Labour has not yet won its charter of rights because it has neglected to perform its role of duties. Labour has to look the social problem squarely in the face with both eyes open. At present it only opens one eye--the eye which sees magnifically its rights. The other eye is shut which should observe its duties. The eye of Labour that should see its duties is sealed in darkness. The scales of Justice must balance truly before mankind is happy ever more.
Free labour is as necessary a commodity as free sunshine in a well-balanced State. If a man does his work well and does not require so much beer and tobacco and time for football as another man, he should be free to dispose of his labour as he chooses, without being picketed or bludgeoned by lewd fellows of the baser sort. Until there prevail an all-round correct idea of work, legislation will be a dead letter. God has not made one sun to shine on wages and another on capital, nor has He made two varieties of justice. He is God over all of us, and His law is impartial justice.
Capital is not immaculate. It sits the great god incarnate on its high gold throne, ruling men with sovereign power and using men as a means to wealth. Its vestments are of purple and fine linen. Costly raiment to wear, but unseemly smirched with the mud of gutter complots and stained red with blood sweated from the poor. Capital wants washing thoroughly from its iniquity and purging with hyssop before it is fragrant and can discourse virtue to the working classes.
Capital and Labour must forgive each the sins of the past, and as Brains and Hands work together in mutual confidence and esteem. Brains and Hands are not hard-set hereditary foes. They are blood relatives, members of the same body-politic, and must hold together for their common good. They are not even business opponents with clashing interests spoiling to cut each other's throat and smash the opposition concern with fiery glee of heart. They are copartners in the same business concern, and must combine, each having their own department to superintend. The interest of one is the interest of the other. If one department breaks, the other falls with it deep in disaster. Yet these two copartners of the same business firm are hating one another with a hot historical hatred that defies the flight of ages. They are locked together struggling for mastery, each hoping to throw the other and become top-dog and dictate new terms of partnership which never would be kept, for the articles of treaty would soon become merely "a scrap of paper." It is not conquest: it is co-operation that will bring peace and concord between Capital and Labour.
The world is ripe for a new social programme. The war has altered the map of Europe, and it will alter the map of men's minds. The war has swept away old crusted conventions which cobwebbed the mind, and false foundations of social science upon which men laboured vainly to build Utopia. These things must be reassessed at new values.
The working-man wanted to get in the sun and own his patch as a free and independent citizen. There is no such thing in the world as independence, complete and arrogant: either in art, science, revolting daughters or commerce. Independence is a fool's word or an anarchist's battle-cry. The nearest approach to it in the realm of reality is interdependence. Substitute this word "interdependence" in the place of the other insolent and erroneous one and you have a working proposition, for you establish a sense of justice between man and man, and you have gathered together raw material out of which to build a new heaven and a new earth.
A pre-war panacea for curing the ills of unrighteousness which blight society was the amelioration of environment--a sonorous, windy, academic platitude having more sound in it than sense. It was the pet scheme for manufacturing good citizens out of bad ones; it began at the outward condition of mankind and worked inward. It started with the barber, the schoolmaster, and the politician. By pursuing this method they started with folly and ended with failure. It is like telling a man to polish his boots when his heart wants cleaning. The favourite speculation of theorists was that perfect circumstances create perfect character. This is attractive reading in cheap handbooks of political economy for the working classes, but in this wicked world it fails to pan out when put to a working test. It is more important a man should start by mending himself, and his circumstances will quickly mend themselves.
To expect by flattening down inequalities, removing temptations, and giving everybody a living wage of £2 per week, England will flower into a Garden of Eden where people are all good and happy and pay no taxes, and where angels will come and converse with us in the cool of the day, is to expect the impossible. To expect by adapting the lot to man instead of adapting man to his lot you will create an earthly paradise out of a world of wickedness is to expose your ignorance of human nature and to admit your incapacity for adjusting its wrongs.
They tell us that in the New Democracy patriotism will be scrapped. Love of country is a parochial virtue; it will be swamped in the greater love of humanity which will rise like a swelling flood and cover all. In the new Garden of Eden we shall be a happy brotherhood, for the dangerous serpent will be scotched. This doctrine is maudlin sentimentalism with a tang of grotesque to flavour it. Humanity is an immense crowd to fall in love with en bloc; each individual will receive a very thin slice of your affection if all the world is to share in it alike. Love will die of starvation fed on these lean rations. As a padre fresh from the Front persuasively raps out the truth, "the would-be cosmopolitan who will not narrow himself to love of country is rarely capable of any real self-devotion to the international ideal which he worships. The lover of humanity is more often than not utterly miserable travelling in a third-class railway-carriage."
Patriotism must survive as a national virtue, however violently the universal brotherhood flourishes, because the love of country is founded on the love of home and family, and the love of home and family is founded on the love of a man and a woman. You can never get over this nature-logic while men and women remain human beings with natural instincts which draw them to love one another and preserve the family feeling. I would rather be the victim of every insular prejudice possible than have no British prejudices to stir my British blood.