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persons must be conformed to on pain of defeat. The civium ardor prava jubentium is not to be lightly turned aside.

Few senators or representatives would venture to realize Burke's conception of representative accountability; none would feel called upon to do so except in matters of conscience, and, unfortunately, economic legislation is not recognized generally as involving matters of conscience. Here is the core of the trouble that besets our times; here is the chief, but a hidden, source of the social unrest, the industrial disorders, that mar the symmetry of American prosperity; economic truth has not acquired ethical force.

In the United States, society is constructed altogether upon the industrial basis, and modern industry is a living organism framed upon a vast network of reciprocal relations and dependencies. The currents of its life circulate with the velocity to which steam impels; electricity is its nerve-force, the sciences are its faculties, the arts constitute its members, its great heart throbs with all the productive energies of nature raised to incalculable power by the mechanical achievements of human invention. Each man or woman or child who works, each human being who contributes to the matter or to the force which together constitute the totality of our industry, sustains some relation to every other such contributor; every person is an industrial point where the capillaries of supply and of distribution coalesce; every one is incessantly emitting the products of his industry and absorbing the products of others' industries; the channels of general distribution and supply are gorged with the superfluities of all on the way to supply the deficiencies of all.

Natural laws pervade this wonderful system and sustain it. Nothing but natural law could hold its myriad forces in balanced play, guide through its mazes such masses of material, adjust to every man's back his burden of labor, bring to every mouth its daily bread. Natural law would go further, apportioning to every man his due share of industrial opportunity and his proper dividend in the total product of wealth; but man, voter and legislator, doctrinaire and charlatan, man in his unwisdom has presumed to interfere. Statute laws, usurping the function of

natural laws and invading their sphere, have projected disorder into the machinery; the rhythm of its movements is disturbed, abnormal conditions are created, so that our wondrous resources, energies, and achievements are running abnormally to two products, millionaires and mendicants!

Natural laws, when obstructed or overborne, transfer their energy to sub-laws, and in our case such sub-laws have produced, on the one hand, corporations and trusts, on the other hand labor organizations. The first are castles and strongholds of accumulated wealth, the second are the walled cities and intrenched camps of the "producers of wealth." Here is war where we should have peace, and where nature would have maintained peace but for man's meddling.

Outside these marshaled forces of militant industry we find great masses of workers, neither armed for conflict nor desiring it, taking no part in the hostilities, having no sympathy with either side, and yet compelled to bear the cost of each campaign. The farmers and the artisans, the small shopkeepers, the modest tradesmen, a multitude of clerks, sewing women, shop-girls, children, and aged persons suffer in pocket, or through privation, every time there is a lockout, a blow-out, a strike, or a boycott. It is trite to say that these things are the products of a too rapid expansion of industry; but, while partially true, the statement is misleading. Industry cannot expand too rapidly, but our ideas ought to expand with it. With the development of machinery the science of mechanics has become perfected; chemistry, geology, physics, have all advanced with the growth of the employments to which they minister; but economic science has not progressed with the expansion of industry. We have not even adjusted the common law to the requirements of a society organized wholly upon reciprocal industrial relations and interactions.

A rapidly expanding industry demands absolute freedom of environment; within and beyond the peripheries it successively transcends there must be room for both the old and the new activities, scope for constantly augmenting forces, no obstructions, no counteractions. These conditions do not exist among us; no wonder that the old frames and casings are strained and cracked by the energies pent within them, for no strength of

material can resist the force exerted by cell multiplication in natural growth.

This great expansion of industry is not quite a hundred years old; but see how it has changed the physical face of the country, the occupations of the people, their social habits. What corresponding changes have we made in our laws, civil and criminal? How have we adjusted conveyances of property to the accelerated movement in the transfer of ownership? What efforts have been made to modify the precedents and the practice of our courts in harmony with the new relations generated by the spirit of industry that impregnates every source of individual or corporate activity? The material gains of the century cannot be computed, its intellectual progress has been bewildering, in literature and in art there has been a veritable efflorescence, science has attained a development beyond the scope of eighteenth-century conjecture; but in economics we have stood still, nay, we have even drifted back from where our fathers were fifty years ago.

The one science of all others which can enable us to take proper account of our gain in wealth, in productive force, in commercial effectiveness; the one science that can teach us to make this wealth a national blessing without its becoming a social curse; the one science that can enlighten us as to the duties arising out of industrial relations, and guide us in grafting a new morality upon the dead wood of the old systems, has been, and still is, neglected among us. We have passed under a new social dispensation, but the light of its gospel is denied to us. In our colleges and universities economic science has less vitality than the dead languages; in legislatures and in Congress it has not passed beyond the stage of a superstition. Statesmen account it foolishness; to the politician it is a stumbling-block.

Surely it is time for popular attention to be aroused so that this neglected science may be brought up abreast of the age. One way of effecting this is to make an appeal to the national conscience; another way is to excite public apprehension. Inverting the order of these methods so as to reserve the nobler for the last, let it be considered how serious is the present aspect of what is called the strife between capital and labor. Who sees any remedy for the antagonism of classes? Who pro

poses any basis for a truce, not to speak of permanent peace? No church in the present day dares to hold up the cross or any other symbol of peace and mutual good-will between these antagonists. The Episcopal Church puts this declaration in the mouth of every votary:

"My duty toward my neighbor is to love him as myself and to do to all men as I would they should do unto me; to love, honor, and succor my father and mother; to honor and obey the civil authority; to submit myself to all my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors, and masters; to order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters; to hurt nobody by word or deed; to be true and just in all my dealings; to bear no malice nor hatred in my heart; to keep my hands from picking and stealing and my tongue from evil speaking, lying, and slandering; to keep my body in temperance, soberness, and chastity; not to covet nor desire other men's goods, but to learn and labor truly to get mine own living, and to do my duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me."

The church that alone adheres to this formula is especially supported by those who belong to what is popularly known as the capitalist class. It either does not try, or else it has failed, to secure adherents from the "labor element" so called; but no one imagines that any considerable number of either the one class or the other would, or in conscience could, subscribe to this as a complete statement of social duty. The old systems of morals are equally impotent to restrain the greed for gain on the one side, the fierce assertion of the rights of labor on the other. Nor do they teach that self-restraint in such matters is a duty. Industrial co-operation is of economic, not moral, parentage.

The courts have strained the chains of precedent to the point of rupture in their noble effort to clothe new-born rights in obsolete phraseology; but the new cloth threatens to rend the old garment, the new wine is bursting the old bottles. The laws of master and servant which arose in England when feudal service ceased can never be so stretched and patched as to cover the relations between a great railroad corporation or a great manufacturing concern and the thousands of "hands" borne on its pay-rolls. New laws must be devised to fit our new needs, new processes must be adopted to suit these new times, or else the courts will fall into disrepute and society will vibrate between industrial despotism and social anarchy.

But there is a higher and nobler view of the situation. Let it be admitted, for the sake of argument, that economic truth. has an ethical sanction; let it be admitted, also, that economic science can adjust equitably the relations of capital, labor, and all other factors of wealth; must it not follow that both religion and morality will thus have the door opened to them to re-occupy their old seats of social authority? Will not religion be inspired to formulate a nineteenth-century statement of one's duty to one's neighbor, and stimulated to enforce the observance of the duties thus defined? Will not morality take jurisdiction. of economic offenses, and a conscience be evolved that is capable of comprehending the true inwardness of "the management of properties"?

Whether or not economic science, when elaborated, will be able to adjust equitably all industrial relations, can be determined only by experience. Those who believe in the ultimate sufficiency of science for every social need will accept this upon faith, and the rest of us must wait until we have an established science of economy set in a fair field and free from anti-economic laws and prejudices. At present we are able to answer only the antecedent questions, Have economic principles moral force? Are economic truths binding upon conscience?

It has been well said that the recognition of a truth is in itself an acknowledgment of the duty to believe it and to act upon it. Truth is a force, a belief-compelling, will-urging force, and every true system of morals aims, or professes to aim, at subduing to the force of truth the faculties, the impulses, and the passions of man. The fundamental postulate of morals, therefore, is, that the highest duty is to seek for what is true in respect to those matters which we talk about and in respect to whatever influences our conduct. To speak the truth one must know the truth, to act rightly one must know the right; but such knowledge is not intuitive nor does it float in the atmosphere; it must be obtained, and to be obtained it must be sought for.

It is quite evident that no one can be a good soldier without knowing so much of tactics and discipline as to be able to conduct himself properly on every military occasion, and this involves not only a knowledge of what he should do, but of

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