That we were able, in the course of a few months, to meet a demand from abroad for nearly two milliard pounds sterling is explained by the fact that our Freeland Insurance Department had at its disposal in an available form about one-fifth of its reserve of more than ten milliards sterling.
The other four-fifths were invested--that is, it was lent to a.s.sociations and to the commonwealth for various purposes; the one-fifth had been retained in the coffers of the bank as disposable stock for emergencies, and now could be used to meet the sudden demand for capital. This reserve, of course, was not kept in the form of gold or silver: had it been, it would not have been available when an accidental demand arose. It is not gold or silver, but quite other things that are required in a time of need: the precious metals can serve merely as suitable means of procuring the things that are really required. In order that such things may be acquired they must exist somewhere in a sufficient quant.i.ty, and that they exist in sufficient quant.i.ty to meet a sudden and exceptionally large demand cannot be taken for granted. He who suddenly wants goods worth milliards of pounds will not be able to buy them anywhere, because they are nowhere stored up to that amount; if he would be protected from the danger of not being able to get such a demand met, he must lay up, not the money for purchase, but the goods themselves which he expects to need. Take, for example, the case of the Russians who had burnt and destroyed the granaries of their landowners, the warehouses of their merchants, the machines in their factories: what good would have done them had the milliards of roubles which they needed to make good--and to add to--what had been destroyed been sent to them in the form of money for them to spend? There were no surplus supplies which they could have bought: had they taken our money into the markets the only effect would have been to raise all prices, and to have made all the neighbouring nations share their distress. And in the same way all the other nations, which we wished to a.s.sist in their endeavour to rise as quickly as possible out of their misery into a state of wealth similar to our own, needed not increased currency but increased food, raw material, and implements. And our reserve was laid up in the form of such things.
About half of it always consisted of grain, the other half of various kinds of raw material, particularly materials for weaving, and metals. When our commissioner in Russia asked at different times for sums amounting altogether to 285,000,000, he did not receive from us a farthing in money, but 3,040 cargoes of wheat, wool, iron, copper, timber, &c.: the result was that the wasted country did not suffer at all from want, but a few months later--certainly less in consequence of the loans themselves than of the fact that the loans were employed in the Freeland spirit--it enjoyed a prosperity which a short time before no one would have dreamt to be possible. In the same way we made our resources useful to other nations, and we resolved that should our existing means not suffice to meet the demands, we would make up what was still needed from the produce of the coming year.
We by no means intended to continue this _role_ of economic and social providence to our brother peoples longer than was absolutely necessary. We did not shrink from either the burden or the responsibility; but we considered that in all respects it would be for the best if the process of social reconstruction, in which all mankind was now engaged, were to be carried out with the united powers of all, according to a well-considered common plan. We therefore determined at once to invite all the nations of the earth to a conference at Eden Vale, in which it might be decided what ought next to be done. It was not our intention that this congress should pa.s.s binding resolutions: it should remain, we thought, free to every nation to draw what conclusions it pleased from the discussions at the congress; but it seemed to us that in any case it would be of advantage to know what the majority thought of the movement now going on.
This suggestion met with no serious objection anywhere. Among the less advanced nations of Asia there was a strong feeling that, instead of spending the time in useless talk, it would be better simply to put into execution whatever we Freelanders advised. The const.i.tuent a.s.semblies of several--and those not the least--nations said that they on their part would abide by what we said, whatever the congress might decide upon. But it was necessary only to point out that we could not advise them until we had heard them, and that a congress seemed to be the best means of making their wants known, to induce them to send delegates. We could not prevent many of the delegates from receiving instruction to vote with us Freelanders in all divisions whatever--an instruction which proved to be quite unnecessary, as the congress did not divide at all, except upon questions of form, upon other questions confining itself to discussion and leaving everyone to draw his own conclusions from the debates.
On the other hand, in the most advanced countries a small minority had organised an opposition, not, it is true, against the general principles of economic justice, but against many of the details involved in carrying out that principle. This opposition had nowhere been able to elect a delegate who should bear its mandate to the World"s Congress; but it everywhere found strong advocates among the Freeland confidential agents and commissioners, who, while perfectly in harmony with the public opinion of Freeland, endeavoured, as far as possible, to secure a representation of every considerable party tendency, in order that those who clung to the obsolete old economic order should have no right to complain that they could not make themselves heard. Sixty-eight nations were invited to take part in the congress; it was left to the nations themselves to decide how many delegates they should send, provided they did not send more than ten each. The sixty-eight countries elected 425 delegates, thus making with the twelve heads of departments of the Freeland government a total number of 437 members of the congress.
On the 3rd of March, in the twenty-sixth year after the founding of Freeland, the congress met in the large hall of the Eden Vale National Palace. On the right sat those who questioned the possibility of carrying out the proposed reform universally, in the centre the adherents of Freeland, on the left the Radicals to whom the most violent measures seemed best. The presidency was given to the head of the Freeland government, which position had been uninterruptedly occupied by Dr. Strahl since the founding of the commonwealth.
We give the following _resume_ of the six days" discussion from the official minutes:
FIRST DAY
The PRESIDENT, in the name of the Freeland people, welcomed the delegates of the nations who had responded to the Freeland invitation.
CHARLES MONTAIGNE (_Centre_), in the name of his colleagues, thanked the Freeland people for the magnanimous and extraordinary a.s.sistance which they had afforded to the other nations of the earth in their struggles after economic freedom. Not content with showing to the rest of the world the way to economic freedom and justice, Freeland had also made enormous material sacrifices. For his part, he did not know which was the more astonishing, the inexhaustibleness of the resources which Freeland had at its disposal or the disinterested magnanimity exhibited in the employment of those resources.
JAMES CLARK (_Freeland_): In the interest of sober truth, as well as with a view of furthering as much as possible the great work we all have at heart, I must explain that though the Freeland people are always happy to make disinterested sacrifices for the good of their brother peoples, and that in all they do in this way their object is rather to develop and to promote the best interests of mankind than to obtain any advantage for themselves, yet, as a matter of fact, the milliards lent to foreign countries cost Freeland no material sacrifice, but bring it considerable material profit.
[Sensation.] Under the _regime_ of economic justice and freedom the solidarity of all economic interests is so universal and without exception, that in Freeland business becomes as profitable as it is possible to conceive of its being while you, with our a.s.sistance, are growing rich most rapidly. This would be true if we gave you the milliards instead of lending them. You look at each other and at me with an inquiring astonishment? You hold it to be impossible to become rich by lending gratuitously or by absolutely giving away a part of one"s property? Yet nothing is simpler.
The subject is a very important one, and will come up for discussion again in the course of our sittings; at present I will only briefly point out that we have been prevented by the misery of the rest of the world from making the right use of the advantages of international division of labour.
We have been obliged to manufacture for ourselves goods which we might have obtained better from you; and we have therefore had to produce a smaller quant.i.ty of those things which we could have produced most profitably. It is plain that we should be far richer if we could give our attention chiefly to the production of grain for ourselves and for you, and derive from you the supplies we need to meet our demand for manufactured articles.
For here the soil yields for an equal amount of labour and capital ten times as much as among you, while few manufactures here yield a larger return for labour and capital than they do abroad. But, on account of the system of exploitation which has prevailed and is not yet got rid of among you--the cheap wages consequent upon which have cramped your use of labour-saving machinery--we have been, and still are, compelled to meet most of our demand for manufactured articles by our own production, since you are scarcely able to produce for yourselves, to say nothing of producing for us, a great number of goods which in the nature of things you ought to be able to produce most profitably both for yourselves and for us, and in exchange for which you would receive our foodstuffs and raw material. We calculate that the removal of this hindrance to the complete international division of labour must increase the productiveness of our labour so much that the resulting gain would be cheaply bought by a permanent sacrifice of many milliards. You need not wonder, then, at finding us always so eager in encouraging you to make the freest and fullest claims upon our resources. You will never dip so deeply into our pockets that we--in our own interest as well as in yours--will not wish to see you dip still deeper. Every farthing spent in hastening the development of your wealth is made good to us ten and twentyfold.
FRANCIS FAR (_Right_): If it is so much to the interest of Freeland to enrich us that Freeland is profited even by making us a gift of its capital, why has it not given us its capital sooner? Who would have hindered it from handing its milliards over to us? Why did it delay so long, and why does it now make its a.s.sistance conditional on our accepting its economic inst.i.tutions?
JAMES CLARK: Because so long as you remained in servitude every farthing given to you for such a purpose would have been simply thrown away.
Formerly we could do nothing more than support the victims of your social system and mitigate the misery and wretchedness you inflicted upon yourselves. As a matter of fact, there have long been large sums of Freeland capital--bearing interest, it is true--invested in Europe and America. What has been the result? This money has contributed to increase the amount of surplus capital among you: it could not increase the quant.i.ty of capital actually employed in production among you, for nothing could have done that but an increased consumption by the people outside of Freeland--and this was not compatible with what were then your economic principles. Therefore we have been able to help you only since you yourselves have held out the hand: our capital will benefit you only because you have at length decided to enjoy the fruits of it yourselves.
[General a.s.sent.]
The PRESIDENT: In order to preserve a certain amount of order in our discussions, I propose that we at once agree upon a list of the questions to be considered. It may not always be possible to adhere strictly to the order in the list; but it is advisable that each speaker should endeavour as much as possible to confine himself to the subject under discussion. In order to expedite matters, the Freeland government has prepared a kind of agenda, which you can accept, or amend, or reject. The matters for discussion mentioned in this agenda, I may remark, were not introduced on our initiative, but were mentioned by the leaders of the different parties abroad as needing more detailed explanation: we, on our part, contented ourselves with arranging these questions. We propose, therefore, that the following be the order in which the subjects be discussed:
1. How can the fact be explained that never in the course of history, before the founding of Freeland, has there been a successful attempt to establish a commonwealth upon the principles of economic justice and freedom?
2. Is not the success of the Freeland inst.i.tutions to be attributed merely to the accidental, and therefore probably transient, co-operation of specially favourable circ.u.mstances; or do those inst.i.tutions rest upon conditions universally present and inherent in human nature?
3. Are not want and misery necessary conditions of existence; and would not over-population inevitably ensue were misery for a time to disappear from the earth?
4. Is it possible to introduce the inst.i.tutions of economic justice everywhere without prejudice to inherited rights and vested interests; and, if possible, what are the best means of doing this?
5. Are economic justice and freedom the ultimate outcome of human evolution; and what will probably be the condition of mankind under such a _regime_?
Has anyone a remark to make upon our proposal? No one has. Therefore I place point 1 upon the order of the day, and call upon delegate Erasmus Kraft to speak.
ERASMUS KRAFT (_Right_): Wherever thinking men dwell upon this earth, we are preparing to exchange the state of servitude and misery in which from time immemorial our race has been sunk, for a happier order of things. The brilliant example which we have before our eyes here in Freeland seems to be a pledge that our attempt will--nay, must--succeed. But the more evident this certainty becomes, the more urgent, the more imperative, becomes the question why that which is now to be accomplished has not long since been done, why the genius of humanity slept so long before it roused itself to the task of completing this richly beneficent work. And the simpler--the more completely in harmony with human nature and with the most primitive requirements of sound reason--appears to be the complex of those inst.i.tutions upon which the work of emanc.i.p.ation depends, so much the more enigmatical is it that earlier centuries and millenniums, when there was no lack of enlightened and n.o.ble minds, never seriously attempted to accomplish such a work. We see that it suffices to guarantee to everyone the full enjoyment of what he produces, in order to supply everyone with more than enough; and yet through untold millenniums men have patiently endured boundless misery with all its consequences of sorrow and crime as if they were inevitable conditions of existence. Why was this? Are we shrewder, wiser, juster than all our ancestors; or, in spite of all the apparently infallible evidence in favour of the success of our work, are we not perhaps under a delusion? It is true that the greatest and most important part of the history of mankind is veiled in the obscurity of primitive antiquity; yet history is so old that it is scarcely to be a.s.sumed that the endeavour after the material well-being of all--an endeavour prompted by the most ardent desires of every creature--should now make its appearance for the first time. It must be that such an endeavour has been put forth, not _once_ merely but repeatedly, even though no tradition has given us any trustworthy account of it. But where are its results? Or did its results once exist though we know nothing of them? Is the story of the Golden Age something more than a pious fable; and are we upon the point of conjuring up another Golden Age? And then arises the query, how long will this Golden Age last; will it not again be followed by an age of bronze and an age of iron, perhaps in a more wretched, more humble form than that exhibited by the age from which we are preparing to part? Is that fatalistic resignation, with which the ages known to us endured misery and servitude, a human instinct evolved during an earlier and bitter experience--an instinct which teaches mankind to endure patiently the inevitable rather than strive after a brief epoch of happiness and progress at the risk of a deeper fall? In obedience to the hint from the chair, I will at present refrain from inquiring what might be the cause of such a relapse into redoubled misery, as this will be the theme of the third point in the list of subjects for discussion; but I think that before we proceed to an exposition of all the conceivable consequences of the success of our endeavours it would be advisable first to find out _whether_ those endeavours will really and in their full extent succeed; and in order to find this out, it will again be advisable to ask why such endeavours have never succeeded before--nay, perhaps, why they have never before been made.
CHRISTIAN CASTOR (_Centre_): The previous speaker is in error when he a.s.serts that history tells us of no serious attempt to realise the principle of economic justice. One of the grandest attempts of this kind is Christianity. Everyone who knows the Gospels must know that Christ and His apostles condemned the exploitation of man by man. The words of Scripture, "Woe to him who waxes fat upon the sweat of his brother," contain _in nuce_ the whole codex of Freeland law and all that we are now striving to realise. That the official Christianity afterwards allowed its work of emanc.i.p.ation to drop is true; but individual Fathers of the Church have again and again, in reliance upon the sacred text, endeavoured to realise the original purposes of Christ. And that during the Middle Ages, as well as in modern times, vigorous attempts to realise the Christian ideal--that is, the ideal of Christ, not that of the Church--have never been wanting is also well known. This is what I wished to point out. The elucidation of the question why all these attempts were wrecked I leave to other and better furnished minds.
VLADIMIR OSSIP (_Left_): Far be it from me to hold the n.o.ble Founder of Christianity responsible for what was afterwards made out of His teaching; but our friend from the United States goes, in my opinion, too far when he represents Christ and His successors as _our_ predecessors. We proclaim prosperity and freedom--Christ preached self-denial and humility; we desire the wealth, He the poverty, of all; we busy ourselves with the things of this world--He had the next world before His eyes; we are--to speak briefly--revolutionaries, though pacific ones--He is the founder of a religion. Let us leave religion alone; I do not think it will be of any use for us to call in question the _meum_ and _tuum_ as to Christianity.
LIONEL ACOSTA (_Centre_): I differ entirely in this case from the previous speaker, and agree with our colleague from North America. The teaching of Christ, though not explicit as to means and ends, is the purest and n.o.blest proclamation of social freedom that has yet been heard, and it is this proclamation of social emanc.i.p.ation, and not any religious novelty, that forms the substance of the "Good News." It was a master-stroke of the policy of enslavement to represent Christ as a founder of a religion instead of a social reformer: the latter doctrine had quickly won the hearts of the oppressed ma.s.ses because it promised them release from their sufferings, but the former doctrine was used to lull to sleep their awakening energy.
Christ did not concern Himself with religion--not a line in the Gospels shows the slightest trace of His having interfered with one of the ancient religious precepts of His country. The most orthodox Jew can unhesitatingly place the Gospels in the hands of his children, certain that they will find nothing therein to wound their religious sentiment. [A Voice: Then why was Christ crucified?] I am asked why Christ was crucified if He had done nothing contrary to the Mosaic law. Do men commit murder from religious motives _merely_? Christ was hurried to death because He was a _social_, not because He was a religious, innovator; and it was not the pious but the powerful among the Jews who demanded His death. Scarcely a word is needed to set this matter right in the minds of all those who study without prejudice the momentous events of that saddest, but at the same time most glorious, of the days of Israel, upon which the n.o.blest of her sons voluntarily sought and found a martyr"s death. In the first place, it is a well-attested historical fact that in Judaea at that time death for religious heresy was as little known as in Europe during the last century.
In the second place, the mode of execution--the cross, which was quite foreign to the Jews--shows that Christ was executed according to Roman, not Jewish, law. But the Romans, the most tolerant in religious matters of all peoples, would never have put a man to death for religious innovation; they would not have allowed the execution to take place, much less have themselves p.r.o.nounced sentence and carried out that sentence in their own method. The cross was among them the punishment for _riotous slaves_ or their _instigators_. I do not say this for the purpose of shifting the responsibility for Christ"s death from Judaea--it is the sad privilege of that people to have been the executioner of its n.o.blest sons; and as only the Athenians killed Socrates, so none but the Jews killed Christ; the Romans were only the instruments of Jewish hatred--the hatred, that is, of those wealthy men among the Jews of the time who denounced the "perverter of the people" to the Governor because they trembled for their possessions.
Indeed, it is quite credible that the Governor did not show himself willing to accede to the wishes of the eager denouncers, for he, the Roman, who had grown up in unshaken faith in the firmly established rights of property, did not understand the significance and bearing of the social teaching of Christ. The Gospels leave us little room to doubt--and it would be difficult to understand how it could be otherwise--that he held Christ to be a harmless enthusiast, who might have been let off with a little scourging. Generations had to pa.s.s away before the _Roman_ world could learn what the teaching of Christ really was; and then it fell upon His followers with a fury without a parallel--crucified them, threw them to the beasts; in short, did everything that Rome was accustomed to do to the foes of its system of law and property, but never to the followers of foreign religions. It was different with the _Jewish_ aristocracy: these at once understood the meaning and the bearing of the Christian propaganda, for they had long since learnt the germ of these social demands in the Pentateuch and in the teaching of the earlier prophets. The year of Jubilee which required a fresh division of the land after every forty-nine years, the regulation that all slaves should be emanc.i.p.ated in the seventh year--what were these but the precursors of the universal equality demanded by Christ? Whether all these ideas, which are to be found in the Sacred Scriptures of ancient Judaea, were ever realised in practice is more than doubtful. But they were currently known to every Jew; and when Christ attempted to give them a practical form--when, in vigorous and rousing addresses, He denounced woe to the rich man who fattened upon his brother"s sweat--then the powerful in Jerusalem at once recognised that their interests were threatened by a danger which was not clearly seen by non-Jewish property-owners until much later. There is not the slightest doubt that they made no secret of the true grounds of their anxiety to the Roman Governor, for Christ was executed, not as a sectary, but as an inciter to revolt.
But, of course, it could not be told to the people that the death of Christ was demanded because He wished to put into practice the principle of equality laid down in the sacred books and so often insisted on by the prophets. The people had to be satisfied with the fable of the religious heresy of the Nazarene, which fable, however--except in the case of the unjudging crowd that collected together at the crucifixion--for a long time found no credence. Everywhere in Israel did the first Christian communities pa.s.s for good Jews; they were called _Judaei_ by all the Roman authors by whom they were mentioned. What they really were, in what respects alone they differed from the other communities of Jews, is sufficiently revealed in the Acts of the Apostles, notwithstanding the very natural caution of the writer, and the subsequent equally intelligible corruptions of the text. They were Socialists, to some extent Communists; absolute economic equality, community of goods, was practised among them. Later, when the Christian Church sacrificed its social principle to peace with the State, and transformed itself from a cruelly persecuted martyr to equality into an instrument of authority and--perhaps because of this apostasy--of a doubly zealous persecuting authority, then first did she put forth as her own teaching the malicious calumny of her former maligners, and took upon herself the _role_ of a new religion; and since then she has, in fact, been the propounder of a new religion. And that she has succeeded, for more than 1,500 years, in connecting her new _role_ with the name of Christ, is mainly the fault of the Jews, who, through the sanguinary persecutions which have been carried on against them in the name of the meek Sufferer of Golgotha, have allowed themselves to be betrayed into a blind and foolish hatred towards this their greatest and n.o.blest son.
But it remains none the less true that Christ suffered death for the idea of social justice and for this alone--nay, that before His time this idea was not unknown to Judaism. And it is equally true that notwithstanding all subsequent obscuration and corruption of this world-redeeming idea, the propaganda of economic emanc.i.p.ation has never since been completely suppressed. It was in vain that the Church forbad the laity to read those books which were alleged to contain no teaching but that of the Church: again and again did the European peoples, languishing in the deepest degradation, derive from those forbidden Scriptures courage and inspiration to attempt their emanc.i.p.ation.
DARJA-SING (_Centre_): I should like to add to what I have just heard that another people, six centuries before Christ, also conceived the ideas of freedom and justice--I mean the Indian people. The essence of Buddhism is the doctrine of the equality of all men and of the sinfulness of oppression and exploitation. Nay, I venture to a.s.sert that the already mentioned ideas of social freedom to be found in the Pentateuch, and held by the prophets, and consequently those also held by Christ, are to be referred back to Indian suggestion. At first sight this appears to be an anachronism, for Buddha lived six centuries before Christ, while the Jewish legends carry back the composition of the Pentateuch to the fourteenth century before Christ. But recent investigations have almost certainly established that these alleged books of Moses were composed in the sixth century B.C. at the earliest--at any rate, after the return of the Israelites from the so-called Babylonish captivity. Now, just at the time when the _elite_ of the then existing Jews were carried to Babylon, Buddha sent his apostles through the whole of Asia; and it may safely be a.s.sumed that those who "wept by the waters of Babylon" were specially susceptible to the teaching of such apostles.
When, therefore, certain eminent German thinkers a.s.sert that Christianity is a drop of foreign blood in the Arian peoples, they are certainly correct in so far as Christianity actually came to them as Semitism, as having sprung from Judaism; nevertheless the Arian world can lay claim to the fundamental conception of Christianity as its own, since it is most highly probable that the Semitic peoples received the first germ of it from the Arians. I say this not for the purpose of depreciating the service performed by the great Semitic martyr to freedom. I cannot, alas! deny that we Arians were not able to accomplish anything of our own strength with the divine idea that sprang from our bosom. While it is probable that the horrors of the Indian system of caste, that most shameful blossom that ever sprang from the blood-and-tear-bedewed soil of bondage, made India the scene of the first intellectual reaction against this scourge of mankind, it is certain, on the other hand, that that very system of caste so severely strained the energy of our Indian people as to make it impossible for them to give practical effect to the reaction. Buddhism was extinguished in India, and outside of India it was soon entirely robbed of its social characteristic. Those transcendental speculations to which even in the West it was _attempted_ to limit Christianity have in Eastern Asia been in reality the only effects of Buddhism. Indeed, the idea of freedom took different forms in the minds of the founders--taking one form in the Indian Avatar which, notwithstanding all his sublimity, bore the mark of his nationality; and taking another form in the Messiah of Judah who saw the light of the world in the midst of a people fired with a never-subdued yearning for freedom. Buddha could conceive of freedom only in the form of that hopeless self-renunciation which was falsely introduced into the Christian idea of freedom by those who did not wish to have their own enjoyments interfered with by the claims of others.
In fact, I am convinced that even our more vigorous kinsmen who had migrated to the West could not have given practical effect to the conception of freedom and equality if we--the Indian world--had transmitted to them that conception just as we had conceived it. For even those who migrated westward carried in their blood to Europe, and retained for a thousand years, the sentiment of caste. The idea that all men are equal, really equal here upon earth, would have remained as much beyond the grasp of the German n.o.ble and the German serf as it has remained beyond the grasp of the Indian Pariah or Sudra and the Brahman or Kshatriya. This conception had first to be condensed and permanently fixed by the genius of the strongly democratic little Semitic race on the banks of the Jordan, and then to be subjected to a severe--and, for a time, adverse--a.n.a.lytical criticism by the independent and logical spirit of research of Rome and Greece, before it could be transplanted and bear fruit in purely Arian races. It is very evident that the converted German kings adopted Christianity because they held it to be a convenient instrument of power.
It was for the time being immaterial to them what the new doctrine had to say to the serfs; for the serf who looked up to the "offspring of the G.o.ds," his master, with awful reverence, seemed to be for ever harmless, and the only persons against whom it was necessary for the masters to arm were their fellow lords, the great and the n.o.ble, who differed from the kings in nothing but in the amount of their power. The right to rule came, according to the Arian view, from G.o.d: very well, but the right of the least of the n.o.bles sprang, like that of the king, from the G.o.ds. Now, the kings found in Christ the _one_ supreme Lord who had conferred power upon them, and upon them alone. They alone now possessed a divine source of authority; and therefore history shows us everywhere that it was the kings who introduced Christianity against the--often determined--opposition of the great, and never that the great were converted without, or against the will of, the kings. The ma.s.ses of the people, the serfs, where were these ever asked? They have to do and believe what their masters think well; and without exception they do it, making no resistance whatever--allowing themselves to be driven to baptism in flocks like sheep, and believing, as they are commanded to do, that all power comes from _one_ G.o.d, who bestows it upon _one_ lord. For the Arian serf is a mere chattel without a will, and will not think for himself until he is educated to do so. This work of education has been a long time in progress; but, as the previous speaker rightly said, the idea of freedom has never slept.
ERICH HOLM (_Right_): I do not think that any valid objection can be made to the statement that the general idea of economic justice is thousands of years old and has never been completely lost sight of. But it is a question whether this general idea of equality of rights and of freedom has much in common with that which _we_ are now about to put into practice, or whether in many respects it does not differ from that ancient idea. And, further, it is a question whether that idea, which we have heard is already twenty-five centuries old, has ever been or can be realised.
With reference to the first question, I must admit that Christ, in contrast to Buddha, entertained not a transcendental and metaphysical, but a very material and literal idea of equality. It is true that He p.r.o.nounced the poor in spirit blessed; but the rich, who according to Him would find it harder to get into heaven than it is for a rope of camel"s hair to go through a needle"s eye, were not the rich in spirit, but the rich in earthly riches. It is also true that he said, "My kingdom is not of this world" and "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar"s"; yet everyone who reads these pa.s.sages in connection with their context must see that He is simply waiving all interference whatever with political affairs--that in wishing to gain the victory for social justice he is influenced not by political, but by transcendental aims for the sake of eternal blessedness.
Whether Rome or Israel rules is immaterial to Him, if only justice be exercised; yet only pious narrow-mindedness can deny that He wished to see justice exercised here below, and not merely in the next world. But is that which Christ understands by justice really identical with what we mean by it? It is true that the "Love thy neighbour as thyself," which He preached in common with other Jewish teachers, would be a senseless phrase if it did not imply economic equality of rights. The man who exploits man loves man as he does his domestic animal, but not as himself: to require true "Christian neighbourly love" in an exploiting society would be simply absurd, and what would come of it we have in times past sufficiently experienced. Indeed, the apostle removes all doubt from this point, for he expressly condemns the getting rich upon another"s sweat.
So far, then, we are completely at one with Christ. But He just as emphatically condemns wealth and praises poverty, whilst we would make wealth the common possession of all, and therefore would place all our fellow-men in a condition in which--to speak with Christ--it would be harder to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a rope to go through a needle"s eye. Here is a contradiction which it seems to me can scarcely be reconciled. We hold misery, Christ held wealth, to be the source of vice, of sin: our equality is that of wealth, His that of poverty. This is my first point.
In the second place, Christ did _not_ succeed, modest as His aims were. Is not, then, an appeal to this n.o.blest of all minds calculated to discourage rather than to encourage us in the pursuit of our aims?
EMILIO LERMA (_Freeland_): The previous speaker has brought the poverty which Christ praised and required into a false relation with the--alleged--miscarriage of His work of emanc.i.p.ation. Christ"s work miscarried not in spite of, but _because_ of, the fact that He attempted to base equality upon poverty. The equality of poverty cannot be established, for it would be synonymous with the stagnation of civilisation. However, it is not only possible, but necessary, to bring about the equality of wealth, as soon as the necessary conditions exist, because this is synonymous with the progress of civilisation. You will say that certainly this is so according to our view; but according to the view of Christ wealth is an evil. Very true. But when we examine the matter without prejudice, it is impossible not to see _that Christ rejected wealth only because it had its source in exploitation_. There is nothing in the life of Christ to suggest that He was such a gloomy ascetic as He must have been if He had held wealth, as such, to be sinful: numberless pa.s.sages in the Gospels afford unequivocal evidence of the contrary. Christ"s daily needs were very simple, but He was always ready to enjoy whatever His adherents offered him, and never saw any harm in getting as much pleasure from living as was consistent with justice. This view of His was not affected even by the hatred with which the rich of Jerusalem persecuted Him, and the often-quoted condemnation of the rich has in it something contrary to the spirit of the Gospels, if we tear it away from its connection with the words, "Woe unto him who waxeth fat upon the sweat of his brother." In condemning wealth, Christ condemned merely its source; the kingdom of heaven was closed to wealth because, and only because, wealth could not be acquired except by exploiting the sweat of men. There can be no doubt that Christ, like ourselves, would have become reconciled to wealth if then, as in our days, wealth were possible without exploitation--nay, really possible only without it. We shall have further occasion to discuss why this was impossible in Christ"s day and for many centuries afterwards; at present it is enough to know that it _was_ impossible, that the only choice lay between poverty and wealth with exploitation.
Christ rendered the immortal service of having recognised this alternative more clearly than anyone before Him, and of having attacked exploitation with soul-stirring fervour. It was inevitable that He should be crucified for what He did, for in the antagonism between justice and the claims of civilisation the first always succ.u.mbs. It was inevitable that He should die, because He unrolled the banner of true human love, freedom, and equality--in short, of all the n.o.blest sentiments of the human heart--nearly two thousand years too soon; too soon, that is, for Him, not for us: for dull-witted humanity needed those two thousand years in order fully to understand what its martyr meant. For humanity Christ died not a day too soon. There is, then, no contradiction between the Christian ideas and what we are striving for; the difference between the two lies simply herein: that the first announcement of the idea of equality was made in an age when the material conditions necessary for the practical realisation of this divine idea did not yet exist, whilst our endeavours signify the "Incarnation of the Word," the fruit of the seed then cast into the mind of mankind. It cannot, therefore, be said that the Christian work of emanc.i.p.ation has really "miscarried": there merely lie two thousand years between the beginning and the completion of the work undertaken by Christ.
On account of the lateness of the hour the President here closed the sitting, the debate standing adjourned until the next day.
CHAPTER XXIV
SECOND DAY
(_Adjourned Discussion upon the first point on the Agenda_)
LEOPOLD STOCKAU (_Centre_) re-opened the debate: I think that the preliminary question, whether our present endeavours after economic justice really are without any historical precedent, was exhaustively discussed yesterday and was answered in the negative. At least, I am authorised by yesterday"s speakers of the opposite party to declare that they are fully convinced that the teaching of Christ differs in no essential point from that which is practically carried out in Freeland, and which we wish to make the common property of the whole world. We now come to the main subject of the first question for discussion--namely, to the inquiry why the former attempts to base human industry upon justice and freedom have been unsuccessful.
The answer to this question has already been suggested by the last speaker of yesterday. Former attempts miscarried because they aimed at establishing the equality of poverty: ours will succeed because it implies the equality of wealth. The equality of poverty would have produced stagnation in civilisation. Art and science, the two vehicles of progress, a.s.sume abundance and leisure; they cannot exist, much less can they develop, if there are no persons who possess more than is sufficient to satisfy their merely animal wants. In former epochs of human culture it was impossible to create abundance and leisure for all--it was impossible because the means of production would not suffice to create abundance for all even if all without exception laboured with all their physical power; and therefore much less would they have sufficed if the workers had indulged in the leisure which is as necessary to the development of the higher intellectual powers as abundance is to the maturing of the higher intellectual needs.
And since it was not possible to guarantee to all the means of living a life worthy of human beings, it remained a sad, but not less inexorable, necessity of civilisation that the majority of men should be stinted even in the little that fell to their share, and that the booty s.n.a.t.c.hed from the ma.s.ses should be used to endow a minority who might thus attain to abundance and leisure. Servitude was a necessity of civilisation, because that alone made possible the development of the tastes and capacities of civilisation in at least a few individuals, while without it barbarism would have been the lot of all.