The organic action of Society necessarily involves a common nourishment, as it is even now seen to involve a common defence, and beyond that it requires a progressive increase in social stimulus. Our increased consumption is an accompanying condition of our increased activity, as the hard worker should eat more than the idle; but it is the well-distributed nourishment that promotes the activity, activity does not nourish. Now since the life and progress of Society depend on our best production, it is the natural duty of Society to so distribute nourishment and stimulus as to promote that production. A rich, strong, free, intelligent, thoroughly educated society will produce far more than a poor, weak, foolish, uneducated society.
The tremendous productivity of America does not result from our wanting more than other people, as is popularly supposed, but from our having more. Not only the great natural advantages of the country, not only the independence which left men more free to work, but our public institutions for wide distribution of social advantages, such as free education,—these have combined to make the American not a greedier, but an abler man. Note in small instance the difference between our custom of free service of ice-water in the theatres, of programmes and the like, of toilet conveniences in the great stores, and all such matters, as compared with the twopence or fivepence you have to pay extra for so much as a napkin in an eating house in England.
“But,” says the Englishman, “you have to pay in the end.” We are willing to pay in the end. Any decent man is willing to pay for what he has had. It is the difference between the “European plan” and the “American plan.” So soon as a more enlightened society provides more and more fully and freely for the needs of its citizens, so much the more cheerfully will they be willing to pay for it.
Our personal work in the specialised service of the great social body which maintains us is our payment for goods received. The slave works to avoid the whip. His labour might be termed whip-dodging. The employee works to obtain bread withheld. His labour is called “bread-winning.” The free and socially conscious human being works because he likes to, because he can’t help it, because it is his honourable return in small degree for the immeasurable benefits he has received from infancy from his supporting society. We have established a very binding sense of “duty to parents” because we believed that the father by his unaided arm supported the child; the mother by hers reared and trained it. The parents unquestionably give the child its physical and mental endowment. But if we proportioned our duty to parents to the value of our inherited constitutions and temperaments, some parents would get short shrift.
Beyond the gifts of birth, the mother’s breast, and the tendency to benefit of parental love, what else the child receives is from Society. Parents were parents and did what they could in savage and pre-savage eras. That parents are wiser and tenderer is due to our progress in Socialisation. That they are richer and more powerful is not due to parenthood, but to Society. The heaped-up increment of all the years, the highly developed products of our industry and skill, the discoveries in science, the masterpieces of art,—these are all social products not parental.
The child needs to be supplied with all that he can healthfully consume of this his social inheritance, his birthright as a human being. Some children have more of the social products than others because their parents have an arbitrary and unnatural “ownership” of these products; but as a normal condition of sociology, all children have this claim upon their great social entail, with no “right of primogeniture” or other usurpation to interfere. So supplied, and so taught to recognise the true supplier, it will be as easy to rear our children in a sense of duty to Society as it is now to duty to parents, and more so, because this later, larger claim is so indisputably true. With the full productive power of the race finally set free and pouring out on normal lines, there will be no lack of social benefit for all.
We have seen the economic advantage of wage labour over slave labour; can we not see the even greater economic advantage of free labour over wage labour?
XVI: OUR POSITION TO-DAY
Summary
Fact and delusion. American advantages and possibilities. Possible consciousness. Perverted Press. Falsely maintained position. Grade A and grade G. Soul paradoxes. Old Adam. Arbitrarily opposed “Leisure Class” and “Working Class.” Parasitism actual and potential. Dead matter in live body. Sour grapes. Charity an evil. Helplessness of rich man trying to establish right relation. Furnishing employment, i. e., furnishing payment. Unhealthy secretions resultant from over-consumption. Law of private servants. Doctor with a herald. Degraded art. Human value in work. Painful result of social disconnection in leisure class. Working Class suffers differently. Higher social position of Working Class. All human labour collective. False classification. Economic relation of sexes, result. Effect on child. What he should be taught. The round man in the square hole. Extended ill effect of malposition in social organism. Waste of energy, inferior workmanship, deterioration of social tissue. Progressive mal-nutrition. Genius.