Social Environment and Moral Progress
TextCHAPTER XVII
HOW TO INITIATE AN ERA OF MORAL PROGRESS
In Chapters VIII to XII of this volume I have given in briefest outline a summary of the growth during the nineteenth century of the actual social environment in the midst of which we live.
We see a continuous advance of man's power to utilise the forces of Nature, to an extent which surpasses everything he had been able to do during all the preceding centuries of his recorded history.
We also see that the result of this vast economic revolution has been almost wholly evil.
We see that this hundredfold increase of wealth, amply sufficient to provide necessaries, comforts, and all beneficial refinements and luxuries for our whole population, has been distributed with such gross injustice that the actual condition of those who produce all this wealth has become worse and worse, no efficient arrangements having been made that from the overflowing abundance produced all should receive the mere essentials of a healthy and happy existence.
We have seen huge cities grow up, every one of them with their overcrowded, insanitary slums, where men, women, and children die prematurely as surely as though a body of secret poisoners were constantly at work to destroy them.
We see thousands of girls compelled by starvation to work in such an empoisoned environment as to produce horribly painful and disfiguring disease, which is often fatal in early youth, or in what ought to have been, and what might have been, the period of maximum enjoyment of their womanhood. And to this very day no efficient steps have been taken to abolish these conditions.
We see millions still struggling in vain for a sufficiency of the bare necessaries of life (which in their misery is all they ask), often culminating in actual starvation, or in suicide to which they are driven by the dread of starvation. Yet our Governments, selected from among the most educated, the most talented, the wealthiest of the country, with absolute power to make what laws and regulations they please, and an overflowing fund of accumulated wealth to draw upon, do nothing, although more people die annually of want than are killed in a great war, and more children than could be slaughtered by many Herods.
And while all this goes on in the depths, where—
"Pale anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair"—
a little higher up, among the middle-men distributors of the necessaries and luxuries of life, bribery, adulteration, and various forms of petty dishonesty are rampant.
And higher yet, among the great Capitalists, the merchant Princes, the Captains of industry, we find hard taskmasters who drive down wages below the level of bare subsistence, and who support a more gigantic and widespread system of gambling than the world has ever seen.
And, finally, our administration of what we call "Justice" (and of which we are so proud because our judges cannot be bribed) is utterly unjust, because it is based on a system of money fees at every step; because it is so cumbrous and full of technicalities as to need the employment of attorneys and counsel at great cost, and because all petty offences are punishable by fine or imprisonment, which makes poverty itself a crime while it allows those with money to go practically free.
Taking account of these various groups of undoubted facts, many of which are so gross, so terrible, that they cannot be overstated, it is not too much to say that our whole system of society is rotten from top to bottom, and the Social Environment as a whole, in relation to our possibilities and our claims, is the worst that the world has ever seen.
Such are the evil products of the social environment we have ourselves created in the course of a single century. We have seen it going from bad to worse, and have applied petty remedies here and there during the whole period; but the evils have continued to increase. It has now become clear to the more intelligent of the workers that if we wish to improve it—if we wish to prevent it from getting even worse than it is—we must deal with the root-causes of the evil and, so far as possible, reverse the conditions which are so demonstrably bad, such hideous failures. And, fortunately, this is by no means so difficult as it may seem to be, because a large body of our thinkers and a considerable number of our workers see clearly what these root-causes are, and, less clearly, how to remedy them. They will, however, give their energetic support to any Government that devotes itself to the task of remedying them. The following are my own views as to how the problem must be attacked in order to solve it thoroughly and permanently.
The Root-cause and the Remedy
If we review with care the long train of social evils which have grown up during the nineteenth century, we shall find that every one of them, however diverse in their nature and results, is due to the same general cause, which may be defined or stated in a variety of different ways:
(1) They are due, broadly and generally, to our living under a system of universal competition for the means of existence, the remedy for which is equally universal co-operation.
(2) It may be also defined as a system of economic antagonism, as of enemies, the remedy being a system of economic brotherhood, as of a great family, or of friends.
(3) Our system is also one of monopoly by a few of all the means of existence: the land, without access to which no life is possible; and capital, or the results of stored-up labour, which is now in the possession of a limited number of capitalists and therefore is also a monopoly. The remedy is freedom of access to land and capital for all.
(4) Also, it may be defined as social injustice, inasmuch as the few in each generation are allowed to inherit the stored-up wealth of all preceding generations, while the many inherit nothing. The remedy is to adopt the principle of equality of opportunity for all, or of universal inheritance by the State in trust for the whole Community.
These four statements of the existing causes of all our social evils cannot, I believe, be controverted, and the remedies for them may be condensed into one general proposition: that it is the first duty (in importance) of a civilised Government to organise the labour of the whole community for the equal good of all; but it is also their first duty (in time) to take immediate steps to abolish death by starvation and by preventable disease due to insanitary dwellings and dangerous employments, while carefully elaborating the permanent remedy for want in the midst of wealth.
I myself have pointed out how these two ends may be best achieved, and hope to elaborate them. In the meantime, I call attention to Mr. Standish O'Grady's letter "To the Leaders of Labour" in The New Age of November 21st, 1912, in which, after referring to the very natural dread by the rich of any such radical reorganisation of Society, as leading to their own financial ruin (which it certainly need not do), he makes the following suggestive statement, with which I hope all my readers will agree:
"But what they fail to perceive is, that, in a world like this, made by infinite goodness and wisdom, Right is always the great stand-by for men and for Nations, and for the rich as well as for the poor; and that Wrong, sooner or later, ends in misery and destruction."
That is sound moral teaching. We have been doing the Wrong for the past century, and we have reaped, and are reaping, "misery and destruction." It is time that we changed our methods, which are all (as I think I have sufficiently pointed out) fundamentally Wrong, radically Unjust, wholly Immoral.
We have ourselves created an immoral or unmoral Social Environment. To undo its inevitable results we must reverse our course. We must see that all our economic legislation, all our social reforms, are in the very opposite direction to those hitherto adopted, and that they tend in the direction of one or other of the four fundamental remedies I have suggested. In this way only can we hope to change our existing immoral environment into a moral one, and initiate a new era of Moral Progress.
In Chapters XIII to XVI I have shown that the well-established laws of Evolution as they really apply to mankind are all favourable to the advance of true Civilisation and of Morality. Our existing competitive and antagonistic Social System alone neutralises their beneficent operation. That System must therefore be radically changed into one of brotherly co-operation and co-ordination for the equal good of all. To succeed we must make this principle our guide and our pole star in all Social legislation.