CHAPTER VIToC

It is said that by the side of every poison in Nature there grows its antidote; that for every bean of St. Ignatius there is a bean of Calabar; and that a man poisoned by the one has only to stretch his hand out to the other.

So also in our social system may the two influences be at work, at odds with each other; whereas, did we but know enough, they might not only serve to counteractone another, but even become a priceless boon to humanity, as indeed the beans of St. Ignatius and Calabar have been made to yield up drugs as useful as nux vomica and eserine.

Religion and economics start by assumptions that are glaringly inconsistent.

Religion proceeds upon the assumption that man has morality in him and will, sometimes, act morally even contrary to his material interests.

Economics proceed upon the assumption that man has no morality in him and will never act morally if morality be contrary to his material interests.

Modern economists have somewhat modified this last view, but I am not criticising modern Political Economy, which is already lowering its flag to new doctrine; I am criticising the doctrine oflaissez faire, which still constitutes the backbone of our existing economics and will continue to deform our economic ideas until that backbone is relegated to museums by the side of the Ichthyosaurus and the Iguanodon.

Is the assumption that economic science is uninfluenced by morality true or false? Undoubtedly an economic science can be and has been constructed which does ignore morality and, dealing with man not as he really is but stripped of his morality, or as he is termed by some economic writers, "economic man," and still more naïvely by others the "average sensual man," has laid down the laws whichfor such a mangovern the production, distribution, and accumulation of wealth. In the development of this science it has been found necessary to define wealth, and here we come upon the first hard substance against which economists have broken their heads. For obviously wealth is to the "economic" or "average sensual" man a totally different thing towhat it is to a Diogenes, a Cato, or to a Sister of Charity. To the latter wealth or well-being as opposed to illth or ill-being, consists mainly in the opportunity to be helpful to our fellow-creatures, whereas to the average sensual man wealth means money or the things that represent money, produce, bonds, and shares of stock. Now all economists are not "average sensual" men; it is doubtful whether to those who know the Dean of Modern Economists, Mr. Alfred Marshall, he can be described as a sensual man at all; and so there are few subjects upon which economists have differed so much as upon the definition of wealth. The extremists confine wealth to material things that have an exchange value; but the absurdity of such a definition is slowly making itself recognized; thus it has been forced upon some that skill is wealth; and upon others that honesty too is wealth; for the money value of honesty is now put into dollars and cents by surety companies. And so very slowly but surely economists are beginning to recognize that man is a moral as well as a sensual animal, and that his morality cannot be disregarded even by economics.

Then, too, what is wealth in one country is not wealth in another; thus we are told that the food of John the Baptist was "locusts and wild honey," and in certain parts of Africa locusts are still a marketable article of food; so snails are wealth in France though not in England; and human flesh which is not wealth in Europe is still wealth in some parts of Africa. Wealth then depends upon two factors: intrinsic and extrinsic; the first including qualities of the thing itself, the second depending upon human demand; so that a painting by Tintoretto is wealth to a community that loves art, but an encumbrance to one that does not love it; and absinthe, that isregarded as a valuable asset in France, is excluded by Belgium as poison.

Here again we come up against the morality of man; will he continue to poison himself with absinthe or will he abstain? Upon this ethical decision will depend the question whether the immense stock of absinthe now on the French market is wealth or not. And so we are led insensibly to a question of still wider importance: Is wealth money or is it happiness? If it is money then economists are right; if it is happiness then they are wrong. And yet it is as clear as the sun on a cloudless day that what man wants is happiness, and that if he has been set all these centuries on seeking money it is because money is believed by him to be practically the only medium through which he can attain happiness. Here is repeated the old story of the captive beaver in the attic gathering sticks to make a dam when the water pitcher was upset. The object for making dams had disappeared, but the dam-building instinct survived. We have grown so accustomed to labor for money that we have lost sight of the real object of our efforts; and we have to think a long time before we recognize that money in itself is of no importance to us whatever; and that the only thing of real importance is that for which money is sought—happiness. Now what happiness consists of depends upon the mentality of any given community. The tree-dwelling savage's idea of happiness is plenty of nuts and fine weather; the Englishman's idea is plenty of land and a seat in Parliament; the American's idea is millions of money; and the tree-dwelling savage is probably as near the truth as either of the other two.

Obviously there is an ideal of happiness quite different from this; an ideal that recognizes the solidarity of therace and recognizes that no one man can be securely happy unless his neighbors are happy also; an ideal built on the plan of mutual helpfulness—of coöperation instead of competition. But here the lip of the economist will curl and he will, if he deigns to express himself at all, denounce such a proposition as "impractical." But why does he do this? Because he has been educated to believe that economics deal only with the "average sensual man," and that wealth consists exclusively of "material things that have an exchange value." If, then, it turns out that both these assumptions are false, is it not time for him to revise his philosophy?

It is not unnatural that starting with false definitions of man and of wealth, economists should arrive at a false conclusion regarding the so-called beauties of our industrial system, and of such time-honored though immoral maxims as "competition is the soul of trade" and "caveat emptor."

And now after this rapid glance at economic philosophy and the "average sensual man," let us turn to Religion and see how Religion regards man.

It seems inconceivable that the same civilization should include two bodies of men living in apparent harmony and yet holding such opposite and inconsistent views on man as economists on the one hand and theologians on the other. To these last, man has no economic needs; this world does not count; it is merely a place of probation, mitigated sometimes, it is true, by ecclesiastical pomp and episcopal palaces; but serving for the most part as a mere preparation for a future existence which will satisfy the aspirations of the human soul—the only thing that does count, in this world or the next. So while to the economist man is all hog, to the theologian he is all soul; and between the two the Devil securesthe vast majority. One-fifth of the population in London is admittedly foredoomed to die in a penitentiary, an almshouse, or a lunatic asylum; and the vast multitude of wage earners are kept out on the ragged edge of the strike on one hand and unemployment on the other, with no better prospect before them than a destitute old age.

Were there no churches in the land, were there no charity in man, no pity, the economists would be comprehensible; but with our churches still crowded; with charitable societies as thick as universities; with pity in their own hearts giving every day the lie to the economic enormities they profess and teach, what are we going to say of these men? And were there no economists in the chair, no stock exchange, no factory, no strikes, no unemployed; did our theologians' stomachs never themselves clamor for food, or their bodies cry out for shelter and heat, they too would be excusable. But with our tenements steeped in misery; with misery pitilessly leading to crime, vice, disease; with the demands of the body brought home to every one of them a thousand times a day, is it not time for theologians at last to remember that men have bodies as well as souls?

Consider then these two sets of teachers, one professing a philosophy built on the assumption that man is all body and no soul, the other built on the contrary assumption that man is all soul, meeting daily at dinner parties and discussing the agony of the workingman with complacency and "philosophic calm"!

Yet if we look at the world as it is, so full of evil and yet so easily set right, we will not delve at the roots of plants and say: "Life is all mud;" nor point to their leaves and say: "Life is all flower and fruit." Life is made up of root and flower; man is made up of bodyand soul. The economy and the religion that heed this will alone be true. Let economics be enlightened by religion and let religion be enlightened by economics; let the economist learn that the soul of man is more than raiment and the priest that the needs of the body come in order of time before the needs of the soul; let the economist learn the laws of mutual helpfulness and the priest the laws of the production and the distribution of well-being; and there will spring into existence a new religion and a new political economy that will preach the same thing—the solidarity of man—that what man wants in this world is not money, but happiness—and that he can prepare himself best for the next world of which he knows nothing by making his neighbor as well as himself wholesome as well as happy, in this world of which he to-day alas, knows too much of its misery and too little of its play.

Let us now consider the Scientific and Ethical aspects of Socialism from a slightly different angle than that which closed the preceding chapter.

In what Huxley calls the "cosmic process"—the process of evolution prior to the advent of Man—the development or degeneration of animal or vegetable life is determined by the environment. If the environment is favorable to development, there is development; if it is unfavorable, there is degeneration. The question, therefore, whether animal or vegetable life is to develop or degenerate is left to the caprice of environment. The process through which this caprice is exercised is the survival of the fittest, and this includes two processes: the utmost propagation on the one hand, and the utmost competitionon the other. With all the cruelty that this system involves, it would be idle to call such a process moral; nor would it be reasonable to call it immoral. The cosmic process is non-moral. It ignores justice because justice is a conception of either God or Man, and is not found in Nature outside of God or Man at all.

If now we turn from the cosmic process to that employed by the gardener in converting wild land into a garden for the purpose of producing things beautiful or useful to man, we find that the gardener reverses the cosmic process. He does not tolerate utmost propagation or even propagation at all except to the extent necessary to furnish him beautiful or useful things. He limits propagation; and as to utmost competition, he eliminates competition altogether. And it is only by limiting propagation and eliminating competition that the gardener keeps his garden beautiful and useful. The moment he stops applying to his garden patch the art which limits propagation and eliminates competition, that moment the garden tends to return to a state of Nature; to

"an unweeded garden,That grows to seed; things rank, and gross in nature,Possess in merely."[221]

It must also be observed that in the garden patch selection is not exercised by the environment, though it islimited by the environment; selection is exercised by the gardener who, within the limits permitted by the environment, replaces Nature. It is no longer Nature that selects, but Man.

Let us now turn from the civilized garden to the civilized community. Here, too, we find the cosmic process in some respects reversed; in other respects, allowed to run riot. It is reversed in the sense of the word that prudence created by the ownership of property limits the propagation of the educated; but it remains unreversed by the fact that despair created by absence of property leaves propagation unchecked in the uneducated. So that if it be admitted that it would be better for type that the educated should propagate than the uneducated, the human type is tending to degenerate owing to the fact that there is unlimited propagation of the least desirable types; whereas there is limited propagation of the more desirable.

When we turn to competition, we find it almost unrestrained. Indeed, it was the deliberate policy of the government and of political economists a century ago to let it proceed absolutely without restraint. Such was the doctrine oflaissez faireand such is the doctrine which to-day is expressed by business men in the request to be "let alone." But the experience of the past one hundred years has demonstrated that humanity cannot afford to let competition go unrestrained; that it leads to such fatal consequences that all—even the most educated and carefully nurtured—are exposed to the contagion of disease engendered by unrestrained competition; witness the cholera scare and the hygienic laws to which this cholera scare gave rise.[222]Competition has been controlled in various manners: by laws such as factory acts,child labor acts, women labor acts; second, by trade unions which the community and the law have had to protect in order to keep workingmen from the danger of having to work for less than starvation wages; and last of all, by trusts, which discovered that competition involves a waste which, could it be saved, would roll up enormous dividends to stockholders. But trusts have occasioned evils against which to-day the whole nation is crying out. So that the cry now abroad is to control monopolies, trusts, and corporations; and if the efforts to control corporations have not already sufficiently demonstrated that such laws are bound to result in more blackmail than control, no reasonable man can doubt that they must in the end so result in view of the fact that the prizes offered by business attract first-class talent to business whereas the smaller prizes offered by politics or the government can only draw to it second-or third-rate ability.

I trust it has been shown that the confusion that results from the competitive system is due to false notions of property; that property as an institution is, and must always be, essential to the economic structure of the state in the sense that the original and beneficial purpose of property is to secure to men as nearly as possible the full product of their toil. This is the ideal distinctly expressed by Mr. Roosevelt, and is the ideal of every mind that has distinct notions about property at all.

Our social structure, therefore, should be so organized as to assure to men the full product of their toil by the adoption of some such system as has been described in the chapter on the Economic Construction of the Coöperative Commonwealth.

In such a social structure, competition would be limitedso that we should reserve its stimulus and eliminate its sting, and propagation would be limited not only by prudence, but by the economic independence of women, who ought to have most to say on the subject. In such a social structure, we should for the first time have an environment that would discourage vice and encourage virtue. And here comes, as I have already said, the crowning glory of Socialism that reconciles religion, economics, and science.

For the Church teaches: "Man is born in sin; his passions are sinful; unaided by God he is their slave. If, however, he chooses to make the effort necessary to secure the aid of God, he can master his passions and earn salvation. But although the Grace of God will secure to him some happiness in this world, this world is a place of unhappiness and purgation; the reward of the faithful is not in this world, but in the world to come."

The Economist teaches: "Man is born in sin; his passions are sinful; in matters so practical as bread and butter we must not allow ourselves to be deluded by the promises of the Church, as to the fulfilment of which no evidence has ever been furnished. A practical system of economics then must be built on the undoubted fact that the 'average man' is 'sensual' and will always act in accordance with what he believes to be his material interest. It must be founded on human selfishness; let every man be driven by selfishness to make wealth primarily for himself and incidentally for the community at large. This is the only practical system for the accumulation of wealth."

Science says: "Man is born with passions, but are these passions sinful? They are sinful when uncontrolled, because they may then act injuriously to the neighbor.When controlled they act beneficially to the neighbor. The problem is not how to suppress passion, but how to control it. Man must indeed obey his greater inclination; but Man has the power to mould his own environment; to make his own habits; to make his own inclination; Man therefore is master—not slave. There is too in evolution a power which from the creation to this day has persistently worked toward progress, justice, and happiness; but we are still ignorant as to what this power is except in so far as we see it working in Man. In Man we can see and study the working of this power. And we find it in Man's capacity to mould his own environment by resisting Nature instead of yielding to it. And so science teaches to-day—not the gospel of evolution alone—but also the gospel of effort and Art."

In Nature we observe two systems of social existence: one competitive, one coöperative. Both are attended by evils; both by advantages. Man can frame his social and economic conditions so as to eliminate the evils and secure the advantages of both. This is Socialism.

Socialism leaves the church free to proceed along the lines of its faith; but it furnishes the church with the inestimable advantage of creating economic conditions that make the practice of religion for the first time possible. To-day economic conditions by ignoring the soul of Man and appealing only to his appetites make the practice of the Golden Rule impossible.

Economic conditions can be so changed that they appeal to the soul of man without ignoring his appetites. It may be that the earth is a place of preparation for another life. But it is not for that reason necessarily a place of misery and injustice. Socialism by eliminating misery and injustice will make this preparation easier. The environment of Socialism will tend to improve notonly the individual, but also the type. It may be that the grace of God will help man to be noble and just. Let the church continue to teach this. But let science be heard also in the positive proof it furnishes that man will and must be what the environment makes him; that if we continue to tolerate economic conditions that appeal to his selfishness, he will and must remain selfish; whereas if wiser economic conditions appeal to his unselfishness he will and must tend to be unselfish.

And so in Socialism and in Socialism alone, do we find reconciled the ethics of the church, the needs of economics, and the demands of science.

The new church will continue to teach social service; the new economics will permit of social service; and the new science will make of social service an environment out of which the new type of man will be evolved that will justify the words of Christ: "Hath it not been said in your law 'Ye are Gods'?"

[207]"Evolution and Ethics," by T.H. Huxley, p. 80.

[208]"Evolution and Ethics," p. 13.

[209]"Evolution and Ethics," p. 20.

[210]Ibid., p. 81.

[211]"Evolution and Ethics," p. 81.

[212]Ibid., p. 83.

[213]Ibid., p. 85.

[214]Ibid., p. 116.

[215]"Evolution and Ethics," p. 20.

[216]Book II, Chapter I.

[217]"Government or Human Evolution," Vol. I, p. 16.

[218]"Evolution and Ethics," p. 85.

[219]Ibid., p. 86.

[220]"Modern Socialism," by R.C.K. Ensor.

[221]Of course, I must not be understood to mean that nothing beautiful or useful grows in Nature outside of the art of the gardener. On the contrary, we know that in the Tropics Nature furnishes not only beautiful things, but enough of useful things to make the art of the gardener unnecessary. The lesson to be drawn from the garden patch is that, if the best result in the shape of beautiful and useful things is to be obtained from a limited surface, Art must be applied to that surface; Nature cannot be depended upon.

[222]Book III, Chapter II.

I think it was Miss Martineau who said that if her generation was better than that which preceded her, the betterment was due to the teachings of Carlyle; and much though we may differ with John Ruskin in matters of detail, no one will dispute the apostolic fervor with which he endeavored to push on the work of Thomas Carlyle. It is a significant fact, therefore, that both Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin had nothing but abuse to give to political economy. Nevertheless, I think we all must agree that this hostile attitude was due to a misconception of the scope of political economy, a misconception due in great part to its name; for the words "political economy" seem to indicate that it deals with the economy of the state, and that it becomes the duty of its teachers to show us not only what the rules regarding the production and distribution of goods are, but what they ought to be.

In fact, however, although economists do discuss how—if at all—the system of production and distribution of goods can be improved, they have always regarded it as their principal function to describe accurately what the rules that govern production and distribution really are, rather than what they ought to be. And as existing industrial conditions are extremely complicated, those who have thrown light upon them are highly to behonored. And although they have contributed nothing to the solution of such problems as unemployment, pauperism, and the conflict of labor and capital, it may be as unreasonable to complain of this as to quarrel with the "crossing-sweeper of Piccadilly" because he is unable "to tell you the road to Highgate."

Again, political economy has encountered a great deal of unmerited abuse because critics have confounded authors with their subject, and have held economists responsible for the industrial conditions they describe; whereas, these economists have earned our sincerest thanks for demonstrating that the competitive system offers no solution for the conflict between capital and labor, or the problem of unemployment and all the other problems as those of pauperism, prostitution, and economic crime which result therefrom.

Mr. Ruskin is certainly wrong when he denounces political economy as the "science of getting rich," and when he adds that "persons who follow its precepts" do actually become rich; "all persons who disobey them become poor"; for our ablest political economists have always been and still are relatively poor men, and our richest millionaire is a past master of the rules in the game which it is his particular business to play; but he is not concerned with a science which does no more than study wealth under the competitive system and demonstrate how inevitably a few grow rich and the rest grow poor under it.

Let us then abandon hostility to a science without which to-day we could not see clearly the workings of the existing system, and on the contrary, avail ourselves of all its teachings, recognizing that a study of what industrial conditions to-day are must precede the study of what they could and should be.

The study of political economy is necessary to a study of "social economy." Political economy admittedly deals with the average sensual man, and having determined the rules that determine the actions of the average sensual man, it becomes now the problem of social economy to deal with the average moral man. And the moral man must not be regarded as opposed to the sensual. The moral man includes the sensual, but adds affection, sympathy, and all that makes happiness to the sensual man who may, through absence of affection and sympathy, fail to attain the happiness of which he is in search. Under this definition, while political economy deals with the attainment of wealth, social economy deals with the attainment of happiness; and as man must eat before he can pursue happiness, social economy must concern itself with the acquisition of wealth to satisfy physical needs before it concerns itself with the attainment of justice to satisfy moral needs. An attempt has been made in this book to present the social and economic structure which would best attain happiness. Would such a system at the same time attain justice?[223]

To arrive at a correct notion of justice, we have to refer once more to the difference between what Huxleycalls the "cosmic process"—that is to say, the process of the environment of Nature before the advent of Man—and the ethical process, or the process of the artificial environment created by Man. For there is one difference, and a most essential difference, between them to which attention has not yet been directed: namely, that in communities such as those of the bee and ant, the individual is sacrificed to the community; whereas the effort of Man is or should be to so organize his community that it will serve the happiness of the individual. For example, we would not tolerate a community upon the plan we see practised by the bees, under which only one male out of a whole hive is permitted to propagate and all the rest of the males on attaining maturity are caused to die; only one female of the whole hive is allowed to be fertile and to propagate, all the rest being subject to the dreary round of keeping the fertile bee a prisoner, of feeding her, of rearing, feeding and caring for the young in the hive, and incidentally destroying any males who may return to the hive from the nuptial flight. We have to recognize that the great obstacle to happiness in community life is sexual instinct, of which Socialists of the type of Edward Bellamy have for the most part failed to take account.

Reference has been made to the various devices adopted by different races of animals and by Man at different periods and at different places to solve the problem of sexual instinct,[224]and it has been, I think, demonstrated by Professor Giddings, that of all the systems proposed none can compare with our present institution of marriage.[225]The mere fact that the marriage system has survived in the conflict with races that have adopted othersystems ought to furnish an argument in favor of its superiority. In the struggle between races of Man, those races the institutions of which require most self-restraint have invariably overwhelmed those races whose institutions require less self-restraint. For example, the tribes that lived without any regulation of sexual instinct and in which children took the name of their mother because the name of their father was not and could not be known, disappeared in the conflict with tribes which insisted upon some restraint to sexual appetite, such as the patriarchal system. Again, the patriarchal system which tolerated polygamy has everywhere been destroyed when it came into conflict with monogamous races, such as our own, which involve still further restraint in the sexual relation.

It would seem, therefore, as though the monogamous marriage were the keystone of our present civilization, for upon it has been built the family, and the education and self-restraint which family life involves.[226]There is too no function of the family more important than that it serves as a model of what the state ought to be as distinguished from what the state actually is; that is to say, a government which should have equal concern for every member of the community, and not one which as at present surfeits some and starves others.

It is the growing idea that a properly constituted state must do this for the protection not only of the many, but of the few that probably give the most continuous aid to Socialism. As Mr. Edwin Björkman expressed it: "We are beginning to grasp the futility of planning the welfare of any one human being apart from the rest of his kind. We are coming to think of ourselves, at last, as links in a chain so firmly bound together that when thedevil grabs the hindmost the wrench is felt by the top-most—felt in the very marrow of his bones."[227]

And so while the institution of marriage has removed an obstacle to solidarity in community life, public health has proved its ally. Mr. Björkman has made an estimate of the enormous cost of unnecessary sickness. But the protection of public health is furnishing us a far better argument in favor of solidarity and Socialism than the mere cost of neglecting it. In Cuba our sanitary engineers have practically got rid of yellow fever, not only for that community, but for our own. Recent discoveries tracing malaria to the mosquito are leading to the destruction of this insect. Smallpox and cholera have practically been stamped out, and efforts are now being made to do the same with typhoid and tuberculosis.

Now one feature characterizes all these efforts. They cannot be made by one man for himself; they have to be made by whole communities for whole communities and they will eventually have to be made by the whole world for the whole world. The same thing is true of vagrancy, pauperism, and crime. No individual or group of individuals can handle this problem; it must be handled by every community, and through the further extension of extradition treaties by all countries for the whole world.

Again, reference has been often made in this book to the necessity under which governments, openly professing the policy oflaissez faire, have found themselves to enact laws totally inconsistent with this doctrine. Such, laws ought to be sufficient evidence that the days oflaissez faireare gone forever; and that this theory, universally proclaimed a century ago as the only sound theory of government, has to-day given way before therecognition that no wealth can compensate a man for the misery of his neighbors; and that even if, abandoning all ideals and all ethics, we confine ourselves to the problem how to make men materially happy, we can only do so by adjusting our institutions so that no man will be allowed to become or to remain a pauper or criminal.

I am not discussing here matters of theory, but matters of fact.

Theoretically, the development of man might have taken a totally different direction. The master minds of the period (such as that, for example, of Mr. W.H. Mallock) might have so organized the able as to constitute an aristocracy strong enough to keep the rest of the community in a state of ignorant servitude, so that while Mr. Mallock was enjoying the necessary leisure to discuss the "New Republic" amid the luxury of his English country home, all the work of the world would be accomplished by human automata with no desires beyond that of the immediate gratification of their appetites. Unfortunately, however, Mr. Mallock has come too late upon the scene. Some years before he was born, the die was cast. Workingmen were given a voice in public affairs and have been educated, so that they constitute a power with which government has to reckon. Here is a fact against which it is useless for millionaires to break their heads. No one can ignore the power exercised by such men as Bebel in Germany, Jaurès and Guesde in France, Vandervelde in Belgium, Keir Hardie and MacDonald in England, Gompers and John Mitchell in America. These men are all engaged in organizing the workingmen's vote with extraordinary efficacy in Europe, and with extraordinary inefficacy in the United States. But the days of Gompers and Mitchell are drawing to a close, and in this country as wellas in Europe, Organized Labor will grow to understand the inevitable truth that it is only by political action and with the Socialist program that it can defeat the power of capital. So that whether Mr. Mallock be right or not, the day of aristocracy is over and the day of solidarity has dawned. The question for us to decide is whether we should recognize this fact and modify our institutions to conform to the new era, or whether we should continue to ignore the fact until we break our heads against it.

The point which Mr. Mallock and his school have failed to understand is that the very greed which creates aristocracy unfits the aristocrat for the coöperation indispensable to its survival. This condemns him, as it does all the highest types of carnivora, created by the competitive system to isolation. For it is out of the jealousy and struggles of the aristocrats with one another that the people are at last getting to their own. It was because the king, the noble, and the church could not agree in the division of spoils that their perpetual altercations left room for the organization of the Communes in France at the end of the eleventh century. It was because the church, the noble and the king would not give a fair share of the honors and spoils of the state to the wealthy bourgeoisie, that the bourgeois was obliged to associate himself with the people in 1789; it was because of the conflict between the Whigs and the Tories that the franchise was gradually extended to the workingmen in England; and it is because the Republicans can put no limit to their greed that workingmen in America will find themselves eventually compelled to organize politically their at present disunited multitudes. It is, therefore, extremely improbable that, even if Mr. Mallock had lived in an earlier age, he could haveprevented the inevitable progress of the great principle of solidarity which has determined the direction of human development ever since it began to differ from that of other animals.

If now we run through all the differences between the natural environment and the environment created by Man, we shall see that they practically all proceed upon the theory that men must develop no longer as individuals but as a unit. All our customs and laws proceed upon the theory of liberty and justice; and upon that theory is based the original principle of property that assures to all men the product of their toil. Now if all men are to be assured the product of their toil, there must be an end to the system which puts a few millionaires at one end of the social scale and millions of paupers at the other.

Again, for centuries the so-called struggle for life has ceased to be a struggle for life, but has become a struggle for wealth, power, and consideration. It is no longer only the fit that survive; the unfit also survive; and if the unfit are to survive, we all have a common interest in taking the necessary steps to prevent the unfit from proving too heavy a burden upon the community.

Again, all isolating vices such as lust, ferocity, craft, fear, and selfishness—vices which characterize the carnivora and condemn them to lives of isolation—are being tempered by the necessities of common life—by the fundamental fact of the solidarity of Man. Thus, lust is tempered and in part replaced by love and mercy; ferocity is tempered and in part replaced by courage and patience; fear is tempered and in part replaced by respect and reverence; selfishness is tempered and in part replaced by unselfishness.

And all this advantage which humanity has attainedover the lower animals is due to its ability to mould its own environment, and deliberately undertake the task of justice; namely, to "eliminate from our social conditions the effects of the inequalities of Nature upon the happiness and advancement of Man, and particularly to create an artificial environment which shall serve the individual as well as the race, and tend to perpetuate noble types rather than those which are base."

It is true that so far our efforts to attain justice have lamentably failed; but they have failed mainly because we have not yet sufficiently limited the scope of competition. The day we limit competition as suggested in the chapter on the Economic Structure of Socialism,[228]that day we shall have removed the lion from our path. And as stated in the Preface, the development of Man will then proceed upon the theory that all are perfectible and that it is through the improvement of all that every individual will attain his best freedom, his best happiness, and the fullest opportunities for promoting the happiness of all around him.

This is the ideal to attain which the environment described in the Chapter on the Economic Construction of the Coöperative Commonwealth has been conceived. It is the ideal which furnishes the most economical method of production and distribution and, therefore, the most leisure and liberty; that creates the environment fitted to perpetuate the noble rather than the base type; to promote virtue and discourage vice and, in a word, creates conditions under which we can practise the morality preached by every religion, whether it be that of Moses, of Mohammed, or of Christ.

[223]In a previous attempt to define justice, I have found it necessary to devote to this subject an entire volume, and I do not believe that the subject can be sufficiently discussed in less than such a volume. The definition with which I concluded that book has been adopted by Mr. Lester F. Ward in his book on Applied Sociology. I believe that all other definitions of justice are defective mainly because other definitions such as those of Herbert Spencer in his book entitled "Justice" confound justice with liberty. In other words, his definition of justice is a definition of liberty, whereas justice is more than liberty. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that liberty is one of the elements of justice.

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