Conscience and the Strike
THE COMMONWEAL A Weekly Review of Literature, The Arts, ...
...Wealth and in fighting through them, shoulder to shoulder, with the ability to create it commanded much the same pubmore favored brethren...
...cludes Mr...
...secondly, so long our own day were singularly bleak and uncomforting, as the religious tenets which encouraged the individualMr...
...While not abating one jot of its agination...
...mastered at the expense of a few hours' concentration, But there are times when the contrary seems to must have been at work to produce what was practically happen...
...Expressed in the merchant and craft condemnation of disorder, from whatever grievance guilds, it "formed, in fact, the basis of mediaeval social proceeding, American Catholic judgment of the whole life, influencing it in every direction, temporal and issue will be guided by the answers that can be given spiritual...
...A variation in one, i 5o years ago...
...How far is labor free of the apprentice and master...
...The Calvinistic doctrine of election and preessential to every country's salvation which in good destination lessened the value of good works at the times has its modest share in general prosperity, and very time it hardened and consecrated wealth as the in hard times its own modest but personal interest outward manifestation of divine election...
...Gradually, as Puritanism setsolemn moments for all, inside the nation or outside tled down upon the class most active and powerful of it, who feel called upon to judge the rights or economically, a new conception of riches arose, still wrongs of the case...
...Dudley sees two epochs when England, "eco- our feet for ever, no one will seriously maintain...
...Democracy ladling out from the melting pot into individual fordoubts of itself, and autocracy, finding a people un- tunes, put an end to this era...
...Sometimes it happens that new and unforeseen general cessation of labor...
...New York: Longmans, Green and Company...
...demands that disruption shall cease with those inalienThe Reformation, with its orgy of plunder, the able rights to a fair wage and a decent life for the meanest worker which the great Pontiff and prophet, *National Resurrection: A Plea for Disillusionment, by Leo XIII, laid down in his encyclical just thirty-five Eustace Dudley...
...Corporate interests, class interests, personal other with no weapons save idle hands and what de- interests, detach themselves, demand an attention all gree of sympathy or apprehension their attitude could their own, and reecho the old Luciferian cry, "non arouse in the class that keeps control...
...to its antagonists...
...M. Dudley perceives very clearly, is that to obtain general Georges Sorel, the French collectivist, in La Ruine du acceptance it was singularly dependent on three things Monde Antique, had attempted a similar study based which he terms "supports...
...Volume IV New York, Wednesday, May 19, 1926 Number 2 CONTENTS Conscience and the Strike 29 Air for Viola da Gamba (verse) Week by Week 31 Joseph Frant-Walsh 44 Church Music in Britain 35 Conversation With an Angel...
...Sister Mary Louis 46 Communist Schools in England Communications 46 E. M. Almedingen 37 The Play R. Dana Skinner 49 A Novelist and a Saint Ernest Dimnet 38 Books Arnold Whitridge, Educating the Musical Public...
...That these three supports," conwith which it is faced...
...To produce or second time...
...But the apart because of some vital flaw which destroys na- difference was vital, and fraught with terrible social tional fusion-most of all, by the lack of that element danger...
...Illusions that one had thought buried under break-up of the ecclesiastical mortmain under which the mass of economic fact, are resurrected, with their so much of the nation's wealth was secured, and its old faculty to dazzle and betray intact...
...The enthusiasm that should fuse and enerthe cleavage of an entire nation in half-the one gize the entire body fails inexplicably...
...How far do those who in the interests of the community at large, and not as are the defenders of social order reconcile their just an accumulation of wealth for wealth's sake...
...and thirdly, so long supply the missing moral sanctions to modern society, as our material wealth and prosperity were not seriwill not yet avail to save the world from the impasse ously challenged...
...It is evident to every problems, entailing much personal sacrifice, meet with thoughtful man or woman not blinded by class feeling a favoring temper in the people governed, and that that something more profound than an economic issue enthusiasm for the common task communicates itself which can be stated in two columns of news-print and quickly and naturally from governors to governed...
...First, the theory "that upon phenomena observable at the close of the Roman the enlightened selfishness of the individual was in the empire...
...which we note in the case of the individual...
...Avery Claflin40 Conde B. Pallen, Annette S. Driscoll 5o The Soul of Young Italy Robert Sencourt 42 The Quiet Corner 55 CONSCIENCE AND THE STRIKE ONE of the main obstacles to American under- in which it is being met are two factors which must standing of the recent unprecedented situation always be considered in their separate relation to the in Great Britain was an imperfect knowledge of the issue at point...
...They are wealth was concerned...
...But whereas the Frenchman's conclusions for interests of the community at large...
...No `profiteering' was materialism and narrow class-consciousness it imputes possible, for wages and prices were regulated...
...Dudley, "have not been kicked from under Mr...
...In one form or another it has been a result for which history holds no parallel, it is not endemic ever since the inception of the industrial era necessary that both should change...
...Dudley sees no reason why a creed that will istic spirit, were generally believed...
...As The Commonweal remarked last human background against which the drama was being week, in commenting with inevitable briefness upon played out...
...His little monograph which, short as it is, is packed A theory of wealth so strongly rooted in human with vital facts, is essentially an attempt to assign a nature and the acquisitive instinct is naturally very collective "conscience" to capital, and to show that powerful, and very formidable when threatened...
...THE COMMONWEAL A Weekly Review of Literature, The Arts, and Public Affairs...
...lic veneration as did the saints in the middle-ages...
...But its violation in the case of the social body is attended what the classes, who by now own all means of prowith the same distressing and obscure phenomena duction, do not seem to have perceived, but what Mr...
...nomically, socially, and morally," has been truly great What we are watching, indeed, in England at the The first roughly embraces the twelfth to the four- present time, is nothing less than a come-to-judgment teenth century...
...years ago...
...During this period, the hey-day of the of the whole Protestant and individualistic theory of guilds and monasteries, the corporate ideal, latent in wealth as opposed to the Catholic, corporate and cothe Church's organism, laid hold upon the social im- operative ideal...
...Hilaire Belloc 4S Justice and Economics 36 The First Violet (verse...
...Crises have arisen, with every indica- just as well as in the other, will produce the social distion of being acute, notably in 1911 and 192o, and array which it is the duty of all good governments to have been met without the supreme challenge of a avert...
...As for the poor-the unwhose beginnings he assigns to the great dogmatic favored by God-"they, neglected and forgotten, bechange in the middle of the sixteenth century and the came either the victims of capitalism or were hidden economic upheaval which was its immediate effect.* away in state institutions under the stigma of poverty...
...Mr...
...Nations do not fall asunder be- allied to religious thought, that was the root of Engcause there are "faults on both sides...
...serviam 1" Old grudges that one had believed forThe nature of an individual problem and the temper gotten resume their malign power to harden hearts and 30 THE COMMONWEAL May i9, 1926 dose fists...
...How far does its movement mark The essential difference between that age and this, is an instinctive return to the old corporate ideal which that capital was valued then for what it could procure the Reformation destroyed...
...Eustace Dudley, an English writer and scholar The principle of private judgment "was now transof Oxford University, has striven to trace the causes lated to the sphere of economics and applied in the of this national failure back through an historical past interests of the individual...
...These not believe it put an end to national conscience where are tragic moments in a nation's history...
...There was no essential difference between to three questions...
...Dudley does dependable, dreams of a people dependent...
...Ominous fissures armed with all the material resources of government, and flaws appear, sometimes in the most unexpected limited till now only by constitutional precedent-the places...
...But Mr...
...the first news of the general strike, no judgment or The issue-on the face of it, an economic one of conclusion worth arriving at will ever be reached unless wages and costs-was not being presented for the first both these are taken into consideration...
...They do fall land's expansion and of the new prosperity...
Vol. 4 • May 1926 • No. 2
