Favourable, however, as improved material or legislative conditions may undoubtedly be to the extension of health and morality amongst a people, these reforms can only be palliative, not curative, if the fundamental conditions of growth and freedom to use them be not guaranteed to all portions of a people. Every really curative measure which will insure the healthy growth of society presupposes a recognition of the needs of our human constitution and an adaptation of our social methods to those needs. It is only by such recognition and such adaptation that any human measure becomes an embodiment of Divine law. Our conscience must recognise this law, and our Will must render it obedience, in both individual and collective life, for there is no other possible method of securing durable and progressive growth. No human effort can change the supremacy of law written on the human constitution. Human perversity is free to thwart it temporarily, with delusive results which serve to bewilder our short vision; but the law is rewritten with wonderful persistency on each fresh generation of men, and it remains inexorable in its demand for obedience.
If trade in women be contrary to the Divine law written on the human constitution, it will destroy society. Insignificant as the needs of women’s lives may seem to superficial politicians or self-worshipping wordlings, yet these apparently weak lives, because God-created, will prove stronger than all their unstable laws and customs. No arrogant rebellion against the methods of moral progress, however splendid in its material force and its money-worship, can change the awful reality of Divine law.
Is the trade in women such a violation? Does it destroy the freedom, and therefore the necessary conditions of growth, in one-half the human race?
The time has certainly come when earnest reformers should consider to what extent trade in the human body exists in this civilized and Christian nation, and what its effect upon the nation is.
In a subject so vital to human welfare as the social relations which are established between men and women, it is pusillanimous to refuse to examine them. If the human conscience, slowly awakening, discovers that the necessary laws of progress have been ignorantly violated during the gradual development of humanity, none but pessimists will fold their hands in despair, none but the partially blind will continue to rebel against the Divine law of growth.
CHAPTER I
The Foundations of Trade
The wealth of a nation is that which contributes to its real and lasting well-being, which makes it powerful in the present, and durable and progressive in the future. A happy and intelligent people, with just and far-seeing rulers or guides amongst them, is a rich nation, and one that is fulfilling its duty by carrying on the gradual growth and ever higher development of the human race.
Political economy is the study of wealth, and particularly of those results of human activity, which spring from the necessary physical relation of human beings to their surroundings. It is this relation which makes the firm foundation on which political economy rests.
The subject leads to three great branches of inquiry—viz., the things which constitute wealth, the method of their production, and the way in which they are distributed.
The study of wealth must always take in this large scope in any lasting system of political economy, because the many special branches which the subject includes are all connected together. Every part is built up on the sure foundation of the relation of human needs to their surroundings. If our knowledge of this relation is unsound, the edifice will in time fall down.