But the practical politics of the present deal with a society where a strong arm is needed to protect the weak from the tyranny of the giants. To talk about the principles of brotherhood fully prevailing in our present conditions, is to treat the laws of Christ with flippancy. Nine-tenths of the maxims of our modern business system contradict the law of love. In our present environment it is impossible for business people or working people to obey the Sermon on the Mount and not starve. Perhaps a few sacrifices of this kind are needed to teach us how abhorrent the present selfish system is to the Christianity of Christ. “I suppose I ought to be thankful to get the work at all, for they told other women they had no work left for them,” said a woman to me who was making men’s pantaloons for two dollars a dozen. She was part of the system; she was competing with other less fortunate women as truly as her employer with other firms; she drank her tea at the expense of her less lucky sister, who had no work and no tea. What chance does this system afford for perfect fraternalism, or even for decent fraternalism, among those who have to compete?
Socialism aims to produce an environment where not only the Golden Rule but the Law of Love will have a living chance. As such an agent it has its proper political place in the development of mankind.
REVOLUTIONARY MEASURES AND NEGLECTED CRIMES.
PART II.
BY PROF. JOSEPH RODES BUCHANAN.
If we agree that all men are born free and equal, with certain inalienable rights,—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,—let us legislate to enforce our belief. All men are not born equal, if one is born with power to live without toil; power to control the movements of a hundred thousand of his unequal fellow-citizens; power to bribe legislatures; power to hire a pretorian guard of laborers, writers, editors, clergymen, and even soldiers or police to do his bidding and to sing his praise, and to threaten those who wish to establish a real republic. It was thought we had abolished hereditary inequality; but in a land where our democratic lords can each hire fifty thousand men and equip an army if need be,—where a democratic American lord can buy a dozen of the puny lords of Europe,—the social equality dreamed of in ‘76 does not exist. We have abolished the useless title but not the lord.
We should not object to that inequality which is natural—to the superior ability and superior virtue which place one man far above his fellows; but we should object to an immense inequality, which is not natural, and which sometimes places the superior man at the mercy and in the service of one who has no ability whatever,—who is simply born to rule by means of hereditary wealth. This is just as great a social inequality as that which Jefferson saw in Europe, and which he thought was to be excluded from America.
It is a condition that is demoralizing in a hundred ways, and is fraught with peril to the republic, peril to society, and peril to all the interests of humanity; and therefore as I would assert,—and who would deny the supreme right and power of the people to protect the republic from any impending calamity by any just means, but not by any unjust means—I would claim that it is our right and duty to say that this grand hereditary inequality shall not be perpetual, and that the past shall not rule the present—the graveyard shall not contain our legislature,—but that each generation shall be a law unto itself, and shall establish the conditions of justice and safety without regard to the follies of the dead and the ancient laws of inheritance when they conflict with justice.