The next selected paragraph is from Professor Simon Patten (University of Pennsylvania), Ex-President of the American Academy of Political and Social Science:[[348]]
“The human hordes turned upon each other, and their prowlings about the precarious supplies of food evolved in the course of time the ‘wars of civilization.’ There was little peace where nature was most productive, and the conquering populations of the better lands, governing and protecting by conquest, built up whole states on the traditions and practice of fighting.... Statesmen and philosophers set forth the necessity and beneficence of destruction. It was in such a world, where a man’s death was his neighbor’s gain, that OUR social institutions were grounded.... Predatory habits, which originated in the hunting of game, developed a zest for hunting men as soon as conquests and the possession of slaves made the agricultural resources of the valleys more desirable than those of the mountain or upland plain.... The contests evolved social institutions, which do perpetuate and conserve, and which do not improve, man’s adjustment to nature. Here arises the distinction between the social institutions ... and the economic institutions.... The former establish status and the rights of possession and exploitation; the other increase nobility of men and goods, promote industry, and give each generation renewed power to establish itself in closer relations with nature.
“The result of these conditions is two kinds of obstacles that hinder advance. On the one hand are the obstacles economic, maladjustments between man and nature, which forced men in the past to submit to a poverty they did not know how to escape; and on the other hand are the obstacles social which do not originate in nature, but in those past [social] conditions retaining present potency that have aligned men into antagonistic classes at home and into hostile races abroad. The economic obstacles are being slowly weakened by the application of knowledge, science and skill; but the social obstacles will never be overcome until an intellectual revolution shall have freed men’s minds from the stultifying social traditions that hand down hatreds, and shall have given to thought the freedom that now makes industrial activity. The extension of civilization downward does not depend at present so much upon gaining fresh victories over nature, as it does upon the demolishment of social obstacles which divide men into classes and prevent the universal democracy that unimpeded economic forces would bring about. The social status, properly determined by a man’s working capacity, has now intervened between him and his relations with nature until OPPORTUNITY, which should be impersonal and self-renewed at the birth of a man, has dwindled and become partisan.”[[349]]
Thus Professor Patten, tho’ a conservative and a nonsocialist, frankly points out the necessity of such social reorganization as will destroy the artificial barriers to equality of opportunity for each to secure an abundance. And it is certainly true, as Dr. Patten suggests, that we have arrived at that stage in our knowledge of nature and in our industrial evolution, which renders industrial reconstruction of society logically necessary—both to avoid war and to secure industrial justice and freedom for the working class.
Anent this matter one of America’s noblest and most scholarly women, Miss Jane Addams, writes as follows:[[350]]
“Existing commerce has long ago reached its international stage, but it has been the result of business aggression, and constantly appeals for military defense and for the forcing of new markets.... It has logically lent itself to warfare, and is indeed the modern representative of conquest. As its prototype rested upon slavery and vassalage, so this commerce is founded upon a contempt for the worker, and believes that he can live on low wages. It assumes that his legitimate wants are the animal ones, comprising merely food and shelter and the cost of its replacement.”
Frederic Harrison thus:[[351]]
“Within our social system there rages the struggle of classes, interests, and ambitions; the passion for wealth, the restlessness of want. The future of industry, the cause of education, social justice, the very life of the poor, all tremble in the balance in our own country, as in other countries; this way or that way will decide the well-being of generations to come.”
The wars of long ago originated because it was extremely difficult to get a living out of nature’s store-house of supplies—when men were ignorant of nature’s resources and ignorant of how to make nature yield abundantly. Those wars were due chiefly to ignorance of physical nature, due to our inability to get into right relations WITH PHYSICAL NATURE. But the wars of the present are carried on, and the wars of the future will be carried on, chiefly because of the following combination of circumstances:
(a) We have so much knowledge of nature’s forces and resources that it is easy, now, to get livings from nature’s store-house, easy to produce abundantly; and