When the conditions of social life are such that the individual may
be excluded through no unfitness of his own for co-operation, or may
be born without a chance of acquiring fitness for it, we are brought
face to face with the conditions of primitive ages. And if you force
him back upon the elemental instincts, one of two things will happen.
Either, if the individual is weak through physical deterioration or
incapacity to combine with his fellow outcasts, he will be crushed
and killed by society and putrefy about its holy places; or, if he
has indomitable life and vigor, he will revert to the argument of
elemental forces: he will turn and explode society. Here, then, we
should fear explosion, for we are not as submissive in extremities as
the proletariats of arrested Indian civilisations. But with us the
class whose freedom is incessantly threatened by the operation of
private capitalism is the class which by its political position holds
in its hands the key to the control of industrial form: that is to say,
its members can modify, as soon as they elect to, the laws of property
and inheritance in this State of Britain. They can, as soon as they
see clearly what is needed supersede institutions now immoral because
useless and mischievous by institutions which shall re-establish the
elementary conditions of social existence and the possibility of the
corresponding morality--namely, the opportunity for each individual to
earn his living and the compulsion upon him to do so.
Returning from the consideration of the “residuum” and the “criminal
classes,” we find that even the workers of the employed proletariat are
by no means wholly moral. In spite of the massive healthiness of their
behavior in ordinary relations, they are generally coarse in their
habits; they lack intelligence in their amusements and refinement in
their tastes. The worst result of this is the popularity of boozing
and gambling and allied forms of excitement, with their outcomes in
violence and meanness. But when once society has ensured for man the
opportunity for satisfying his primary needs--once it has ensured him
a healthy body and a wholesome life, his advance in the refinements of
social morality, in the conception and satisfaction of his secondary
and more distinctly human desires, is solely and entirely a matter of
education. This will be attested by every man and woman who has at all
passed through the primary to the secondary passions. But education in
the sense alluded to is impossible for the lad who leaves school at
fourteen and works himself weary six days in the week ever afterwards.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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