Competition; Monopolies -- United States; Trusts, Industrial
Nor are these men alone in their belief. Earnest thinkers outside of the
Church, who are familiar with the evils which intense competition and
extortionate monopoly are constantly pushing into our notice, discern a
tendency in our social organism to pulsate with stronger and more rapid
beats in its convulsions of strike and boycott and commercial crisis.
And in these mighty vibrations, like the swing of a gigantic pendulum,
there is danger that it may swing so hard and so far as to break its
controlling bonds and leave humanity in chaos.
Anarchy means more than the reign of individualism. It means such a ruin
of the world's wealth, the storehouses and fields and factories which
supply its wants, that nine tenths of the population of the globe would
be swept off its face by actual starvation. Some social organism there
must be if our civilization is to continue. What can adjust the delicate
relations of man to man when the bond of selfishness which holds us
together breaks? There are many men, even now, whose greatest desire and
strongest purpose is to benefit their fellow-men; and if we can extend
and strengthen this noble principle so that it will govern the great
mass of humanity, why may we not cease to measure and bargain and weigh
with our brother men?
Such is the argument for what we may appropriately call Christian
communism. Who shall say what shall be possible with a new and nobler
generation of men? When the great mass of the race has Altruism for its
governing motive, then it may be possible to use that trait of character
as the basis of industrial society. But to-day the governing motives of
mankind are largely selfish. Society must govern men in their dealings
with each other, not by arbitrary force but by their inner motives of
action. When men at large begin to heartily desire to benefit others
more than themselves, then the system of selfish competition will begin
to disappear, and the system of fraternal devotion will arise to take
its place. This will come about naturally. It will be an effect which
can only be brought about by producing the cause. When Christianity
shall have so regenerated mankind that its governing motives are noble
and generous, then the social problems we are discussing, as well as
many others, will be forever happily solved.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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