A profit-seeking system will always breed profiteers. It cannot be cleansed or sweetened or ennobled. There is only one way to Christianize it, and that is, to abolish it. That is, it may well be believed, the distinctive task of the age that is now beginning, as the abolition of the liquor-traffic was of the age that is closing, and the abolition of slavery of a still earlier age.
This whole present industrial and commercial world, ingenious, mighty, majestic, barbaric, disorderly, brutal, must be lifted from its basis of selfish, competitive profit-seeking and placed squarely on a basis of co-operative production for human needs.
How this tremendous transformation will be eventually accomplished, probably no one of this generation can foresee. All we can see is some initial steps.
A hint, it may be, is given in the well-recognized tendency of competing industries to escape competition by specialization. Thus they become co-operative. The same tendency to co-operative specialization is at work among professional men. Medical men specialize ever more narrowly. Lawyers elect to become authorities in a very narrow field.
Another principle of transformation may be found in the union of competing businesses under government regulation as to prices. Such combinations, while often disadvantageous to the public unless governmentally regulated, at least attest the increasing recoil from competition.
The main line of development, however, it seems altogether probable, will be the extension of public ownership, municipal, state or provincial, and national.
There is no diviner movement at work in the modern world. It is emancipating, educative, redemptive, regenerating. "Whatever says I and mine," says one of the wisest and most Christ-like of Medieval Mystics, "is Anti-Christ." The converse is equally true. "Whatever says we and ours is Christian." Public ownership, more extensively and powerfully than any other human agency, teaches men to say we and ours. It teaches them to think socially.
To discredit and attack the principle of public ownership is to discredit and attack Christianity. It would seem to be the special sin against the Holy Ghost of our age. He who doubts the practicability of public ownership is really doubting human nature and Christianity and God.
What we are facing to-day is the issue between learning to do things together and a struggle between competing individuals, competing classes, and competing nations, so frantic and ferocious that in it our civilization may go down.
In these two chapters there has been the effort to set forth two at least of the dominating principles of the new social order. They are both embodied in a significant report adopted by the General Conference of the Methodist Church of Canada, October, 1918, in the city of Hamilton, Ontario. This report presented by a Committee on the Church in Relation to War and Patriotism was adopted, after a long and deeply earnest debate, in a reduced but still large Conference, with but four dissentient votes. It has awakened unusual interest as perhaps the boldest and most outspoken deliverance on the social question which any great Christian body up to that time had made.