On the other hand, it would be hard to find an economic explanation for
the emigration of the Pilgrim Fathers to Plymouth, for the Quaker
agitation that supported John Woolman in his war upon slavery or for
most of the Christian missionary enterprises of the present day. Also it
would take a mental microscope to find the economic cause for the
extermination of the Moriscos in Spain by Philip III. or the expulsion
by Louis XIV. of the Huguenots from France. These two great crimes of
history had important economic consequences, but the cause behind them
was religious prejudice. Prof. James Franklin Jameson, of the Carnegie
Institution at Washington, rightly has stressed a study of the religious
denominations in the United States, of the Baptist, Methodist and other
"circuit riders" of the old Middle West, as one of the most fruitful
sources for a fuller knowledge and understanding of the history and
development of the American nation. Neither George Whitefield, Peter
Cartwright, nor Phillips Brooks of a later day, can be explained in
terms of economic interpretation.
This false and entirely materialistic conception of the development of
society and civilization is a mistake not only of the learned, but of
the pseudo-learned, of the men and women of more or less education whose
mental development has not progressed beyond an appreciation of Bernard
Shaw, Henrik Ibsen and H.G. Wells. Most of them are estimable people,
but the difficulty is that they are so idealistic that, so to speak,
they never have both feet upon the ground at the same time. This is
especially true of our esteemed contemporaries, the Socialists. These
cheerful servants of an idealistic mammon pride themselves upon
completely ignoring human nature. A few years ago, at a London meeting
of the "parlor Socialists" known as the Fabian Society which, by the
way, was presided over by Bernard Shaw, an old man began to harangue the
audience with the words, "Human nature being as it is--" At once his
voice was drowned out by a chorus of jeers, cat-calls and laughter. He
never made his address, for the audience was unwilling to hear anything
about "human nature." No Socialists in general are willing to do so, for
human nature, with the mental and spiritual sides of life, is just the
element with which their fallacious creed cannot deal, and they know it.
But the human element must enter into business and trade in the problems
of direction, management, even in the form of competition itself, and
cannot possibly be eradicated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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