It would be by no means fair to maintain that no man can be successful in business who is not cursed with all these vices. On the contrary, some of our greatest philanthropists have been successful business men. But philanthropy sometimes results from the blessed principle of reaction, under which vice, when it gets bad enough, creates a revulsion against evil. Reaction, however, is the eddy in the stream; and it is the stream and not the eddy that in the end counts.
The main, the essential, the inevitable result of private property is to promote selfishness, for the competitive system creates an artificial environment to which the human type must tend to conform. This artificial environment not only promotes selfishness at large, but tends to degrade every institution which man has invented in his effort to advance. Among these institutions, the two which have sprung from the noblest instincts in man, and ought most to tend to his improvement, are Marriage and the Church. Yet both are demoralized by the competitive system.
In the state of nature, animals tend to improve through sexual selection. By sexual selection is meant the fight between males for the female, the result of which is that the strongest males are the ones that perpetuate the type.
In the artificial environment produced by private property, a very different process is at work. Marriage tends to be determined by wealth rather than fitness; and the wealthy tend to have few children or none; whereas it is found that in the unwealthy classes, the poorest have the most children. Well-to-do people protect themselves and their families from poverty by prudence, whereas, those who despair of escaping from poverty have no reason for refusing themselves what is often almost their only satisfaction; and the result is that while the houses of the rich tend to be desolate through childlessness, those of the poor are crowded with the offspring of despair.
The religious conception of Marriage that it is a sacrament has become practically obsolete; particularly in this so among the rich, whose daughters are annually offered for sale in the market of Mayfair as shamelessly as not long ago were Circassian girls in that of Istamboul.
The effect of private property on the Church is no less deplorable. It costs money to maintain a church; and the more splendidly a church is maintained the more money it costs. The priest has to live; bishops indeed have to live in a certain state. The Church, then, must have money. In some countries the Church secures money from the government, and is driven thereby into the questionable field of politics; in others, every individual church is thrown upon its own resources, and has either to make its services attractive by ritual, or to depend for its supplies upon one or two of the wealthy members of its congregation. It is not surprising, then, that under this subjection to wealth, Christians have abandoned the teaching of Christ, and forgotten that in early days they sold all and gave to the poor, contributed their earnings to a common stock, and resisted not evil but overcame evil with good.
Yet the Church has rendered, and is still rendering, a priceless service to man. Falter though she may, she has preserved for us the Gospel of Christ.
The blame rests not with the Church, but with the artificial environment which man has himself created, and to which he alone can put an end—the environment that appeals to the selfishness of man, and having made man selfish, insolently asserts that in no other environment can he be otherwise.
Man will be what his environment makes him.
If the environment stimulates selfishness, man will be selfish. If it stimulates unselfishness, he will be unselfish.