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
I have not the advantage of knowing anything of the treatment of any
part of this subject by any preceding speaker. I myself intend to deal
with it from the industrial and social standpoint, for I think if we are
to seek unity amongst classes it is most important in the national
interest that unity should first be sought and secured in the industries
of the country. That there is disunity is suggested and admitted in the
terms of the subject. This disunity has grown out of conditions which
range over a few generations. I believe that these conditions grew
largely out of our ignoring the human side of industry and the general
life conditions of the masses of our workers. Our economic doctrine
ignored the human factor, and measured what was termed national progress
in terms merely of material wealth without due regard to who owned the
wealth, made mainly by the energy of the industrial population.
Religious doctrines and religious institutions were not the cause of
that unhappy situation, but they had suffered from it, until now we find
a very considerable number of the population engaged in a struggle for
life, in a struggle for the material means of existence, handicapped by
belief that their own unaided effort alone can assist them, that they
must not look for help to any other class, or to any other quarter.
Moral precepts have not the influence which they ought to have upon our
industrial relations. Workers are thrown back upon their own resources;
and in the use of those resources, during the past fifteen years
particularly, much has been revealed to us of what is now in the working
class mind. I am not suggesting that to seek a settlement of conditions
of disunity, or the trouble arising from those conditions, you must
coddle the working classes, praise them and pay them highly, and try to
keep them contented with conditions which in themselves cannot be
defended. I do not mean that at all. What I mean is that if unity
between classes in industrial and economic life is to be sought and
secured, it can be got only at a price, paid in a two-fold form; that of
giving a larger yield of the wealth of the nation to those who mainly by
their energies make that wealth, and of placing the producing classes
upon a level where they will receive a higher measure of respect, of
thanks, and regard than they previously have received from the nation as
a whole. I was asked among others some twelve months ago to share in the
investigations then made by representatives of the Government to
discover the immediate cause of the very serious unrest then displayed
in the country, and we went for a period of many weeks into the main
centres of the kingdom and brought a varied collection of witnesses
before us in order that the most reliable evidence should be obtained,
and one who favoured us with his views was the Rev. Canon Green, whom I
am going to quote because of his great experience among the working
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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