The aspiration for Social Order pauses not when it has won national unity
and harmony. The principle and the result of the existing industrial
system no longer content those who live under it. That system has been
stimulated by the enormous material acquisitions which have flowed from
invention. It has improved in some degree the condition of most members
of society, but with a marked inequality in the improvement, and at the
cost of the mutual hostility which unchecked competition involves, and
which is fruitful in moral mischief and material waste. The laborer has
gained in intelligence by the school and the newspaper; holding the vote,
he feels himself one of the masters of the state; sympathy draws him to
his own class. The scholar sees that the system of unchecked competition
is an outgrowth of conditions which are changing, and which ought to
change. The idealist longs for a society which shall effectually seek
the highest good of every member, and supplement the hunger for personal
advantage with satisfaction in the good of all. The toiler and the
idealist unite to seek a more generous and serviceable order in the
community, and the tendency is vaguely called Socialism. One conspicuous
exponent is Karl Marx, who, with his followers, would make the highly
centralized German state the starting-point for a still more
authoritative and minute regulation of the community, directed to the
equal material benefit of all its members. By a different road a degree
of fraternal organization is being attained, through voluntary
associations of workingmen, for mutual support as toward their employers,
or for independent production or distribution. All definite and dogmatic
schemes of social reform prove upon challenge to need adjustment and
modification, to fit the actual workings of a society already infinitely
complex. It is as the sentiment which for want of a better word we call
socialistic works along with that broad and candid study of fact which we
call scientific, and toward an ideal in which the material is but an
instrument of the spiritual,--that there is solid promise of advance.
With these sentiments of Liberty and Social Order may be named what is
sometimes called Philanthropy, or in a broader way of speaking may be
named Humanity,--the unselfish passion for the good of others, the ardor
of service, to which early Christianity gave outlet in missions, and
which now throws itself into reform, education, amelioration in every
direction of human need.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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