Management is, of course, entitled to its wages, and under present conditions those wages must be relatively high, for managing ability is not abundant. What might be called the wages of capital have been unjustly high and are destined to fall until no man can afford to be a mere capitalist. To gain a livelihood he will be obliged to develop some productive function.
So long as industry must be maintained on a capitalistic basis, those furnishing the capital are entitled to a fair return on their investment, but the fashion of this capitalistic age passeth away. The control of money and credit is destined to gradually become a function of government.
A check must be placed on the fatal fashion money has of breeding money. Wages of labor, wages of invention, wages of superintendence, are just; profits of capital must grow less and less to the vanishing point. The bitter conflict between capital and labor over the division of the profits will never be settled. It probably never can be settled. It will cease to be. Capital will cease to be a factor; only labor in the broadly inclusive sense of the term will remain.
The onward march of democracy, then, cannot be staid. It ought not. Democracy is nothing but the social expression of the fundamental Christian doctrine of the worth of the human soul. Democracies had found their way into human life before the revelation of the worth of the human soul in the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, but at their best, as in ancient Greece, they were restricted. Even that most glorious of all non-Christian democracies and, in some respects, most glorious as yet of all democracies non-Christian and Christian, the democracy of Athens, rested on a slave basis and excluded the man not possessing Athenian citizenship. But it was at least a noble anticipation, a sublime, if inconsistent, partial, and evanescent reaching-out after the democracy which Christianity can never be content till it has achieved, a democracy of religion, of culture, of politics, and of industry. The inherent dignity of every human soul must be recognized in every sphere of life. Heirs of God, joint-heirs with Christ--how is it possible to reconcile such august titles with servitude or subjection? A share in the control of church, community, industry is the Divine right of every normal man and woman.
CHAPTER II.
THE OVERFLOW OF BROTHERHOOD
The Church of Jesus Christ should not be alarmed at the inundating progress of democracy. She, of all institutions, should not oppose it. It is her child. But even democracy, with its majestic vindication of the worth and dignity of the humblest and least-endowed human soul, is not so distinctively and gloriously the offspring of Christianity as is the principle of brotherhood. The movement towards brotherhood, the great master-passion of our day, is just the overflow of Christianity from the conventionally religious into the economic realm. One might rest the divine claim of Christianity on this irrepressible impulse to overflow.
The ancient heathen faiths, with a few possible exceptions, did not seek to overflow. They asked only a strictly delimited area, definite times, definite places, definite gifts, definite ceremonial, observances and regulations. Outside that circumscribed area, life might go on as it would.
Even some forms of Christianity have shown little disposition to overflow. There has long been and still is a type of Christianity which fixes its eye on heaven and abandons earth. It is indifferent and acquiescent in regard to the affairs of this life, with no surge of passion for their purification and ennoblement.
This attitude has found expression in a hymn of John Wesley's which was once sung in its entirety but which, where it still lingers in our present collections, survives in a repeatedly and severely abridged form.