The net result of a century and a half of industrialism is avarice,
warfare and hate. Society can continue even when avariciousness is
rampant--for a time--and warfare of one sort or another seems
inseparable from humanity, at all events it has always been so, but
hatred is another matter, for it is the negation of social life and is
its solvent. Anger passes; it is sometimes even righteous, but hatred is
synonymous with death in that it dissolves every unit, reducing it to
its component parts and subjecting each of these to dissolution in its
turn. Righteous anger roused the nations into the war that hate had
engendered, but hate has followed after and for the moment is
victorious. Russia seethes with hatred and is perishing of its poison,
while there is not another country in Europe, of those that were
involved in the war, where the same is not true in varying degrees;
hatred of race for race, of nation for nation, of class for class, of
one social or industrial or economic or political institution for
another. This, above all else, is the disintegrating influence, and
against it no social organism, no civilization can stand. Unless it is
abrogated it means an ending of another epoch of human life, a period of
darkness and another beginning, some time after the poison has been
worked out by misery, adversity and forced repentance.
It is this prevalence of hatred, reinforced by avarice and perpetuated
by incessant warfare, that negatives all the efforts that are made
towards effecting a correspondence between the divided interests that
are the concomitant of industrialism. Strikes and lockouts, trades
unions and employers' associations as they are now constituted and as
they now operate, syndicalism and Bolshevism and proletarian
dictatorships, protective tariffs and commercial spheres of influence,
propaganda and subsidized newspapers are all energized by the principle
of hate, and no good thing can come of any of them. Nor is it enough to
work for the re-establishment of justice even by those methods of
righteousness, and with the impulse towards righteousness, which are so
different from those which are functioning at present along the lines of
contemporary industrial "reform." Justice is a "natural" virtue with a
real place in society, but the only saving force today is a supernatural
virtue. This, amongst other things, Christ brought into the world and
left as the saving force amongst the race He had redeemed and in the
society reconstituted in accordance with His will. This supernatural
virtue is Charity, sometimes expressed in the simpler form of Love, the
essence of the social code of Christianity and the symbol of the New
Dispensation as justice was the symbol of the Old. Just in so far as a
man or a cult or an interest or a corporation or a state or a generation
or a race, relinquishes charity as its controlling spirit, in so far it
relinquishes its place in Christian society and its claim to the
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