The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice | Page 6

mad
with the energy of activity, would be seen to pursue the fleeing
phantom of insatiable desire. Thus among the huge mass of
accumulated commodities the simplest wants would go unsatisfied.
Half-fed men would dig for diamonds, and men sheltered by a crazy
roof erect the marble walls of palaces. The observer might well remain
perplexed at the pathetic discord between human work and human
wants. Something, he would feel assured, must be at fault either with
the social instincts of man or with the social order under which he lives.
And herein lies the supreme problem that faces us in this opening
century. The period of five years of war has shown it to us in a clearer
light than fifty years of peace. War is destruction--the annihilation of
human life, the destruction of things made with generations of labor,
the misdirection of productive power from making what is useful to

making what is useless. In the great war just over, some seven million
lives were sacrificed; eight million tons of shipping were sunk beneath
the sea; some fifty million adult males were drawn from productive
labor to the lines of battle; behind them uncounted millions labored day
and night at making the weapons of destruction. One might well have
thought that such a gigantic misdirection of human energy would have
brought the industrial world to a standstill within a year. So people did
think. So thought a great number, perhaps the greater number, of the
financiers and economists and industrial leaders trained in the world in
which we used to live. The expectation was unfounded. Great as is the
destruction of war, not even five years of it have broken the productive
machine. And the reason is now plain enough. Peace, also--or peace
under the old conditions of industry--is infinitely wasteful of human
energy. Not more than one adult worker in ten--so at least it might with
confidence be estimated--is employed on necessary things. The other
nine perform superfluous services. War turns them from making the
glittering superfluities of peace to making its grim engines of
destruction. But while the tenth man still labors, the machine, though
creaking with its dislocation, can still go on. The economics of war,
therefore, has thrown its lurid light upon the economics of peace.
These I propose in the succeeding chapters to examine. But it might be
well before doing so to lay stress upon the fact that while admitting all
the shortcomings and the injustices of the régime under which we have
lived, I am not one of those who are able to see a short and single
remedy. Many people when presented with the argument above, would
settle it at once with the word "socialism." Here, they say, is the
immediate and natural remedy. I confess at the outset, and shall
develop later, that I cannot view it so. Socialism is a mere beautiful
dream, possible only for the angels. The attempt to establish it would
hurl us over the abyss. Our present lot is sad, but the frying pan is at
least better than the fire.

II.--Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
"ALL men," wrote Thomas Jefferson in framing the Declaration of

Independence, "have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness." The words are more than a felicitous phrase. They
express even more than the creed of a nation. They embody in
themselves the uppermost thought of the era that was dawning when
they were written. They stand for the same view of society which, in
that very year of 1776, Adam Smith put before the world in his
immortal "Wealth of Nations" as the "System of Natural Liberty." In
this system mankind placed its hopes for over half a century and under
it the industrial civilization of the age of machinery rose to the
plenitude of its power.
In the preceding chapter an examination has been made of the purely
mechanical side of the era of machine production. It has been shown
that the age of machinery has been in a certain sense one of triumph, of
the triumphant conquest of nature, but in another sense one of
perplexing failure. The new forces controlled by mankind have been
powerless as yet to remove want and destitution, hard work and social
discontent. In the midst of accumulated wealth social justice seems as
far away as ever.
It remains now to discuss the intellectual development of the modern
age of machinery and the way in which it has moulded the thoughts and
the outlook of mankind.
Few men think for themselves. The thoughts of most of us are little
more than imitations and adaptations of the ideas of stronger minds.
The influence of environment conditions, if it does not control, the
mind of man. So it