There are of course certain concrete things which might help, as for instance the further extension and honest trying out of the "Kansas plan" for regulating industrial relations; the forming of "consumers leagues," and all possible support and furtherance of coöperative efforts of every sort. There are further possibilities (perhaps hardly probabilities) of controlling stock issues and stock holdings so that dividends do not have to be paid on grossly inflated capitalization, and fixing the maximum of dividends payable to non-active stockholders. Equally desirable but equally improbable, is the raising of the level of leadership in the labour unions so that these valuable institutions may no longer stultify themselves and wreck their own cause by their unjust and anti-social regulations as to apprentices, control of maximum output and its standard of quality, division of labour with ironclad inhibitions against one man doing another's work and against one man doing what six men can do less well, and as to the obligation to strike on order when no local or personal grievance exists. Most useful of all would be a voluntary renunciation, on the part of the purchasing public, of nine-tenths of the futile luxuries they now insanely demand, coupled with the production by themselves of some of the commodities which are easily producable; in other words, establishing some measure of self-support and so releasing many men and women from the curse of existence under factory conditions and giving them an opportunity of living a normal life under self-supporting circumstances. This, coupled with a fostering of the "back to the farm" movement, and the development of conditions which would make this process more practicable and the life more attractive, would do much, though in small ways, towards producing a more wholesome and less threatening state of affairs.
Back of the whole problem, however, lies a fallacy in our conception of existence that must be eliminated before even the most constructive panaceas can possibly work. I mean the whole doctrine of natural rights which has become the citadel of capitalism in all its most offensive aspects, and of labour in its most insolent assumptions. The "rights" of property, the "right" to strike, the "right" to collective bargaining, the "right" to shut down an essential industry or to "walk out" and then picket the place so that it may not be reopened, the "right" to vote and hold office and do any fool thing you please so long as it is within the law, these are applications of what I mean when I speak of a gross fallacy that has come into being and has stultified our intelligence while bringing near the wrecking of our whole system.
Neither man nor his community possesses any absolute rights; they are all conditioned on how they are exercised. If they are not so conditioned they become privilege, which is a right not subject to conditions, and privilege is one of the things republicanism and democracy and every other effort towards human emancipation have set themselves up to destroy. Even the "right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is conditioned by the manner of use, and the same is true of every other and unspecified right. I do not propose to speak here of more than one aspect of this self-evident truth, but the single instance I cite is one that bears closely on the question of our industrial and economic situation; it is the responsibility to society of property or capital on the one hand and of labour on the other, when both invoke their "rights" to justify them in oppressing the general public in the pursuit of their own natural interests.
During the Middle Ages, just as the political theory maintained that while a king ruled by divine right, this right gave him no authority to govern wrong, so the social theory held that while a man had a right to private property he had no right to use it against society, nor could the labourer use his own rights to the injury of the same institution. Power, property and labour must be used as a function, i.e., "an activity which embodies and expresses the idea of social purpose." Unless I am mistaken, this is at the basis of our "common law."
As Mediaevalism gave place to the Renaissance this Christian idea was abandoned, and increasingly the obligation was severed from the right, which so became that odious thing, privilege. Intolerable in its injustice and oppression, this privilege, which by the middle of the eighteenth century had become the attribute of the aristocracy, was completely overthrown, in France first of all, and a new doctrine of rights was enunciated and put in operation. Unfortunately the result was in essence simply a transforming of privilege from one body to another, for the old conception of social purpose, as the necessary concomitant of acknowledged rights, did not emerge from the shadows of the Middle Ages; it had been too long forgotten. The new "rights" were exclusively individualistic, in practice, though in the minds of the idealists who formulated them, they had their social aspect. Their promulgation synchronized with the sudden rise and violent expansion of industrialism, and as one country after another followed the lead of England in accepting the new system, they hardened into an iron-clad scheme for the defence of property and the free action of the holders and manipulators of property. Backed by the economic philosophy of Locke, Adam Smith, Bentham and the Manchester School, generally, and the evolutionary theories of the exponents of Darwinism, and abetted by an endless series of statutes, the idea of the exemption of property holders from any responsibility to society for the use of their property, became a fixed part of the mental equipment of modernism. Precisely the same thing happened politically and socially. Rights were personal and implied no necessary obligation to society as a whole; they were personal attributes and as such to be defended at all costs.
Now the result of this profound error as to the existence, nature and limitation of these personal rights has meant simply the destruction of a righteous and unified society which works by coöperation and fellowship, and the substitution of individuals and corporate bodies who work by competition, strife and mutual aggression towards the attainment of all they can get under the impulse of what was once praised as "enlightened self interest." In other words—war. The conflict that began in 1914 was not a war hurled into the midst of a white peace, it was only a military war arising in the centre of a far greater social war, for there is no other word that is descriptive. Rights that are not contingent on the due discharge of duties and obligations are but hateful privilege; privilege has issue in selfishness and egotism, which in turn work themselves out in warfare and in the hatred that both precedes and follows conflict.
The net result of a century and a half of industrialism is avarice, warfare and hate. Society can continue even when avariciousness is rampant—for a time—and warfare of one sort or another seems inseparable from humanity, at all events it has always been so, but hatred is another matter, for it is the negation of social life and is its solvent. Anger passes; it is sometimes even righteous, but hatred is synonymous with death in that it dissolves every unit, reducing it to its component parts and subjecting each of these to dissolution in its turn. Righteous anger roused the nations into the war that hate had engendered, but hate has followed after and for the moment is victorious. Russia seethes with hatred and is perishing of its poison, while there is not another country in Europe, of those that were involved in the war, where the same is not true in varying degrees; hatred of race for race, of nation for nation, of class for class, of one social or industrial or economic or political institution for another. This, above all else, is the disintegrating influence, and against it no social organism, no civilization can stand. Unless it is abrogated it means an ending of another epoch of human life, a period of darkness and another beginning, some time after the poison has been worked out by misery, adversity and forced repentance.
It is this prevalence of hatred, reinforced by avarice and perpetuated by incessant warfare, that negatives all the efforts that are made towards effecting a correspondence between the divided interests that are the concomitant of industrialism. Strikes and lockouts, trades unions and employers' associations as they are now constituted and as they now operate, syndicalism and Bolshevism and proletarian dictatorships, protective tariffs and commercial spheres of influence, propaganda and subsidized newspapers are all energized by the principle of hate, and no good thing can come of any of them. Nor is it enough to work for the re-establishment of justice even by those methods of righteousness, and with the impulse towards righteousness, which are so different from those which are functioning at present along the lines of contemporary industrial "reform." Justice is a "natural" virtue with a real place in society, but the only saving force today is a supernatural virtue. This, amongst other things, Christ brought into the world and left as the saving force amongst the race He had redeemed and in the society reconstituted in accordance with His will. This supernatural virtue is Charity, sometimes expressed in the simpler form of Love, the essence of the social code of Christianity and the symbol of the New Dispensation as justice was the symbol of the Old. Just in so far as a man or a cult or an interest or a corporation or a state or a generation or a race, relinquishes charity as its controlling spirit, in so far it relinquishes its place in Christian society and its claim to the Christian name, while it is voided of all power for good or possibility of continuance. Where charity is gone, intellectual capacity, effectual power, and even justice itself become, not energies of good, but potent contributions to evil. Is this supernatural gift of charity a mark of contemporary civilization? Does it manifest itself with power today in the dealings between class and class, between interest and interest, between nation and nation? If not, then we have forfeited the name of Christian and betrayed Christian civilization into the hands of its enemies, while our efforts towards saving what is left to us of a once consistent and righteous society will be without result except as an acceleration of the now headlong process of dissolution.
I am not charging any class or any interest or any people with exclusive apostacy. In the end there is little to choose between one or another. Labour is not more culpable than capital, nor the proletarian than the industrial magnate and the financier, nor the nominal secularist than the nominal religionist. Nor am I charging conscious and willful acceptance of wrong in the place of right. It is the institution itself, industrialism as it has come to be, with all its concomitants and derivatives, that has betrayed man to his disgrace and his society to condemnation, and so long as this system endures so long will recovery be impossible and regeneration a vain thing vainly imagined. Charity, that is to say, fellowship, generosity, pity, self-sacrifice, chivalry, all that is comprehended in the thing that Christ was, and preached, and promulgated as the fundamental law of life, cannot come back to the world so long as avarice, warfare and hate continue to exist, and through Charity alone can we find the solution of the industrial and economic problem that must be solved under penalty of social death.