The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909Besant, Annie
Religion
The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909
Besant, Annie
Theosophy; Theosophy -- Study and teaching
you should remember he will come back again to a physical body, and it is
your duty to make that next birth of his as much an improvement on the
present as it is possible for human thought and human love to make it. We
have a duty to these young souls around us in order that they may profit
by our civilisation, and not suffer from it as they too often do to-day.
When you turn to economics, what will be the result of Brotherhood there?
The detailed working out of that problem will certainly need the keenest
intellects in order to devise some scheme of production and distribution
which shall make human life less burdened on the one side, less full of
useless luxury on the other. But not along the rough-and-ready lines
of the Socialism of the streets are these great and difficult problems
rightly to be solved. You need to solve them by the most careful
consideration of all the problems which are interlinked the one with the
other. Some system of general co-operation, of general profit-sharing, or
something along those lines, will be the principle on which the changed
conditions will go; but while you will make the lot of the toilers far
lighter and happier, you will never give to the ignorant the control
over that on which their food supply depends; for that means ruin. Let
me give you one illustration to show you what I mean. There have been a
large number of strikes in this country for years and years past, and
there is no doubt that many of those were brought about by the greed of
the employing class, and by the unfair treatment of the workers; but none
the less they have in more than one case—in fact, in many cases—reduced
the workers to a lower condition than they were in before. I was up at
Tyneside the other day. Newcastle with its adjoining ports, Sunderland,
and the whole coast along there, was once one of the great shipbuilding
centres in England. Strike after strike made shipbuilding impossible to
carry on, because the men could not pay their way. The result is that
it has ceased to be a great shipbuilding district; that the trade has
largely gone away from the Tyneside, and that those parts are falling
into decay. You cannot blame the men who struck; they tried to get better
conditions for themselves; they did not understand the difficulties
of all these large commercial firms, and that they might readily make
shipbuilding impossible for the shipbuilder by pressing for a particular
rate of wage which was not too much for them, but more than at the time
the exigencies of the trade enabled the shipbuilder to pay. And so on
and on in endless cases. Careful thought and deliberate judgment are
wanted. Many proposals have been made by the trades unions themselves—a
sliding scale of wages, arbitration boards, and so on—all steps in the
right direction. But your difficulty with arbitration boards is that
their decision is not always accepted. When people go to arbitration
they hope to get a decision on their own side; when it does not come
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