Only dimly do men realize these limitations. The more they learn, the more clearly they understand the nature of the bonds that hold them, and the better are they prepared to break down the most hampering barriers, and to follow where aspiration and hope beckon. Yet, even among the masses of the people, who have had little time to learn, and less in which to reflect, there is a persistent longing to be free. The plea for liberty always awakens a response in them because, through their own lives they come into such intimate contact with the hateful burdens that oppression lays upon its victims.
The longing to be free is probably one of the most widely distributed of human qualities, and one, moreover, which men share with many of the higher animals. The World War focused this longing and raised it to a pitch of frenzied exaltation, under the spell of which hundreds of millions fought and worked, as they thought, for liberty. The fact that they were mistaken in their ideas regarding the purposes of the war does not in any sense detract from the sincerity of their desires, nor from the earnestness of their efforts.
The World War fervor was typical of the eager attempts that men have made at intervals all through history, to win freedom against immense odds. During the past three or four centuries this struggle has been particularly severe in the political, the social and in the economic fields alike.
Although the Dark Ages almost obliterated the expression of creative energy in the Western World, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the industrial revolution, following in quick succession, proclaimed its reawakening, and to-day there is scarcely a group of people—in Egypt, in Ireland, in Korea, in the Philippines, or in dark, enslaved Africa that does not hold a molten mass of sentiment surging toward freedom,—a seething, smouldering pressure, continually seeking an outlet.
Economic emancipation does not include all aspects of freedom. Many other chains remain to be broken. But the economic organization of the world would be one step in the direction of freedom, and would burst many a bond that now holds the human race in subjection.
2. Freedom from Primitive Struggle
The first step in economic liberation is to free man from the more savage phases of the life struggle—the struggle against nature: the struggle with other men.
Since those far-off times when men lived by tearing away clusters of nuts, by picking berries, by digging roots, by snaring fish and by clubbing game, they have been compelled to wrest from nature the means of subsistence. In this struggle, there have been the terrible phantoms of hunger, thirst, cold, darkness and physical suffering of every sort, driving men on. He who won in the contest with nature was able to escape the worst of these miseries, but he who lost was tortured by them as long as life remained in his body. The race is saddled, even to-day, by an oppressive fear of these physical hardships that makes the strongest a willing servant of any agency that will promise to ward them off.
The first victory that men must gain in their battle for economic liberation, will be won when hunger, thirst, cold, darkness and other aspects of physical suffering are banished from the lives of all people as effectively as yellow fever and cholera have been banished from the western world during recent generations.
This end has already been attained for the favored few in most countries, but famine still stalks periodically among the peoples of Asia, and even Europe, since the Great War, has felt its grip. Among the industrial workers of the imperial countries, and among the citizens of the exploited countries, the wolf is a far more frequent visitor than is the fatted calf.