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of its servitors. We are not now concerned with the question of justice to those who live and toil in wretchedness. That question is worth considering in its proper place; it is sufficient here to indicate that, for the orderly progress of industry in the coming era, we must remove conditions that destroy our faith in society. Men in the service of society will give their best efforts only if society is worth serving.

But it is not sufficient that society should be worth serving, the worth of society and the worth of work in its service must be given concrete expression if these values are to mold men's conduct. Today these values are perceived, but dimly; they exercise an influence in limited fields. Men in the service of the railways, as a rule, endeavor honestly to realize the ideal of continuous and adequate service. Coal miners are loth to strike at the opening of winter. Their social function plays a part-though unfortunately a minor partin controlling their economic policy. As a rule, however, the servants of society, employers and employees alike regard any peculiar dependence of society upon their services as an element strengthening their bargaining position, a peculiar opportunity for gain. The wheat is falling from the head; the fruit is rotting on the tree; an excellent time for a concerted demand for higher wages! An industrial city has been built upon the expectation of the continuous supply of material: what an opportunity for the material producers to levy tribute! A whole nation lives from day to day upon the fruits of its mechanical industries; coal is its bread. A dazzling prospect of gain lies before those who can possess themselves of the mastery of the mines. Responsibility of function is opportunity for gain; so prevalent is this conception that when we assert that the use of responsibility for gain, not for service, is a species of treason, we seem to be harking back to the middle ages. And so we are. But there is much in the mediæval industrial spirit that is eternal: much that must be restored to our society after the disorders of an era of expansion and exploitation.

The worth of society and of work in its service-these are the social values that must govern in the new industrialism. As mere abstract ideas they can have no potency. As abstract ideas the kings and nobles of an earlier age had no potency; they were invested with the power of social values by the work of architects and sculptors, poets and philosophers. The poets, as it were, created kings and knights-ideals toward which actual rulers and nobles sought to elevate themselves. Architects and sculptors, painters and poets, can transform social man and society into values capable of dominating industry. The task may be difficult; but it

is no more difficult than that of vesting glory in the House of Atreus or the House of Bourbon.

The ultimate need of the new industrialism, then, is not more trained skill, more applied science-although these two are good things in their way-but artists and poets who shall translate society and social man into terms of values worth serving. When these have done their work we shall hear less of the deterioration of labor and the abuse of responsibility, of industrial decay and social corruption, of irreconcilable conflict and threatened revolution. A revolution will have been accomplished: a revolution in ideals and in values.

381. The Banquet of Life37

BY WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER

In 1886 a society published a set of analytical topics covering the field of social science. Among the topics which the student is invited to discuss is this: "The Banquet of Life, a Collation or an Exclusive Feast." The antithesis which is intended is undoubtedly that between a supply for all and a supply for a limited number. If there is any banquet of life, the question certainly is, whether it is set for an unlimited or for a limited number.

If there is a banquet of life, and if it is set for an unlimited number, there is no social science possible or necessary; there would then be no limiting conditions on life, and consequently no problem of how to conquer the difficulties of living. There would be no competition, no property, no monopoly, no inequality. Fresh air and sunlight are provided gratuitously and superabundantly, not absolutely, but more nearly than any other material goods, and therefore we see that only in very exceptional circumstances, due to man's action, do these things become property. If food were provided in the same way, or if land, as a means of getting food, were provided in the same way, there would be no social question, no classes, no property, no monopoly, no difference between industrial virtues and industrial vices, and no inequality. When, therefore, it is argued that there is, or was, or ought to be, a banquet of life, open to all, and that the fact that there is no such thing now proves that some few must have monopolized it, it is plain that the whole notion is at war with facts, and that its parts are at war with each other.

The notion that there is such a thing as a boon of nature, or a banquet of life, shows that social science is still in the stage that

"Adapted from "The Banquet of Life," reprinted in Earth-Hunger and Other Essays, 217-221, from the Independent, XXXIX, 773. Copyright by the Independent and Yale University Press (1887)

chemistry was in when people believed in a philosopher's stone; or medicine, when they believed in a panacea; or physiology, when they believed in a fountain of youth, or an elixir of life. Many of the phenomena of the present seem to indicate that this group of facts is just coming under the dominion of science. The discord and confusion which we perceive are natural under the circumstances. Men never cling to their dreams with such tenacity as at the moment when they are losing faith in them, and know it, but do not yet dare to confess it to themselves.

If there was such a thing as a banquet of life, open to all comers, to which each person was entitled to have access just because he was born, and if this right could be enforced against the giver of the banquet, that is, against nature, then we should have exactly what we want to make this earth an ideal place of residence. We should have, first of all, a satisfaction which cost no effort, which is the first desideratum of human happiness, and which we have not hitherto ever seen realized at all except in the narrow domain of luck. Secondly, we should have abstract justice in nature, which we have never had yet, for luck is of all things the most unjust. We should also have equality, which hitherto we have never found in nature. Finally, we should have a natural right which could be defined and enforced, not against men, but against nature-the trouble with natural rights hitherto has been that they could not be defined, that nature alone could guarantee them, and that against nature they could not be enforced.

If we take the other alternative and conceive of the banquet of life as a limited feast, then we see at once that monopoly is in the order of nature. The question of weal or woe for mankind is: what are the conditions of admission? How many are provided for? Can we, by any means open to us, increase the supply? But when we take the question in this form we see that we are just where we and our fathers always have been; we are forced to do the best we can under limited conditions, and the banquet of life is nothing but a silly piece of rhetoric which obscures the correctness of our conception of our situation.

When men reasoned on social phenomena by guessing how things must have been in primitive society, it was easy for them to conceive of a "state of nature" or a "golden age"; but, as we come to learn the facts about the primitive condition of man on earth we find that he not only found no banquet awaiting him here, and no natural rights adjusted to suit him, but that he found the table of Nature already occupied by a very hungry and persistent crowd of other animals. The whole table was already occupied-there

was not room for any men until they conquered it. It is easy for anyone now to assure himself that this is the true and only correct notion to hold on that matter. If land ever was a boon of Nature to anybody it was given away to the plants and animals long before man appeared here. When man appeared, he simply found a great task awaiting him: the plants and animals might be made to serve him, if he could conquer them; the earth would be his if he could drive off his competitors. He had no charter against Nature, and no rights against her; every hope in his situation had an “if” in it— if he could win it.

We look in vain for any physical or metaphysical endowment with which men started the life of the race on earth. We look in vain for any facts to sustain the notion of a state of primitive simplicity and blessedness, or natural rights, or a boon of material goods. All the facts open to us show that man has won on earth everything which he has here by toil, sacrifice, and blood; all the civilization which we possess has been wrought out by work and pain. All the rights, freedom, and social power which we have inherited are products of history. Our institutions are so much a matter of course to us that it is only by academic training that we. learn what they have cost antecedent generations. If serious knowledge on this subject were more widespread, probably we should have a higher appreciation of the value of our inheritance, and we should have less flippant discussion of the question: What is all this worth? We should also probably better understand the conditions of successful growth or reform, and have less toleration for schemes of social reconstruction.

Civilization has been of slow and painful growth. Its history. has been marked by many obstructions, reactions, and false developments. Whole centuries and generations have lost their chances on earth, passing through human existence, keeping up the continuity of the race, but, for their own part, missing all share in the civilization which had been previously attained, and which ought to have descended to them. It is easy to bring about such epochs of social disease and decline by human passion, folly, blunders, and crime. It is not easy to maintain the advance of civilization; it even seems as if a new danger to it had arisen in our day. Formerly men lived along instinctively, under social conditions and customs, and social developments wrought themselves out by a sort of natural process. Now we deliberate and reflect. Naturally we propose to interfere and manage according to the product of our reflection. It looks as if there might be danger soon lest we should vote away civilization by a plebiscite, in an effort to throw open to everybody this imaginary "Banquet of Life.”

382. Progress and Discontent38

BY THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

It may at first sight seem strange that society, while constantly moving forward with eager speed, should be constantly looking backward with tender regret. But these two propensities, inconsistent as they may appear, can easily be resolved into the same principle. Both spring from our impatience of the state in which we actually are. That impatience, while it stimulates us to surpass preceding generations, disposes us to overrate their happiness. It is, in some sense, unreasonable and ungrateful in us to be constantly discontented with a condition which is constantly improving. But, in truth, there is constant improvement precisely because there is constant discontent. If we were perfectly satisfied with the present, we should cease to contrive, to labor, and to save with a view to the future. And it is natural that, being dissatisfied with the present, we should form a too favorable estimate of the past.

In truth, we are under a deception similar to that which misleads the traveler in the Arabian desert. Beneath the caravan all is dry and bare; but far in advance, and far in the rear, is the semblance of refreshing waters. The pilgrims hasten forward and find nothing but sand an hour before they had seen a lake. They turn their eyes and see a lake where, an hour before, they were toiling through sand. A similar illusion seems to haunt nations through every stage of the long progress from poverty and barbarism to the highest degrees of opulence and civilization. But, if we resolutely chase the mirage backward, we shall find it recede before us into the regions. of fabulous antiquity. It is now the fashion to place the Golden Age of England in times when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman, when farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves, the very sight , of which would raise a riot in a modern workhouse, when to have a clean shirt once a week was a privilege reserved for the higher class of gentry, when men died faster in the purest country air than they now die in the most pestilential lanes of our towns, and when men died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast of Guiana. We, too, shall, in our turn, be outstripped, and in our turn be envied. It may well be, in the twentieth century, that the peasant of Dorsetshire may think himself miserably paid with twenty shillings a week; that the carpenter at Greenwich may receive ten shillings a day; that laboring men may be as little used to dining without meat as they now are to eat rye bread; that saniAdapted from History of England, I, chap. iii (1848).

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