“Sins” are always phenomena of defective social relation—they are not individual matters at all, an individual can no more do wrong than he can do right. The beasts have no morals because they have no Society. Human conduct is all interrelative; and right or wrong as it affects the others. Given any wrong relation in Society, and a certain proportion of sin works out among its members, now here, now there, according to the nature of the diseased relation.
The despot breeds the sycophant, the liar, the assassin; the rich man breeds the thief; the woman who makes her living by marriage, the prostitute. And these sins cannot be checked in the point of expression, the individual, any more than you can cure scarlet fever with salve.
We are good, or We are bad,—with remarkable disconnection of personal circumstance. The thieving produced by the clot of wealth may not break out in the immediately surrounding tissue if that is pretty healthy, but creeps along the line of least resistance, and appears through the brain least able to resist it.
No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself, again.
If, then, this great field of evil, and a thousand as evil concomitants, may be cleared off the world by the adoption of more healthy social processes; if those healthy social processes consist in each person’s being in his right place, and doing his right work in Society; if, too, it clearly appears that to the individual consciousness this right place and right work represent Happiness,—Happiness such as we have never been able to conceive in our little ego-stunted brains; then human duty looms up large and clear.
To find your right place, to do your right work, here is the basis of all virtue, joy, and growth. Here is a steady improvement of every human product, things better and more beautiful, things made more easily and more plentifully; and every human being, better nourished physically and socially, pouring forth the ever-rising tide in harmonious social growth through work. It means a lifting from the heart of man, first, of Care. All that life-long terror of the Wolf, the dragging weight that follows from the young father’s anxiety over his first-born—can he provide for it?—to the dying man’s anxiety over his growing children and wife left behind—can he provide for them? This crippling terror—(which we have solemnly affirmed was an incentive to labour!)—being removed for ever by the mutual insurance of a civilised society; man can lift his head and work with a light heart and a free hand.
It means lifting from the heart of man, second, Sin. Just to see that Sin is Ours, not mine and thine, means instant relief and illumination. Then to see where it comes from, to remove its causes, to watch its shadow recede slowly from the glad, bright face of man, like the passing of an eclipse; that will leave us free to work indeed.
It means lifting from the body of man nearly all his load of disease; his diseases being as clearly traceable to social disorder as his sins. There is no difference, save that one is manifested in physical relations, and the other in social. That the human animal should not be as clean and healthy as other animals is due to his false social relations. When they are right, he maintains all the animal’s physical purity and vigour, and adds to it the yet unsounded depths of social vigour.
With a prospect like this before us, what prevents a sweeping and instant change? Nothing prevents a sweeping and instant change in the minds of some of us; a recognition of the nature of human life and human work which sees it all natural, all healthful, all good, in itself; and the bad only an evanescent mistake, easily to be avoided in future; but to spread that recognition in the minds of all of us means time and effort, and cannot become general at once.
Meanwhile, it is open to us, without waiting for all to see alike these patent truths, to go to work on such changes in economic condition as shall soonest check the decay in social tissues so dangerously apparent at both ends of our present “Society,” and to bring up, as soon as may be, those whose growth has been arrested for ages.