This exhortation addresses itself in like manner to both parties in the struggle; to those who are now in power, not less than to those who are carrying on the social agitation. Intra muros peccatur et extra! There is sin within, as without, the walls.
The same is true of a second demand, which must be developed in the name of culture and humanity within these struggling parties, if the social strife is not to be a war of extermination. It must be carried on with proper weapons, not with poisoned arrows. How greatly have both sides been to blame in this respect! How difficult it is to keep out of the battle on the one side bitterness, mendacity, malice; on the other side brutality, derision, violence! How readily does the one opponent charge dishonour or bad motive against the other! How repellent, how offensive, too often, is the tone in which opinion is expressed! Must that be? Is that necessary for energetic assertion of one's standpoint? Does a man think that he loses anything by conceding that his opponent is an honourable man and by assuming that truth and honour will control in the dealings of his adversary? I do not think so. The man who places himself really in the struggle, who sees that in all historic strife is the germ of whatever occurs, should be able easily to conduct this strife in a noble way, to respect his opponent as a man, and to attribute to him motives no less pure than his own.
Then is not the social struggle, according to this idea of it, as necessary as a thunder-storm in a heavy atmosphere? He who sees in the struggle something artificial, produced by bad men, may perhaps attribute to the creator of the disturbance bad motives for this knavery, for this frivolous and malicious upsetting of social rest. But he who understands that the struggle arises necessarily out of the constitution of social life, and that it is only a warfare between two great principles, each of which has been, and must be, constituted by a combination of objective circumstances—he who looks at differences of idea as to the world and life which arise from the fact of different standpoints and which are the necessary occasion of differences in conditions of life—this one will come to the conviction that even his opponent stands on much the same grounds as he himself; that not personal baseness, but the compelling force of fate, has placed him in a position such that he must be an opponent. Then will it be easy, I think, to respect the other man, to refrain from suspicion and contempt, to battle with him openly and honourably. Shall we extol the Geneva Convention, which humanised warfare, as a fruit of advanced culture; and yet within our kingdom, like barbarians, without any consideration for the opponent, fly one upon another with dishonourable weapons?
In this the development of English social agitation can serve as a model. It points out to us how men may conduct in social life a moral and civilised warfare. Even upon the Continent, I hope, will the more humane form of struggle reach acceptance, if only because it springs of necessity from a deeper conception of what class strife really is. So long as the battle rages legally and honourably, we need not worry about the future of our civilisation.
Schiller's lines show how undisturbed we may be at the social struggle:
"A full life is what I want,
And swinging and swaying, to and fro,
Upon the rising and falling waves of fortune.
For a man becomes stunted in quietness of life;
Idleness and rest are the grave of energy.
* * * * *
But war develops strength.
It raises all to a level above what is ordinary,
It even gives courage to the cowardly."