The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice | Page 7

comes about that every age or generation has its
dominant and uppermost thoughts, its peculiar way of looking at things
and its peculiar basis of opinion on which its collective action and its
social regulations rest. All this is largely unconscious. The average
citizen of three generations ago was probably not aware that he was an
extreme individualist. The average citizen of to-day is not conscious of
the fact that he has ceased to be one. The man of three generations ago
had certain ideas which he held to be axiomatic, such as that his house
was his castle, and that property was property and that what was his
was his. But these were to him things so obvious that he could not

conceive any reasonable person doubting them. So, too, with the man
of to-day. He has come to believe in such things as old age pensions
and national insurance. He submits to bachelor taxes and he pays for
the education of other people's children; he speculates much on the
limits of inheritance, and he even meditates profound alterations in the
right of property in land. His house is no longer his castle. He has taken
down its fences, and "boulevarded" its grounds till it merges into those
of his neighbors. Indeed he probably does not live in a house at all, but
in a mere "apartment" or subdivision of a house which he shares with a
multiplicity of people. Nor does he any longer draw water from his
own well or go to bed by the light of his own candle: for such services
as these his life is so mixed up with "franchises" and "public utilities"
and other things unheard of by his own great-grandfather, that it is
hopelessly intertangled with that of his fellow citizens. In fine, there is
little left but his own conscience into which he can withdraw.
Such a man is well aware that times have changed since his
great-grandfather's day. But he is not aware of the profound extent to
which his own opinions have been affected by the changing times. He
is no longer an individualist. He has become by brute force of
circumstances a sort of collectivist, puzzled only as to how much of a
collectivist to be.
Individualism of the extreme type is, therefore, long since out of date.
To attack it is merely to kick a dead dog. But the essential problem of
to-day is to know how far we are to depart from its principles. There
are those who tell us--and they number many millions--that we must
abandon them entirely. Industrial society, they say, must be reorganized
from top to bottom; private industry must cease. All must work for the
state; only in a socialist commonwealth can social justice be found.
There are others, of whom the present writer is one, who see in such a
programme nothing but disaster: yet who consider that the individualist
principle of "every man for himself" while it makes for national wealth
and accumulated power, favors overmuch the few at the expense of the
many, puts an over-great premium upon capacity, assigns too harsh a
punishment for easy indolence, and, what is worse, exposes the
individual human being too cruelly to the mere accidents of birth and

fortune. Under such a system, in short, to those who have is given and
from those who have not is taken away even that which they have.
There are others again who still view individualism just as the vast
majority of our great-grandfathers viewed it, as a system hard but just:
as awarding to every man the fruit of his own labor and the punishment
of his own idleness, and as visiting, in accordance with the stern but
necessary ordination of our existence, the sins of the father upon the
child.
The proper starting point, then, for all discussion of the social problem
is the consideration of the individualist theory of industrial society.
This grew up, as all the world knows, along with the era of machinery
itself. It had its counterpart on the political side in the rise of
representative democratic government. Machinery, industrial liberty,
political democracy--these three things represent the basis of the
progress of the nineteenth century.
The chief exposition of the system is found in the work of the classical
economists--Adam Smith and his followers of half a century--who
created the modern science of political economy. Beginning as
controversialists anxious to overset a particular system of trade
regulation, they ended by becoming the exponents of a new social order.
Modified and amended as their system is in its practical application, it
still largely conditions our outlook to-day. It is to this system that we
must turn.
The general outline of the classical theory of political economy is so
clear and so simple