"Ask the preachers. Gin they meant brothers, they"d say brothers, be sure; but because they don"t mean brothers at a", they say brethren--ye"ll mind, brethren--to soun" antiquate, an" professional, an" perfunctory-like, for fear it should be ower real, an" practical, an" startling, an" a" that; and then jist limit it down wi" a "in Christ," for fear o" owre wide applications, and a" that. But
For a" that, and a" that, It"s comin" yet, for a" that, When man an" man, the warld owre, Shall brothers be, for a" that--
An" na brithren any mair at a"!"
Social inequality between human beings can never be a permanent relation. Ordinarily between normal human beings it is a hateful and demoralizing relation. It is twice cursed. It curses him who is down and him who is up.
It powerfully tends to make the one who is down and knows he is down, subservient, a truckler, a fawner. If a man is wise enough and strong enough to withstand the influence, the probability is that the very effort at resistance, unless he is very wise and very strong, will develop an unlovely and ungracious spirit of defiance, sometimes of hostility. In any case, human nature generally sours under it.
It is, perhaps, even worse in its effects on the one who is up. At the best he becomes condescending, affable, gracious, patronizing--intolerable att.i.tudes every one. At the worst he becomes arrogant and insolent. Always he tends to become suspicious and cynical. He learns to distrust the forced respectfulness and obligingness everywhere shown to himself, and so comes to distrust courtesy and good-will in general.
H. G. Wells in his _The Future in America_ inserts a picture of "one of the most impressive of these very rich Americans." "My friend beheld him, gross and heavy, seated in an easy chair in the centre of his private car, among men who stared and came and went. He clutched a long cigar with a great clumsy hand. He turned on you a queer, coa.r.s.e, disconcerting bottle nose with a little hard, blue, wary, hostile eye that watched out from the roots of it. He said nothing. He attempted no civility, he looked pride and insults--you ceased to respect yourself.... "It was Roman," my friend said. "There has been nothing like it since the days of that republic. No living king would dare to do it. And these other Americans! These people walked up to him and talked to him--they tried to flatter him and get him to listen to projects. Abjectly. And you knew, he _grunted_. He didn"t talk back.
It was beneath him. He just grunted at them!"
Just as clear as the incompatibility of Christianity with social inequality is its incompatibility with business compet.i.tion.
Compet.i.tion for a livelihood, compet.i.tion for bread and b.u.t.ter, is the denial of brotherhood. It is the ant.i.thesis of the Golden Rule. It is not the doing unto other men as we would that they should do to us. It is obedience to David Harum"s parody of the Golden Rule, "Do unto the other fellow as he wants to do to you, and do it fust." The essential condition of compet.i.tion is that always there shall be at least two men after the one contract, two men after the one job, two men after the custom, the patronage, the _clientele_ only sufficient for one. As a consequence, wherever compet.i.tion exists, the success of one man always involves the failure of another. The man who gets the position knows that another man is suffering. The merchant who captures the trade knows that another must fail. The rule for success, as given by a highly successful business man of America, was, "So conduct your business that your compet.i.tor will have to shut up shop." The method is essentially disorderly and wasteful. Worse than that, it is inhuman.
It is difficult, indeed, to imagine how a more inhuman method of business could be devised short of methods which no man who had not ceased to be human would tolerate. Inhuman and dehumanizing. How deeply dehumanizing is seen in the effort of Christian men to justify it--the supreme ill.u.s.tration in our day of the morally blinding power of the accustomed, the familiar, and, above all, the profitable, which has made Christian men defenders of compet.i.tion, of war, of the drink traffic, of the opium traffic, and of slavery.
Business compet.i.tion to-day is, conceivably, as great an evil as ever intemperance was. Its working is more subtle, more wide-spread, more deeply destructive.
It hardens men. It dries up their natural and almost inextinguishable kindliness. It demoralizes them. It almost compels them to resort to crooked methods. It subjects them to temptations sometimes virtually irresistible. It presents them with the alternatives of failure and starvation for themselves and their loved ones or the doing of something, not right indeed, but which plenty of others do and which seems imperative. The honorable man has to compete with the dishonorable. The Hydrostatic Paradox of controversy, the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table has told us, lies in this, that as water in two connected tubes, however different their calibre, stands at the same level in both, so if a wise man and a fool engage in controversy, they tend to equality. The more demoralizing Hydrostatic Paradox of business compet.i.tion is its deadly tendency to bring the honorable man down to the level of the dishonorable.
It is not always demoralizing. There are men strong enough to maintain their integrity, even sometimes at great risk. But the strain of it, the feverishness of it, the narrowing influences of it, still fewer men escape.
Under the shade and fallen needles of the pine forest, no other vegetation can grow. Under the absorption, the exhaustion, of the fierce business compet.i.tion of America, little else than business shrewdness, business insight, business knowledge can grow. A thousand seeds of culture, art, music, philanthrophy, religion, human fellowship, home happiness die permanently or fail to germinate at all in the American business man. The struggle, like a remorseless machine, seizes him as a young man and works its way with him till it flings him off at the other end of the process, a failure with a dreary old age of dependence and uncertainty, or a successful man broken in health at fifty, to spend the rest of his days in search of health, or with the leisure and the means to develop the old tastes but the tastes themselves atrophied by long and enforced neglect.
In the name of the brotherhood of Christianity, in the name of the richness and variety of the human soul, the Church must declare a truceless war upon this sterilizing and dehumanizing compet.i.tion and upon the source of it, an economic order based on profit-seeking.
With profits not merely as an inducement but as the absolutely essential condition, the _sine qua non_ not merely of success but of a livelihood, compet.i.tion, even desperate compet.i.tion, is inevitable. There is not usually the direct personal clash, the b.l.o.o.d.y or deadly combat, though these may be, but it is a life and death struggle none the less. In business compet.i.tion, men are fighting with halters around their necks.
They are fighting as wolves fight who know that the beaten one will be devoured by the pack.
How unfair and how futile under such conditions to heap reproaches upon the men who make what are called excessive profits! The risks are great. Should not a man make provision for them when he can? When, too, a man is immersed from boyhood in an atmosphere of profit-seeking, when in the talk around the meal-table and the conversation of his father with other men he gathers that profits are the measure of success, when in business he finds the whole energy and ingenuity and influence of men concentrated on profits, and men largely estimated by the amount of their profits, what capacity will be left after twenty years of such a life to distinguish between legitimate and excessive profits?
A profit-seeking system will always breed profiteers. It cannot be cleansed or sweetened or enn.o.bled. There is only one way to Christianize it, and that is, to abolish it. That is, it may well be believed, the distinctive task of the age that is now beginning, as the abolition of the liquor-traffic was of the age that is closing, and the abolition of slavery of a still earlier age.
This whole present industrial and commercial world, ingenious, mighty, majestic, barbaric, disorderly, brutal, must be lifted from its basis of selfish, compet.i.tive profit-seeking and placed squarely on a basis of co-operative production for human needs.
How this tremendous transformation will be eventually accomplished, probably no one of this generation can foresee. All we can see is some initial steps.
A hint, it may be, is given in the well-recognized tendency of competing industries to escape compet.i.tion by specialization. Thus they become co-operative. The same tendency to co-operative specialization is at work among professional men. Medical men specialize ever more narrowly.
Lawyers elect to become authorities in a very narrow field.
Another principle of transformation may be found in the union of competing businesses under government regulation as to prices. Such combinations, while often disadvantageous to the public unless governmentally regulated, at least attest the increasing recoil from compet.i.tion.
The main line of development, however, it seems altogether probable, will be the extension of public ownership, munic.i.p.al, state or provincial, and national.
There is no diviner movement at work in the modern world. It is emanc.i.p.ating, educative, redemptive, regenerating. "Whatever says _I_ and _mine_," says one of the wisest and most Christ-like of Medieval Mystics, "is Anti-Christ." The converse is equally true. "Whatever says _we_ and _ours_ is Christian." Public ownership, more extensively and powerfully than any other human agency, teaches men to say we and ours.
It teaches them to think socially.
To discredit and attack the principle of public ownership is to discredit and attack Christianity. It would seem to be the special sin against the Holy Ghost of our age. He who doubts the practicability of public ownership is really doubting human nature and Christianity and G.o.d.
What we are facing to-day is the issue between learning to do things together and a struggle between competing individuals, competing cla.s.ses, and competing nations, so frantic and ferocious that in it our civilization may go down.
In these two chapters there has been the effort to set forth two at least of the dominating principles of the new social order. They are both embodied in a significant report adopted by the General Conference of the Methodist Church of Canada, October, 1918, in the city of Hamilton, Ontario. This report presented by a Committee on the Church in Relation to War and Patriotism was adopted, after a long and deeply earnest debate, in a reduced but still large Conference, with but four dissentient votes. It has awakened unusual interest as perhaps the boldest and most outspoken deliverance on the social question which any great Christian body up to that time had made.
REPORT NO. 3
II. CHURCH LEADERSHIP IN THE NATION
"Your Committee has had its attention directed to the work of the Church in the problems of reconstruction by some pregnant pa.s.sages in the address of the General Superintendent, and by a Memorial from the Alberta Conference.
"Even before the war it was widely foreseen that great social changes were imminent in the western world. This gigantic convulsion has precipitated the nations into the melting pot. Such an era summons the prophetic gifts of the Church, first, to the task of interpretation--to discern amid the turmoil and confusion the hand of G.o.d, and secondly, to the task of inspiration--to breathe into the hearts of men the faith, the courage, the patience, the brotherliness, by which alone the happy harbor can be won. And no Church is under a deeper obligation to a.s.sist in this two-fold task than our own. Methodism was born in a revolt against sin and social extravagancies and corruption. It was content with no aim lower than "to spread scriptural holiness through the land."
Insisting on personal regeneration and all the implications therein, it transformed the face of England and saved that land from the excesses of a French revolution. To it the ideal of the Christian life was simply love made perfect. Without seeking at this time to commit the Church to a definite programme of economic policy, we would present for the consideration of our people the following statement which reflects our point of view:
"1. The present economic system stands revealed as one of the roots of the war. The insane pride of Germany, her pa.s.sion for world-domination found an occasion in the demand for colonies as markets and sources of raw materials--the imperative need of competing groups of industries carried on for profits.
"2. The war has made more clearly manifest the moral perils inherent in the system of production for profits. Condemnation of special individuals seems often unjust and always futile. The system, rather than the individual, calls for change.
"3. The war is the coronation of democracy. No profounder interpretation of the issue has been made than the great phrase of President Wilson"s, that the Allies are fighting to "make the world safe for democracy." It is clearly impossible for the champions of democracy to set limits to its recognition. The last century democratized politics; the twentieth century has found that political democracy means little without economic democracy. The democratic control of industry is just and inevitable.
"4. Under the shock and strain of this tremendous struggle, accepted commercial and industrial methods based on individualism and compet.i.tion have gone down like mud walls in a flood. National organization, national control, extraordinary approximations to national equality, have been found essential to efficiency.
"Despite the derangements and the sorrow of the war, the Motherland has raised large ma.s.ses of her people from the edge of starvation to a higher plane of physical well-being and, in consequence, was never so healthy, never so brotherly, nor ever actuated by so high a purpose, or possessed by such exaltation of spirit as to-day--and the secret is that all are fighting or working, and all are sacrificing.
"It is not conceivable that, when Germany ceases to be a menace, these dearly bought discoveries will be forgotten. Relapse would mean recurrence, the renewal of the agony.
"The conclusion seems irresistible. The war is a sterner teacher than Jesus and uses far other methods, but it teaches the same lesson. The social development which it has so unexpectedly accelerated has the same goal as Christianity. That common goal is a nation of comrade workers, such as now at the trenches fights so gloriously--a nation of comrade fighters.
"With the earthquake shocks of the war thundering so tremendous a re-affirmation to the principles of Jesus, it would be the most inexcusable dereliction of duty on the part of the Church not to re-state her programme in modern terms and re-define her divinely-appointed goal.
"The triumph of democracy, the demand of the educated workers for human conditions of life, the deep condemnation this war has pa.s.sed on the compet.i.tive struggle, the revelation of the superior efficiency of national organization and co-operation, combine with the unfulfilled, the often forgotten, but the undying ethics of Jesus, to demand nothing less than a transference of the whole economic life from a basis of compet.i.tion and profits to one of co-operation and service.
"We recognize the magnificent effort of many great employers to make their industrial organization a means of uplift and betterment to all who partic.i.p.ate, but the human spirit instinctively resents even the most benevolent forms of government while self-government is denied.
The n.o.blest humanitarian aims of employers, too, are often thwarted by the very conditions under which their business must be carried on.
"That another system is practicable is shown by the recent statement of the British Prime Minister, that every industry save one in Britain has been made to serve the national interest by the elimination of the incentive of private profit. That the present organization, based on production and service for profits, can be superseded by a system of production and service for human needs, is no longer a dream.
"We, therefore, look to our national government--and the factor is a vital one--to enlist in the service of the nation those great leaders and corporations which have shown magnificent capacity in the organizing of life and resources for the profit of shareholders. Surely the same capacity can find n.o.bler and more deeply satisfying activity in the service of the whole people rather than in the service of any particular group.
"The British Government Commission has outlined a policy which, while accepting as a present fact the separation of capital and labor, definitely denies the right of sole control to the former and, insisting on the full organization of workers and employers, vests the government of every industry in a joint board of employers and workers, which board shall determine the working conditions of that industry.
"This policy has been officially adopted by the British Government, and nothing less can be regarded as tolerable even now in Canada.
"But we do not believe this separation of labor and capital can be permanent. Its transcendence, whether through co-operation or public ownership, seems to be the only constructive and radical reform.
"This is the policy set forth by the great Labor organizations and must not be rejected because it presupposes, as Jesus did, that the normal human spirit will respond more readily to the call to service than to the lure of private gain.