Declarations of Dependence

...William James, in his sceptical manner, once said that only this principle would promote the welfare of man...

...Webb's book, is worthy of attention because it, and it alone, gave birth to what has been the most important working plan for the redemption of the proletariat...

...Because of them, New Harmony, which housed a rather distinguished group of people, utterly belied its name...

...They expressed themselves in what may be called declarations of dependence...

...The catastrophe which rendered it a memory was a fatal lack of agreement about metaphysical and religious matters...

...First came Herbert Spencer and theories about what humanity was becoming or ought to become...

...Now whatever else may be submitted in defense of M. Jourdain, it is certainly true that his children have been the important advocates of proletarian welfare...

...In both instances it was assumed that the metaphysical and religious faculties of man had become fossilized...

...Economic study demonstrated that those who should have profited most by this development—that is, the workers—were starving in the midst of plenty...

...But those who have tried, during the past fifty years, to halt the cultural deterioration of the wage-earner were often practical humanists...

...In other words, the faith by which she— and to a greater or lesser extent all the Socialists— lived, was that science could do for man what faith in God could not...

...And thereby was demonstrated once again that citizens may starve together amiably—as did the early Franciscan brotherhood—but that no social charms conceivable will keep them from each other's throats when the life of the soul is in question...

...The third event—it is one to which we have referred previously—is the centenary of Saint Francis...

...Our most active hope is not to advance the cause of either bourgeoisie or proletariat, but to dissolve these classes as far as is practicable and to replace them with organizations conscious alike of their own differentiated importance and of their separate places in the community scheme...

...The last of these is a religious motive, and to it we shall return later...

...Beatrice Webb's My Apprenticeship (briefly reviewed elsewhere in this issue of The Commonweal) is precisely what it$ title lays claim to being-—the record of how a member of the English middle-class learned how to deal with the problem of the social underling...

...The second recent event to which we make reference is the publication of Werner Sombart's Proletarian Socialism...

...This mid-Victorian, middle-class point of view, so fascinatingly illustrated in Mrs...

...the transference of the emotion of self-sacrificing service from God to man...

...The obvious solution was to coordinate scientific production and scientific consumption—by law...

...It happens to be of especial interest just now because of three recent events...

...Webb's early years, attempted to establish at New Harmony, Indiana...

...It did "eliminate profit and extinguish the profit-taker...

...Mrs...

...and though it is often modified by benevolence or even religious charity, it remains content to take the world basically as it is— a world dependent upon the resources of nature and whatever intelligence exploits these...

...And the great mission of the Church is to continue, by every means and all graces in her custody, her eternal task of making a social rule of this Franciscan doctrine: "Magna res est amor...

...What mattered was simply this: what are we going to do, here and now, about the here and now...

...He happened, it is true, to be only an upstart...

...It mattered little how one hoped to arrive at this solution...

...Karl Marx insisted that, because of the actual tendency of "rich" and "poor" to become superlatives, nothing could be done except to impose by force an ideal tendency— that is, to stage a proletarian revolution...

...This was," she says, "the mid-Victorian trend of thought and feeling...

...Born with a curious and tenacious mind that would not grin contentedly at the little routine of social envies which was all life seemed to hold in store for her, this determined woman set about informing herself...

...Brilliant invention had proved that the possibilities for developing the machinery of production were almost unlimited...

...It seeks a "rational" and regulated society, made according to the formulae of science...

...Instead, we cling now to a newer idea^-which is also an older ideal— of mankind as a creative forum in which every group strives to achieve its own purpose as fully as possible...

...Webb is curt and definite in her summary of the philosophy by which her outlook was determined...

...Wherever the spirit of cooperation is developing, whether in industry or agriculture...

...And because there is nothing which the vast majority of men, belonging to all groups, are so little inclined to accept as the authority of "reason," the very mainspring of socialism is the cause for its perennially running down...

...And added to this belief in science was the consciousness of a new motive...

...The first, preeminently natural and fortuitous, is the guiding spirit of capitalism...

...Because it denied this abiding reality, the social conscience which developed out of the mid-Victorian mind was fundamentally fantastical...

...Certainly one of the most careful and competent German observers of modern life, Sombart finds that the really important point about the communists is not the thing they propose doing, but the reasons why they wish to do it...

...And though society may never copy the mystical directness with which he solved the problem of existence, it can wisely apply no principle excepting his: to build, in the spirit of a common love for God, the dwelling in which the community shall live...

...The first is the one hundredth anniversary of the communistic colony which Robert Owen, rising from an environment quite like that of Mrs...

...The rest was easy...

...but he was eager to learn, to do and to enjoy, which, after all, are appropriate aristocratic infinitives...

...What was most noteworthy about this experiment, which figured so largely in the conversation of our ancestors, was that, relatively at least, it succeeded in solving the problems of economics which had banded its supporters together...

...Was there not, we are asked, much admirable stuff in M. Jourdain...

...and the safest thing to say about Richard Owen is that he happened to be philanthropically mistaken...

...All forms of ministration, whether individual or social, are, of course, by-products pi idealism to some extent...

...wherever this cooperation is fostered by the direct or indirect aid of the state—there, blindly, possibly, but yet very actually, a society that was constructed out of power is giving away to a society which is based on love...

...But the socialistic scheme has reason for its mainspring...

...Rene Johannet has recently come brilliantly to the defense of M. Jourdain, that ambitious representative of the middle-class who, in Moliere's comedy, was deterred neither by his humble origins nor by his unfamiliarity with the art of prose...

...There was the current belief in the scientific method, in that intellectual synthesis of observation and experiment, hypothesis and verification, by means of which alone all mundane problems were to be solved...

...They alone ventured to suggest a remedy, because they alone were competent to diagnose the disease...

...The Fabian Socialists declared that, since the electorate was a weapon already forged, political energy could induce the necessary, equitable solution...

...Fundamentally, there are only three motives which can underlie a social system—power, reason and love...

...He modified the reality of natural power by accepting uncompromisingly the more transcendent reality of supernatural power...

...then followed that intense devotion to social facts which was later to have its share in making the Fabian Socialist movement the form which British communism preferred to assume...

...He, among all European men, is the one who preached most exultingly the law of social love...

...They saw that human welfare is doomed unless those who have the power to direct affairs recognize that both responsibilities and rewards of community living must be distributed among ailTherefore it is interesting to turn, just now, to the life story of a woman whose individuality does not prevent her from being a representative type of the modern social reformer...

...We believe that many people are now half-consciously echoing him...

...While the victims of the factory system—the economic and social fournees of the industrial revolution—grew steadily more inert, brilliant men and women who had profited by money, leisure, and education awoke with a start to the frightful human waste exacted by industrialism...