guarantee of stability, not only because it is a safetyvalve, but because the life of communities is one long process of adapting experience to thought and habit to reason.

Such is the claim which the Socialist makes to be heard.

CHAPTER II

SOCIETY AS IT IS

W

MORAL ASPECTS

E must begin our study by considering things as they are, and it will be most appropriate in every way to start with their moral aspect. However much moral imperatives may be obscured by economic and other materialist interests, by expediencies and pressures, and by all that class of motive miscalled "the practical," man's sense of right and wrong and his appreciation of the spiritually appropriate remain on an unshakable judgment seat from which the edicts are issued determining whether there is to be peace and happiness, or unsettlement and discontent in Society. The creative powers of Society are in men's minds not in their pockets, although the one may be in contact with the other. Economic forces change the face of Society, its organization and its temporary motives, and are for ever seeking to set up rival judges and judgment seats. But round them is an unceasing conflict and revolution. Their judgments have no acquiescent assent. They are the suborned decisions which authority can enforce or interest palm off for the time being, but which do not receive unquestioned acceptance. They are not taken as a last word. They are the things which, when regarded as progress, make critical men doubt if there be such a thing as progress at all. They deal with outward forms not with substance. with the

processes of production and not with the enjoyment of consumption, with advantage and not with right, with machinery and not with men, with wealth and not with life. When great movements issue from them, when revolutions happen in them, the changes effected are not substantial, goals are missed, and no peace and no gain that men can accept as something good in itself can ensue. As the years go, people turn back and ask themselves: For what benefit has it all happened? Society may have become more complex, the command over matter more complete, men's powers may have been augmented, the path of agitation deflected, but unsatisfied and condemning sits the judge of the mind and of the spirit, demanding that men must go deeper and look higher than economics, and that he shall use them for human ends. Progress must find its way into the mind of men and not concern itself only with his circumstances.

SLAVERY

If people were asked what, from the moral and human point of view, was the distinction between modern and ancient Society, they would with tolerable unanimity reply that it was the disappearance of slavery. Slavery as the legal ownership of one man by another has gone, and in that sense men are free. Society does not confess to slavery now. Its declared law, however, is not the only enslaving power contained in Society. The whole organization of Society is coercive, and unless that organization is the condition of liberty, men are not free. The American Civil War liberated the slave from the auctioneer, but left him in the wage market where he was his own auctioneer. The auctioneering process was changed.

The war purged American law of the disgrace of recognizing slavery, but it did not free American Society from slave conditions. The history of our own working class records a struggle for freedom from the grosser forms of oppression-the position of the chattel, of the labourer attached to the properties which he worked, of the workman bound by long contracts, of the wage-earner as the mere mechanical wheel in the capitalist machine-but, up to date, it has only succeeded in bringing him into that more intangible form of slavery-that fine network of entanglement woven by poverty and the immanence of poverty and by an ever present dependence upon his day-to-day work for his life. He cannot work, that is live, except by permission of those who are in possession of the land, the factories and the tools; and those who control the means of life, control men. His being able to find work, to use his abilities, to pursue his bent, do not depend upon himself, but upon the working of a system of which he is only a mechanical and irresponsible part and which controls him as though it were a personal tyrant. Supposing men were free but their hands belonged to masters, Society would be a slave society. Now, a man's tools are part of himself just like his hands. We shall always be bound to human necessity; we must always labour; we must work that we may live. That is not the complaint. It is that the workman has no security and no command over himself or over the economic system which is an essential part of that self. He is a thing of the whim, or the profit, of others. Boots may be required, as in times of unemployment, but the shoemaker cannot get a chance to make them and is upon his Union funds or is eating away his

little savings. It may be perfectly clear that certain operations of production, after benefiting a few individually, are to upset markets and cause unemployment and distress, but the workman is bound to the machine and must accomplish his own undoing. In still more objectionable ways is he unfree. Unless he thinks with his employer or landlord he can be turned adrift; he is punished for his opinions; he is put upon a black list and may then trudge from factory to factory, but he finds nothing to do. Labour combinations have reduced the more gross and open forms of this victimization, and employers have discovered that it is some of their most competent workmen whom they would thus have to punish, and hesitate. Common sense has also come in to limit these practices. But the black list and the mental note to punish are still common, labour is still for sale on the market, and the workman finds himself beset behind and before by consequences which he cannot afford to face if he does what he considers to be his duty as a citizen, claims what he considers to be his rights as a workman, and exercises what he considers to be his freedom as a man. "Investigation has shown," says the report of an official enquiry into the working of a group of American capitalist combinations, "that the degree of political freedom which exists is conditioned by the industrial status of the citizens who form the majority of the community."

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In this, however, he is but the victim of a system which enmeshes the whole of Society, workman and employer alike. Business," which should be the servant, has become the master of men. This will be dealt with more fully in the next section of this chapter, but here I must point out that the vast and intricate mechanism of production, exchange