“The immense acquisition,” he says, “to the wealth and resources of mankind which has been the result of the past century of science, should have been the golden opportunity of statesmen and humanitarians and the raw material out of which the sum total of human happiness could have been augmented. Instead, it has but revealed a growing incapacity and failure on the part of the altruist to appreciate the nature and power of the new weapon that science has placed in his hands, and an ever-increasing rapacity and far-sightedness on the part of the egotist to secure it for his own ends.
“For many a decade now, owing primarily and indisputably to the intellectual achievements of a comparative handful of men of communistic and cloisteral habit of thought, a steady shower of material benefits has been raining down upon humanity, and for these benefits men have fought in the traditional manner of the struggle when the fickle sunlight was the sole hazardous income of the world. The strong have fed and grown fat upon a larger and ever larger share of the manna. Initial slight differences of strength and sagacity have become so emphasized by the virile stream that the more successful are becoming monstrously so, and the unsuccessful less and less able to secure a full meal than before the shower began.
“Already it savours of indelicacy and tactlessness to recall that the exploiters of all this wealth are not its creators; that the spirit of acquisitiveness which has ensured success to them, rather than to their immediate neighbours, is the antithesis of the spirit by which the wealth was won.
“Amid all the sneers at the impracticability and visionary character of communist schemes, let it not be forgotten that science is a communism, neither theoretical nor on paper, but actual and in practice. The results of those who labour in the fields of knowledge for its own sake are published freely and pooled in the general stock for the benefit of all. Common ownership of all its acquisitions is the breath of its life. Secrecy or individualism of any kind would destroy its fertility.”
So far Professor Soddy, but let the writer add that there is this point about the scientific world not to be overlooked. Every worker in the latter is a specially educated man, and he is free to leave the communism of science if he thinks fit. This is very different from a communism imposed upon an unprepared mass of people containing large recalcitrant minorities or majorities. A communism sustained by a community of will based on education—an extension, that is, of the communism of scientific research to human affairs generally—is the ideal underlying the political ideas of most intelligent modern men.
[468] We may note a very interesting experiment in wages payment here that has been made by the American Oneida silver company. A committee on which the workers are strongly represented makes a summary week by week of the current prices of staple commodities and common necessities. Week by week it is noted that prices are so much per cent, above the normal figure of January, 1914 (or some such date), which is taken as the standard. On pay-day every worker receives his wages plus a percentage representing the higher prices, so that though the actual sums paid vary week by week, the purchasing power of the wages paid remains practically constant. Here, perhaps, we have a germ of a system that may grow to considerable importance. The burthen of rising prices is shifted to the employer, who can take them into account in fixing his prices.
[469] For a closely parallel view of religion to that given here, see that admirable book, Outspoken Essays, by Dean Inge, Essays VIII and IX on St. Paul and on Institutionalism and Mysticism.
[470] Town Topics, November 26th, 1919.
[471] Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid is worth noting here as one of the earliest correctives to these popular misconceptions of Darwinism.—G. M.
[472] Morley’s Life of Gladstone.