My Life and Work | Page 4

things already produced--that is not business. It is just more or less
respectable graft. But it cannot be legislated out of existence. Laws can
do very little. Law never does anything constructive. It can never be
more than a policeman, and so it is a waste of time to look to our state
capitals or to Washington to do that which law was not designed to do.
As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish special
privilege we are going to see poverty spread and special privilege grow.

We have had enough of looking to Washington and we have had
enough of legislators--not so much, however, in this as in other
countries--promising laws to do that which laws cannot do.
When you get a whole country--as did ours--thinking that Washington
is a sort of heaven and behind its clouds dwell omniscience and
omnipotence, you are educating that country into a dependent state of
mind which augurs ill for the future. Our help does not come from
Washington, but from ourselves; our help may, however, go to
Washington as a sort of central distribution point where all our efforts
are coordinated for the general good. We may help the Government;
the Government cannot help us. The slogan of "less government in
business and more business in government" is a very good one, not
mainly on account of business or government, but on account of the
people. Business is not the reason why the United States was founded.
The Declaration of Independence is not a business charter, nor is the
Constitution of the United States a commercial schedule. The United
States--its land, people, government, and business--are but methods by
which the life of the people is made worth while. The Government is a
servant and never should be anything but a servant. The moment the
people become adjuncts to government, then the law of retribution
begins to work, for such a relation is unnatural, immoral, and inhuman.
We cannot live without business and we cannot live without
government. Business and government are necessary as servants, like
water and grain; as masters they overturn the natural order.
The welfare of the country is squarely up to us as individuals. That is
where it should be and that is where it is safest. Governments can
promise something for nothing but they cannot deliver. They can juggle
the currencies as they did in Europe (and as bankers the world over do,
as long as they can get the benefit of the juggling) with a patter of
solemn nonsense. But it is work and work alone that can continue to
deliver the goods--and that, down in his heart, is what every man
knows.
There is little chance of an intelligent people, such as ours, ruining the
fundamental processes of economic life. Most men know they cannot

get something for nothing. Most men feel--even if they do not
know--that money is not wealth. The ordinary theories which promise
everything to everybody, and demand nothing from anybody, are
promptly denied by the instincts of the ordinary man, even when he
does not find reasons against them. He knows they are wrong. That is
enough. The present order, always clumsy, often stupid, and in many
ways imperfect, has this advantage over any other--it works.
Doubtless our order will merge by degrees into another, and the new
one will also work--but not so much by reason of what it is as by
reason of what men will bring into it. The reason why Bolshevism did
not work, and cannot work, is not economic. It does not matter whether
industry is privately managed or socially controlled; it does not matter
whether you call the workers' share "wages" or "dividends"; it does not
matter whether you regimentalize the people as to food, clothing, and
shelter, or whether you allow them to eat, dress, and live as they like.
Those are mere matters of detail. The incapacity of the Bolshevist
leaders is indicated by the fuss they made over such details.
Bolshevism failed because it was both unnatural and immoral. Our
system stands. Is it wrong? Of course it is wrong, at a thousand points!
Is it clumsy? Of course it is clumsy. By all right and reason it ought to
break down. But it does not--because it is instinct with certain
economic and moral fundamentals.
The economic fundamental is labour. Labour is the human element
which makes the fruitful seasons of the earth useful to men. It is men's
labour that makes the harvest what it is. That is the economic
fundamental: every one of us is working with material which we did
not and could not create, but which was presented to us by Nature.
The moral fundamental is man's right in his labour. This is variously
stated.