“O the deep, deep hunger!
“The mean life all around, the wolfish eyes, the mere struggle for existence, as of man starving on a raft at sea—no room for anything more.
“O the deep, deep hunger of love.”
This picture of the degradation and misery of rich and poor alike is essentially true to fact. Our collective life does not supply the necessary conditions for real happiness in any section of the community; and nothing less than a reconstruction of society and regeneration of its life will suffice to meet the wants of humanity. Immense efforts are put forth in philanthropy and benevolence. Enormous energy is expended in partial or sectional reforms; for quite correctly has it been said that “Reform tends to run on a single rail, the majority of people refusing to study society as an organism of organisms resting on biological law.” (John M. Robertson.) We make no attempt as yet, to prevent waste of energy, to focus the factors of meliorism, to mass them, to direct them straight to the causes of evil and apply them effectively there—and that, because we have no carefully constructed scheme of thought and life whereby the whole effort of individual men and societies of men is concentrated in common and reciprocal activity to the end of creating happiness for all.
Social regeneration is necessarily of a two-fold character, embracing action without and action within. The first—which I call objective, signifies collective action on the physical plane adapted to promote and sustain the healthful, happy vitality of a race expected to grow steadily and uniformly in physical, mental, moral and spiritual elevation. The second, which I call subjective, signifies collective action directed to the repression of all the unsocial desires of man—those selfish emotions and narrow affections that alloy the mental and moral structure of human beings and render it impossible to develop the spiritual side of Humanity. The Darwinian laws—supposed by many to be still applicable to man—had relation, not to happiness, but to the preservation of life and the continuance of the race in the genetic, unconscious period of evolution. It is in the conscious period or stage of evolution that happiness evolves. Our present system of social life, if system it can be called, is a chaos of conflicting interests, duties, thoughts, feelings, actions—a prison-house in which the finer qualities and attributes of man can scarcely exist.
Let us put forth all our strength to create out of this chaos “the garden in which we may walk.” Let us break down the walls of our prison-house till it “opens at length on the sunlit world and the winds of heaven.” (Edward Carpenter.)
PART I
ECONOMICS IN MODERN LIFE
The only safety of nations lies in removing the unearned increments of income from the possessing classes and adding them to the wage-income of the working classes or to the public income in order that they may be spent in raising the standard of consumption.—J. A. Hobson, Contemporary Review, August, 1902.
CHAPTER I
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
It is a leading thought in modern philosophy that in its process of development, each institution tends to cancel itself. The special function is born out of social necessities; its progress is determined by attractions or repulsions which arise in society, producing a certain effect which tends to negate the original function.—William Clarke.