"The remedy is always a problem. I should try co-operation—in this age."
"Co-operation! It has been proved an absolute failure. It makes the industrious and the thrifty the slave of the idle and spendthrift. Men would not work."
"An idle and time-worn fallacy. The ambitious do not work for gold, the high-minded do not—John Marvel does not—Miss Leigh does not. The poor do not work for wealth, only for bread, for a crust, with starvation ever grinning at them beside their door which cannot shut out its grisly face. Look at your poor client McNeil. Did he work to accumulate gold? He worked to feed his starving children."
"But, would they work—this great class?"
"Yes, they would have to work, all who are capable of it, but for higher rewards. We would make all who are capable, work. We would give the rewards to those who produce, to all who produce by intellect or labor. We would do away with those who live on the producers—the leeches who suck the life-blood. Work, intellectual or physical, should be the law of society."
"They would not work," I insisted.
"Why do you go on drivelling that like a morning paper. Why would they not work! Man is the most industrious animal on earth. Look at these vast piles of useless buildings, look at the great edifices and works of antiquity. Work is the law of his awakened intellect. There would still be ambition, emulation, a higher and nobler ambition for something better than the base reward they strive and rob and trample each other in the mire for now. Men would then work for art, the old mechanic-arts would revive in greater beauty and perfection than ever before. New and loftier ideals would be set up. There would be more, vastly more men who would have those ideals. What does the worker now know of ideals? He is reduced to a machine, and a very poor machine at that. He does not know where his work goes, or have an interest in it. Give him that. Give his fellows that. It will uplift him, uplift his class, create a great reservoir from which to draw a better class. The trouble with you, my dear friend," said Wolffert, "is that you are assuming all the time that your law is a fixed law, your condition of society a fixed condition. They are not: There are few things fixed in the world. The universal law is change—growth or decay. Of all the constellations and stars, the Pole star alone is fixed, and that simply appears so. It really moves like the rest, only in a vaster orbit with other stars moving about it."
I smiled, partly at his grandiose imagery and partly at his earnestness.
"You smile, but it is true. There are few fundamental laws. The survival of the fittest is one of them in its larger sense. It is that under which my people have survived."
"And that all men are by nature entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."