The more we bring a true education within reach of the workers the more will there arise that sense of real kinship which only equality of education can adequately guarantee.
And speaking at Cambridge one cannot refrain from remarking that the University itself will have to submit to a considerable re-adjustment of its life if it is to be a pioneer in this intellectual comradeship of which I speak. A University may be a nursery of class distinction. In some measure it certainly has been so in the past. The opportunity is now before it to lead the way in establishing the only kind of equality which is really worth having.
Then too there are obvious steps which can be taken without delay in a new organisation of industry.
I am not one of those who think that the industrial problem can be solved in five minutes or even in five years. None the less it should not be impossible in wise ways to give the workers a true share of responsibility, particularly in matters which concern the conditions of their work and the remuneration of their labour.
If the sense of being driven by a taskmaster, whether it be the foreman of the shop, or the manager of the works, could give place to a truer co-operation in the management, and a larger measure of responsibility for the worker, we should be well on the road to eliminating one of the most persistent causes of just that kind of class distinction which we want to abolish. The more men work together in a real comradeship, the more mere social distinctions fade into the background. Is this not written on every page of the chronicles of this war?
But the supreme factor in the situation, without which no mere adjustment of organisation will prevail, is that new outlook on life which can only be described as a subordination of private advantage to the service of the country.
It is this alone which can really abolish the almost eternal class distinctions which we have traced throughout our survey, the distinction between the "haves" and the "have nots." For, as this spirit grows, the "have nots" tend to disappear, and the "haves" look upon what they have not as a selfish possession for their own enjoyment, but as a means of service for the common weal. Property, that which is most proper to a man, is seen to be precisely that contribution which he is capable of making to the welfare of his fellows.
The crux, the very core of the whole problem, is to find some means by which this new outlook can be produced, and a new motive by which men can be constrained to turn the vision into fact.
Here will come in that power which, as I pointed out, has sometimes been so potent and sometimes so impotent, but which, if it is allowed its proper scope, can never fail. I mean of course religion.
If men can be brought to see that this new outlook with its corresponding re-adjustment of social life is not merely a project of reformers but the plan of the Most High God, the deliberate intention of the supreme Spirit-force of the universe, the Scheme that was taught by the Prince of men, then indeed we may hope that the class distinction of which He spoke will at last be adopted: "Whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister: and whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many[30]."