth as the head of the wisest statesman, thinker, most highly trained economist or historian. It is an admirable way of governing when you come to look at it from the outside standpoint. Let us see how it works in Australia where they have it: you have not got it yet; you are on the way to it. All these people have votes, and the great majority, as is always the case, are ignorant. There has been class legislation over here, and they have class legislation over there—it is not a good thing, only there it is just the other way up; and the effect of ignorant class legislation is even worse than the effect of educated class legislation. Let us see how it works. First, it works for a gradual diminution of efficiency along the ordinary lines of work, on which, remember, the whole prosperity of the country depends. The boy who is a free man does not care to be an apprentice, and it does not to do tell the boy he has done his work badly, because he is a free Australian, and off he goes, and he won’t work any more if you tell him he has not worked well. But, you know, nature is a very awkward thing to come striking up against in your political and social life, and her laws do not get modified as you might think they should. The boy who won’t learn becomes the workman who is wanting in skill, and so the level of efficiency in production is getting lower and lower. If they want a piece of good machinery they have to send over here to get it—although there is a very heavy price put upon importing it into Australia—because the work there is so badly done that the machines won’t work properly after they are made, and that is one of the results that we are seeing at the present time. Another one is, that unemployment is increasing. There are men in the streets there just as there are here, clamouring for work, and asking the Government to give it to them; and how do they get there? Very many of them because they must not work under a certain wage, which is not a possible wage to pay for the kind of work that they can do. Suppose you happen to have a little garden; you want to have your paths weeded and your grass cut. That is gardener’s work. Now a gardener must not work under 10s. a day, and your poor professional man who is at a discount in the matter of votes, and has a fixed income, cannot afford to pay 10s. a day to have his paths weeded, so he goes to weed them himself, and the would-be gardener goes out, and is unemployed in the streets, and calls on the Government to find him work. There is a very serious side to that beyond the question of unemployment. If you are going to make the men who should give better work to the country than the weeding of paths weed their own paths for themselves, then you are putting a check on the whole of the higher kinds of labour on which the nobler national life depends, for it is as true now as it ever was that man does not live by bread alone. If you are going to make every man do manual labour, you can get nothing more than the kind of paradise that you find in “Looking Backward,” which is more a paradise for the respectable suburb than for a nation that needs art and beauty, music and literature. Those things want leisure to produce and time to perfect. There must be education behind them before they can be produced, and it is a very bad arrangement to press all your nation down to a low level of comfortable eating and drinking and amusement, and forget the mightier things that make a national life—the products of genius, the creative exertions of thought. There is one of the greater dangers. You cannot blame the poor people. ‘As long as a man is hungry, a good meal is the one thing he wants, and that must be his ideal. But nations ought not to be built up on the crude ideas of the ignorant and the hungry. That is the duty of wisdom. But see how difficult this question becomes; see how it is even in this country, where still education is a very great weight in popular affairs, even though the vote ignores it. A man may know his own trade, and be able to give very good counsel and advice as to what is necessary for that one particular trade in which he is working; but a nation is not made up of one trade; it is made up of a hundred different occupations, every one interlinked and interrelated with all the others, and you cannot legislate nationally by simply looking at a single occupation or a single class. You must see how your law reacts on the whole of the complicated organism; otherwise you ruin your nation while you lift up a single trade, and that is what is happening in Australia. Certainly some of the trades are very well provided and arranged for, but the rest of the elements that ought to make a nation are disregarded, and life for them is made impossible; and even within the limits of a trade, sometimes things are marvellously stupid. Let me give you one example. Melbourne is a large city, and occasionally it has very hot weather. The trades unions there have made a law that milk shall not be delivered more than once a day on Sunday; the poor man wants his holiday, and it is very selfish of you if you want to make him work on Sunday, so that milk may only be delivered in the morning. Now the difficulty is that the cows have not yet come into the trades unions; they do not realise that on Sunday they are only to give milk once a day and not twice. Without the slightest regard for the beauty of social arrangements, they wilfully persist in giving milk in the afternoon as well as in the morning. But the unfortunate milkman must not sell it, because if he did he would be turned out of his trade union, and that would mean destruction. So he has to keep it; and if the weather is hot it is not quite so good in the morning, in spite of the boracic acid, as it was the night before. So he mixes up the fresh milk of the morning and the stale milk of the night before, and sells it all as fresh milk: and though you may not discover it in the milk-can, the baby discovers it in the milk-bottle, and the death-rate of the children goes up in the summer because of this admirable arrangement which has been made with regard to the distribution of milk. That is not the way that nations can really be governed; and there are all sorts of restrictions of that kind which constantly come up against you in the home, and make you feel that life is not in any sense free. Things of this sort can only succeed if certain conditions are willingly accepted by all the people who have to work under them, and not when they are imposed for the benefit of a particular trade or an unwilling and reluctant population.

Let us go one step further; we need not go out to Australia now. We have to replace competition by co-operation. You may say that is being very largely done. Certainly very much has been done in co-operative distribution; Lancashire and Yorkshire are full of successful co-operative works. How many are there of co-operative productive works? The idea has been tried a good many times, but it has always broken down for two reasons: first, that in production you want one clear, strong brain which is a despot over the production; you cannot do it by boards and committees and popular votes, and all the rest of it, because in that commercial production there are many things to think of; very swift changes may come about, and the one able man is able to seize the right moment and to lead his affair to success, where divided councils and delay and discussion spell bankruptcy. That is one of the difficulties with regard to this production. There is something still more serious—the want of trust. The people don’t trust each other; they are suspicious of each other. They suspect each other of personal ends, instead of honestly co-operating for the public good. So they change their officers continually, and there is no continuity of policy. That fault of want of trust, want of confidence, imputation of bad motives, is fatal and must remain fatal until people can grow out of it into Brotherhood. At the present time, when one man born among the working classes, as they are called, by ability and skill, eloquence and application, rises into the higher social ranks, his bitterest opponents are to be found in the class which he has quitted; and when he finds, as he must find—because again he strikes up against great natural laws—when he finds that Trafalgar Square remedies are not workable when you come to put them within the four corners of an Act of Parliament, then people call him traitor, deserter, renegade, and the best he can do will not win him trust and confidence. How is that to be dealt with?

Oh, you say, you will have to change human nature before your plans will work. Exactly; that is precisely what has to be done. Do you think it is impossible? Human nature is changing every day; human nature is continually in a state of flux. The human nature of the Middle Ages is not the same as the human nature of our own time. When knight-errants went plunging about, fighting and the rest of it, it might very well have been said: “Oh, you have to change human nature before you can get people to sit quietly down and submit to the law, instead of knocking their oppressor on the head.” Quite true; but human nature has been changing through those centuries, so that instead of riding out to right your own wrong, you call in the nearest policeman and submit it to the arbitration of the law. Why should not human nature go on changing? As a matter of fact it is changing before our eyes, and the changes that are coming in it are the unfolding of the divine Spirit in man; the outer forms change to embody the unfolding Spirit, and the lower human nature is always changing, and gradually producing itself in higher and higher forms. In the very midst of this struggle and competition, this misery and conflict, you can see, if you will open your eyes, the germs of a nobler, higher, more brotherly civilisation. How different is the social conscience from what it was even a century ago; how different the common feeling of responsibility when wrong things are done and misery is left unalleviated! How many more of the classes that are called comfortable cannot remain comfortable while they know misery is outside their doors; how many are beginning to recognise the great fact that whatever one has earned one holds as a steward, and not as an owner, in a world where all men are brothers, and where the duty of the family is the duty of each! That thought is spreading further and further, wider and wider; but the great change must come from above, not from below. Starving, ignorant men can make riots, sometime even revolutions; but only wisdom and love can build up a new civilisation that shall endure. I remember that one day, when H. P. Blavatsky was asked: “Are you a Socialist?” her answer was, “I believe in the Socialism that gives; I do not believe in the Socialism that takes.” There lies the keynote of the future. When those who have are ready to sacrifice, then the dawning of the new era will be seen in the sky that is over our earth; when wealth and education and power are held as trusts for the common good, ah! then will come the laying of the foundations of a better and a nobler State. When the educated man and woman remember: “This education of mine, bought by the ignorance of thousands who have laboured in order that I might be educated, really belongs to them, and I must give it back to them in service, in order to pay the debt that I have contracted to them”; when the wealthy man feels: “I am a steward, not an owner of this wealth which has come out of the labour of thousands; let it help the uplifting of thousands”—then Brotherhood is beginning to show itself upon earth. When the gentle and the refined realise that gentleness and refinement are meant to be shared, and not shut up away in drawing-rooms to guard them as though they were delicate Dresden china that must not be used for fear it should be broken—when that day comes, we shall be nearer the beginning of a great social change. It must be by renunciation, by self-abnegation, that the foundations of that great brotherly civilisation will be laid. In a family, the elders think of the youngers; and when food is short, it is the elders who go without it in order that the little ones may be fed. So in every social movement the note of the higher is renunciation, the note of the lower is love and co-operation; then they will blend together, and each will bring what he has to give, none will despise another, for everything is equally necessary for the building up of a nation. The strength of the navy, the genius of the philosopher, the skill of the worker, the keen brain of the organiser—the whole of these must make a common work; and none should either despise or envy, for it is one work which is being made by all for the good of everyone.

If you say to me: “That hope can but be a dream,” my answer to you is, that as man is divine there is nothing too great for him to imagine or too exquisite for him to achieve. Think highly of yourselves, highly of your divine possibilities; realise that you are Gods in the making, and that you can build anything to which you can aspire. Thought is the mightiest power; the thought-image first, and then its materialisation in the physical world. But it is not enough to think; the materialisation here has to be made; and there are signs of that in the great Christian civilisation which is still the dominant power in Christendom. For men are beginning to talk now not of heaven away beyond the clouds, but of heaven here on earth; of the kingdom of Christ on earth that shall surely come, not only in the ideal but in the actual; a civilisation based on brotherhood, wisdom, love. That is what is going to be done in the world just now opening up before us. Men are no longer content to be happy after death, they want to be happy on this side of death as well; and they shall be, unless the prayer that you who are Christians utter day by day is only a lip worship and not a reality: “Thy will be done on earth, even as it is done in heaven.” It is on earth the new great civilisation is to come, that Brotherhood is to be realised, that the nations of the future are to be built on the type of the family, and not on a type of a struggle of wild beasts in the jungle. That is the future to which we are looking; and if on this Sunday and last Sunday I have drawn the darker side, it is to show that because things are at a deadlock, therefore He who holds the key of every lock is near to His return on earth. In the Sundays that lie before us I hope to work out that second side of the subject, to show you how these things are passing away, and how it has been declared in the higher world, and the cry is echoing in the lower: “Behold, I make all things new!”

Lecture III
The New Doors Opening In Religion, Science, and Art

Friends: On the preceding evenings on which I have addressed you we have had our attention turned backwards to the past, or we were glancing at the present. We are now to turn our eyes to the future, and, starting from the basis of the present and of certain facts which are already showing themselves amongst us, to consider what new doors are opening in Religion, in Science, and in Art; what new avenues of knowledge are beginning to show themselves stretching to far-off horizons—horizons, in fact, which are not really the limit of those avenues, but only the limit to which we can at present pierce. I am chiefly concerned to endeavour to show you that this promise of the opening of new doors is a great reality; that the sounds are around us; that, as it were, the doors are already a little open, and we have the right to think that as man evolves a little further those doors will open wider and wider, so that the race may pass through them to a wiser and a happier future. In order to make this intelligible and clear, I shall have to ask you for a few moments to consider with me a certain view of man’s nature and constitution, a view which was practically universal among the ancient religions of the world, which is indicated, although not fully carried out perhaps in detail, in the more modern faith of Christendom, which is revived amongst us, and is being taught all over the world by means of the Theosophical Society; not a new view, but a very old one, clothed only in new garments in deference to the advancing mind of man. Now this view I must put roughly, but without that statement the method of the opening of the new doors would remain unintelligible. It is briefly this: That every human being is fundamentally a spiritual intelligence, appropriating to himself portions of matter in the various types of worlds in which he lives; that that spiritual intelligence commences the great world-cycle as a germ or seed of divinity; and just as if, where you had an ordinary seed, a grain of corn, that grain would not grow and develop the powers within it unless it were planted in the soil, the soil whose juices nourish it, unless it were rained upon, and unless the sun shone upon it, so is it with the divine germ, the human Spirit. It is planted in the soil of human experience, whose juices shall gradually enable it to unfold its divine possibilities. It is watered with the rain of human tears, the tears of sorrow and of pain; it is vivified, strengthened, enabled to grow by the sunshine of human joy and human delight; and out of the contact of experience, out of the rain of sorrow and the sunshine of joy, gradually, generation after generation, century after century, millennium after millennium, the divine germ becomes a divine man, perfect in the manifested powers of Deity enfolded within him from the first.