simple and beautiful clothing of the community will chiefly be made of fabrics woven in the socialized factories, but it will often be worked by the loving hands of women. A happy union of labor economized in routine work and labor lavished upon individual work will uplift the crafts of the future and the character of those who follow them. The abominations of machine-made ornament will disappear, and art be wedded to everyday life. Each new invention to save labor in mining, or tilling, or building, or spinning, will be hailed with joy as a release from toil and a gift of more time in which to do individual work.

The inventor, the originator, now unhappily compelled to hunt for a capitalist and bow low his genius before some individual distinguished only for that gift of acquisitiveness, that business ability, which is the lowest attribute of mankind, will see his idea put to the test and reap not unholy gains but the honor of his fellows if it is not found wanting. The painter, no longer compelled to paint portraits of the rich and not necessarily beautiful, will ally his gifts. with the common life of men and be carried in triumph before the enduring monuments of his genius. The organizer, the man of arrangement, will be invited to exercise his talent, not in overreaching and despoiling his fellows, but in planning their welfare in a thousand new schemes of development.

No host of wasteful workers will be found in the industrial camp. Accounts will be simple and clerks few. No travelers, agents, or touts will be needed to push doubtful commodities. The sham and the substitute will be found only in museums. It will be obviously ridiculous to employ any but good materials, for labor can only be economized by producing the things which are the best of their kind. Policies of insurance, those typical documents of a community of prey, will be read in the public archives with much the same feeling as we now read a warrant for the burning of a Bruno. The young men who now waste their time in ruling up books in banks and insurance offices or in serving writs will find manly and useful work. The production of commodities will be commensurate with the labor put forth, unemployment will be one of the few crimes known to the statute-book, and last, but not least, the economic dependence of woman will cease.

The attainment of such ends will only be difficult as long as we refuse to apply scientific methods to the ordering of common affairs. It is in the domain of politics alone that men refuse to apply first principles to the solution of problems. The mental daring which has accomplished so much in engineering, in astronomy, in

surgery, in every department of science, is replaced in the sphere of politics by a timorous tinkering with admitted evils. With things the scientist has worked marvels in a single century. With those marvels the politician has done little. The scientist has applied his skill to locomotion; the politician has refused to avail himself of that skill in order to distribute the population healthily. The scientist has stated the conditions of health; the politician has refused to create those conditions. The scientist has supplied the tools; the politician has neglected to take them up.

The problem of riches and poverty is of the simplest. It presents none of the difficulties which attach to the measurement of the mass of the sun, or the treatment of such a disease as cancer. Science has presented us with such instruments that we can easily create a tremendous superfluity of commodities if we choose to do so. We know how to produce; we know how to transport the results of our production. The appliances at our command could furnish many more foot-tons of work than are needed to give proper housing, suitable clothing and good food to every unit of the community. There is here no impenetrable secret; we have read enough in the book of Nature to control her forces to effect; our power of production is not too small, but already greater than our need. If invention went no farther, if science now came to a standstill, we should have tools more than adequate to abolish poverty.

Unfortunately the politicians and the economists have never discussed the question of poverty from this point of view. Volumes have been written on such subjects as "rent," "interest," or "value," but nothing has been done to enquire how much work is needed to feed, clothe and house a community, and how best that work may be accomplished. In designing an engine, the man of science considers the work to be done and the known means to do it. For want of that agreement and determination, for want, that is, of a wise collectivism, the greater number of our people are poor. It is a world of service which a civilization would substitute for a world of serfdom and pain. But if, realizing that the world has no room for the idle, the people would rise to a freedom only bounded by the knowledge of and necessity for collective decision, then there is the broadest avenue for hope and the clearest call to action. The achievements of those who are gone, these are the inheritance of the people. The only true riches of the nation, men and women, these are the people themselves. The people have but to will it, and we set our faces toward a civilization.

I. ECONOMICS AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY

380. Wanted: A New Symbolism

BY ALVIN S. JOHNSON

36

The aristocracies have vanished, we shall never know them again. The work of supplying the world, now and for the future, has become one of such complexity, requiring so broad a diffusion of general intelligence, that merely personal dignitaries can never again acquire their ancient influence over man's mind, their ancient hold on his conduct. There remains in the world only the common man. Differences in natural endowment, in culture and in wealth persist; but these can not alter the fact of a fundamental democracy. So far as we serve, we serve the common man.

But-and this we must fix in our minds-the common man of today is not the obscure citizen of earlier epochs. The same commercial process which has broken down the earlier class organization has produced a differentiation in economic structure, an interdependence of parts, which compels us to conceive of economic society as a living organism. The common man of today compares with his prototype of yesterday as the cell in an organized tissue compares with the cell in the half-coherent mass of protoplasm. The functions of the individual are now organic functions, far transcending the narrow confines of his own personality. The pilot, the engineer, the steel worker, the coal-heaver, are significant, not in themselves, but in the social work they perform. With the progress of time, a constantly increasing share of the population assumes functions essentially social.

In serving the common man, then, we are performing a work far more worth while than that of supplying the needs of an individual, of whatever personal worth. We are serving a social functionary in the last analysis, society itself. Our work, then, is significant or meaningless according as we conceive society itself as worthy or not. If we are constrained to think of our society as ninety million persons, chiefly knaves and fools, the service will be irksome, to be shirked, if possible. If the society we serve is full of brutality and injustice, disfigured with poverty and ignorance, corrupted with cynicism and self-indulgence, it can not inspire us with loyalty in its service. The exhausting toil of the long day, the hopeless misery of the sweatshop, the sordid depravity of he slum, can not much longer cumber the earth if society is to command the best efforts

36 Adapted from "An Ethical Aspect of the New Industrialism," in the South Atlantic Quarterly, XII, 9-11. Copyright (1912).

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 part— in 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).