The War and Unity: Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918
Religion
The War and Unity: Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918
Christian sociology; Christian union; Social change; World War, 1914-1918 -- Religious aspects
For one thing we must be quite definitely prepared in every section of
society for a new way of life. From the economic point of view this will
mean that the rich will be less rich, and the poor will be enabled to
lead a larger life. Already the wealthy classes have been learning to
live a simple life, and to substitute the service of the country for
their own personal enjoyment. A serious call will come to them to
continue in that state of life when the war is over. In some degree at
least the pressure of the financial burden which the nation will have to
bear will compel them to do so.
To the workers too in the same way the call will come to a new and more
worthy way of life. I am thinking now of the workers at home who have
been earning unprecedented wages, and thereby in many cases are already
assaying a larger life. They will be reluctant to give this up, but only
a gradual redistribution of wealth can make it permanent. It is not of
course merely or mainly a matter of wages. The only real enlargement of
life is spiritual. It is an affair of the mind and the soul.
The more we bring a true education within reach of the workers the more
will there arise that sense of real kinship which only equality of
education can adequately guarantee.
And speaking at Cambridge one cannot refrain from remarking that the
University itself will have to submit to a considerable re-adjustment of
its life if it is to be a pioneer in this intellectual comradeship of
which I speak. A University may be a nursery of class distinction. In
some measure it certainly has been so in the past. The opportunity is
now before it to lead the way in establishing the only kind of equality
which is really worth having.
Then too there are obvious steps which can be taken without delay in a
new organisation of industry.
I am not one of those who think that the industrial problem can be
solved in five minutes or even in five years. None the less it should
not be impossible in wise ways to give the workers a true share of
responsibility, particularly in matters which concern the conditions of
their work and the remuneration of their labour.
If the sense of being driven by a taskmaster, whether it be the foreman
of the shop, or the manager of the works, could give place to a truer
co-operation in the management, and a larger measure of responsibility
for the worker, we should be well on the road to eliminating one of the
most persistent causes of just that kind of class distinction which we
want to abolish. The more men work together in a real comradeship, the
more mere social distinctions fade into the background. Is this not
written on every page of the chronicles of this war?
But the supreme factor in the situation, without which no mere
adjustment of organisation will prevail, is that new outlook on life
which can only be described as a subordination of private advantage to
the service of the country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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