Our constitutions were constructed by the advanced men of the eighteenth century, who had studied the works of the most radical thinkers of that century. Radicalism then meant a more democratic political organization, and in its defence, they fearlessly quoted the Greek city and the Roman Forum. But we have come to admit that our present difficulties are connected with our industrial organization and with the lack of connection between that organization and our inherited democratic form of government. If self-government were to be inaugurated by the advanced men of the present moment, they would make a most careful research into those early organizations of village communities, folk-motes, and mirs, those primary cells of both industrial and political organizations, where the people knew no difference between the two, but, quite simply, met to consider in common discussion all that concerned their common life. They would investigate the crafts, guilds, and artels, which combine government with daily occupations, as did the self-governing university and free town. They would seek for the connection between the liberty-loving mediaeval city and its free creative architecture, that art which combines the greatest variety of artists and artisans. They would not altogether ignore the “compulsion of origins” and the fact that our present civilization is most emphatically an industrial one. In Germany, when the Social Democratic party first vigorously asserted the economic basis of society and laid the emphasis upon its industrial aspect, the Government itself, in a series of legislative measures, designated “the Socialism of Bismarck,” found itself dealing directly with industry, through a sheer effort to give itself a touch of reality. The Government of Russia, in the first year of the Japanese War, made an effort to relieve the needs of the people. The bureaucracy itself organized the workmen into a species of trades unions through which the Russian Government promised to protect the proletarian from the aggressions of capital. The entire incident was suggestive of the protection afforded by the central State to the slowly emancipated serfs of central Europe when the barons, reluctant to give up their rights and privileges, so unjustly oppressed them.
Shall a democracy be slower than these old Powers to protect its humblest citizen, and shall it see them slowly deteriorating because, according to democratic theory, they do not need protection?
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Trade Unionism and Labor Problems, by John R. Commons, page 248.
[7] “The Slav Invasion,” by F. J. Warne, pages 118, 119.
[8] The Standard of Life, by Mrs. Bernard Bosanquet, page 4.
[9] The American City. Delos F. Wilcox, page 200.
[10] Compromise, John Morley, page 213.
CHAPTER V
GROUP MORALITY IN THE LABOR MOVEMENT
This generation is constantly confronted by radical industrial changes, from which the community as a whole profits, but which must inevitably bring difficulty of adjustment and disaster to men of certain trades. In all fairness, these difficulties should be distributed and should not be allowed to fall completely upon the group of working-people whose labor is displaced as a result of the changes and who are obliged to learn anew their method of work and mode of life.