The new social order; principles and programs

Front matter

ti^m a-uii ^-a. HN <b U

THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER

THE MACMILLAN COMPAtJY

Preface

The background of this discussion is the conviction, which has been maturing through the years, that a new order of social hving is necessary for both the practical and the spiritual interests of humanity. The events of the last few years have intensified that conviction and have added to it the judgment that the beginnings of a new order are already with us, that here and there parts of it may be seen breaking through the shell of the old, which has long been nourishing the embryo. This does not mean that state socialism is going to be universally adopted or that the world is going Bolshevik. Still less does it mean that the organization of a League of Nations will inaugurate the millenium. The signs are clear, however, that we have arrived at one of those conjunctions of economic pressure and idealistic impulse, which occasion fundamental changes in the organization of life. It was so when slavery was abandoned as the economic base of civilization and again when monarchy was rejected as a mode of government. Now, the economic order which superseded production by slavery and came to its fruition with the mass production of the machine era is beginning to give way to some other form. This transformation necessarily involves changes in the form of government that superseded monarchy, also far-reaching alteration and developments in the entire social structure, in the habits and customs of society and in its vital forces. This is more generally understood in Europe than in the United States, where the present economic order is younger and more vigorous on account of its later development and the extent and richness of the natural resources that nourish it. Here too there prevails a simple vi PREFACE

faith that the formulae of the democratic state will solve all the social problems of humanity, even though their application be limited and hindered by an autocratic economic order.

This book views the new order as a process of growth, with its roots in the past. It therefore discusses the principles round which it is forming, and then attempts to analyze in the light of them the main programs for social change that have been recently offered. It deals both with the vital forces and with the form and structure of the new order. It holds that certain principles or ideals — they will be called social or moral or religious according to the point of view, — which have developed in the past experience of man as the expression of both his practical needs and his spiritual aspirations, are now being consciously accepted by multitudes of people as the guiding stars of life and the working principles of a new social order. These principles are viewed not as finished products, but as still, and possibly forever, in process of development. They are "both building and builded upon."

The discussion proceeds from the standpoint of a teacher of Christian ethics. The principles here considered are germinal in the teaching of Jesus. With him they were an historic development, the fulfillment of the law and the prophets, the embodiment of the past experience of his race. They have been an historic development ever since and will continue to be. It is because they are an epitome of universal experience and aspiration that they have authority to mcreasingly challenge the generations of men to fulfill and apply them according to their need and light, and then to pass them on to others for further development. The new order is fundamentally a task for religion as well as for economic and social science and practical organization. It involves a spiritual transformation or it cannot be.

In form, the discussion is an attempt to summarize the nature and chart the direction of impending social change. The

PREFACE VU

discussion of the various programs is by no means complete; it is limited to their relationship to the principles which have been expounded. Those who are familiar with this field will find nothing new here, unless it be the religious aspect of the discussion, for sometimes the spiritual significance of wellknown things escapes the wise as well as the prudent.

In the nature of the material presented, I am indebted for information and suggestion to numerous sources and I have chosen not to incumber the text with notes by referring to them.

Because of the extent of the field covered, it is inevitable that the issues involved should appear to be oversimpHfied. It is not for lack of appreciation of their complexity, but their details do not lie within the province of the present discussion. Moreover, it is concerning the weightier matters of the law, justice and judgment and mercy, that the forces of religion need now to make up their mind. The tithes of mint and anise and cummin can be considered in less urgent times, after the main outlines of the form the molten world is to take have been determined.

Harry F. Ward.

New York City,

Contents

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION Chapter Page I. The Nature of the New Order 3

Part I Principles Of The New Order

n. Equality 35

ni. Universal Service 76

IV. EFFiaENCY 121

V. The Supremacy of Personality 131

VI. Solidarity 154

Part II Programs For The New Order

Vn. The British Labor Party 185

VIII. The Russian Soviet Republic 225

IX. The League of Nations 272

X. Some Movements in the United States 289

XI. The Churches 328

IN CONCLUSION Xn. The Trend of Progress 355

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

Chapter I

During the Great War, many men talked and still more thought of the days that were to come after. They endeavored to assess the tasks that awaited mankind when the fighting should be done. They spoke of "reconstruction" or "a new world" according to their several temperaments and points of view. With every month that passes since the Armistice was signed, it becomes increasingly clear that the task which now calls mankind is something more than reconstruction. The term indicates a job of repairs, or at the most, the replacing or rebuilding of something that has been destroyed. Reconstruction technically means the restoration of the communities devastated by the conflict, and the readjustment of those dislocations of life which the war has occasioned throughout the world. To restore the activities of humanity to a normal peace basis is the strict reconstruction task.

This alone is a tremendous imdertaking. It must needs be on a scale comparable to that of the war. As the war was titanic so reconstruction must be colossal. War is necessarily organized and concentrated destruction and the recent conflict summoned to that purpose all the knowledge and energies of a scientific era. It is a commonplace of life that to construct is always a longer and more difficult undertaking than to destroy. The work of many men, through many years, or the fruition of centuries of collective effort may be smashed in a moment by the shell from a great gun or the finger of a careless child. When the destruction is social, as in the case of war, it requires a better organization and more

4 THE tIEW SOCIAL ORDER: PRINCIPLES AND PROGRAMS

energy to repair than to make the damage. To wage the war required a tremendous concentration of the will of the nations. To make good the social waste of the struggle, indeed to prevent it from being fruitful and multiplying throughout the earth, will require a still greater exercise of the collective will and there is now no stimulus of an immediate danger to arouse the necessary energy. No generation following a great war has ever yet been able to fully recover from it. Having given free rein to the primitive passion of destruction, civilization now stands like a child in the midst of its broken toys, finding that some will not go together again and cannot be replaced. Some other institutions besides kings and kaisers have recently been smashed past hope of repair or cracked beyond possibility of use. Still others have been so badly damaged that it may prove cheaper to make new ones than to repair the old. If the old garment will not carry the new cloth, why waste labor on the patch?

To the effect of the war upon inherited institutions must be added its effect upon the temper, purpose and knowledge of the common people, particularly in Europe. In the final event, they wiU decide whether it is to be repair or rebuilding of the social structure. Such evidence of their point of view as is now available, indicates that any attempt to rebuild the world on the old foundation is doomed to final failure. Too much has been swept away in Europe, too much of the authority and social sanction of what remains has been undermined, to make that foundation much longer safe. It is by this time perfectly clear that the war in its ending is challenging the economic order in Europe, as in its development it challenged the political order of the central powers. This challenge cannot be confined to Europe and the answer to it cannot long be delayed. Even though there is little change in the mode of life after the Peace Conference ad-

Journs, nevertheless the good old days for the people of power and privilege are not coming back. No ruling class anywhere in the earth will ever again be able to sit secure and at ease in the seats of the mighty. The concentration of economic power is to be challenged as the concentration of military power has been challenged. The people throughout the world who toil for a mere living, a Httle less or a little more, are not going to remain quiescent in a subordinate and inferior social status. They have been taught the effectiveness of mass action. Many of them worn and weary, will sink back to the old inertia. They will be like the miner who found his old job underground waiting for him but the mule with which he had worked for years had been replaced by another. A few days with the new animal was all he could stand. Then he struck, refusing to return to work until the familiar mule, the comrade of years of toil, was restored to him. But the attitude toward life of the returned soldier is better revealed by that large number of men who stay in the city instead of going back to the farm or the small town. They have found the former place of life too straight for them, the earHer environment too restricted. At a meeting of a Soldiers', Sailors' and Workmen's Coimcil in Philadelphia a soldier made the following report: "I have interviewed personally 365 men who have been in the army and navy. I have recorded their opinions closely and carefully. There were 191 who told me they were ready for an immediate revolution and the overthrow of the Capitalist system. Of this number 168 were oversea men and 23 had been in the army here. Then there were 104 who wanted a revolution but of a somewhat mild sort, one like the Ebert-Scheidemann revolution in Germany, the rise to power of the moderate socialist party. Of this number 78 were oversea men; 26 were home service men. Of the 365, but 61 wanted a more moderate change of government, a gradual mitigation and removal of current industrial evils. And 8 of the men interviewed were satisfied with present conditions, while a ninth was so thoroughly contented he said he would willingly fight the Bolsheviks if conscripted for Siberian service."

The revolutionary force of the war is not yet spent. The fury of the elements it let loose upon the house of humanity is not yet exhausted. Fourteen wars, in which big artillery was used, were in progress in Europe during the Peace Session, one for each of the Fourteen Points, the men of the old order cynically declared. Strike after strike shakes the economic foundation of the great industrial nations, each one revealing the acquisition of new power and purpose by the toilers. It is the day of judgment for all social and governmental institutions. In open court, before the assembled multitudes, each one must show its moral authority and its practical efficiency. In a world in which so much has been destroyed and abandoned, everything must justify its right to remain. So much of our old-fashioned social machinery proved inadequate for the tasks of war, that it is now compelled to answer the questioning of the cormnon people concerning its adequacy for the tasks of peace. What a wartime censorship could not do in concealing the inefficiency of the prevailing mode of political and economic organization, cannot in the end be accomplished by bureaucratic burrowing or publicity propaganda. Moreover, the complete effect of the war as a force for social change will not have been realized until the common people who did the bulk of the fighting face the full bill for the undertaking. As always in times past, collection is to be attempted from them. But this time there is a difference. The people are now becoming able to audit the accounts. Before long they will check them up to the last item. When that day comes, they will decide who shall pay and who shall collect, and their decision will be enforced. They have been magnificently fooled for the time being by some skillful political juggling, but already the omens declare that the process is becoming apparent to the audience. The political showmen are soon due to find out that the period during which the people can be fooled becomes progressively shorter, as each succeeding method of deception gets understood.

The conservative forces apparently have only one answer to the increasing demand for a new social order, and that is the old futile word of repression. Jails and machine guns are apparently their only resource and these have never proved adequate weapons against the human spirit. They are the poorest of substitutes for ideas, the final evidence of the bankruptcy of an order which must depend on them. Those who think to restore the solvency of the present order by the currency or credit of coercion had better remember that the primitive blood lust of the common people has not yet retired into those dim and secret caverns of their being from which it was conjured by the recent carnage. They too are still dominated by the philosophy and the propaganda of hate so sedulously cultivated for war purposes; they too have learned that life and property are not so valuable as they had been taught; they have discovered that the decalogue is not absolute; they have been taught that no hardship, danger, or sacrifice is too great to be endured in defense or pursuit of an ideal.

The increasing intelligence of the common people is the most significant fact to reckon with in trying to determine the nature and extent of pending social change. They have suffered many things under the present order without knowing how nor why. They are gradually finding out how the machinery of life works and where it needs to be changed, which is what most of the people to whom the present order is kind have neither the motive nor the conscience to discover. What those who would maintain the present order, either from self-

8 THE ISTEW SOCIAL ORDER: PRTNCIPLES AND PROGRAMS

interest or conviction, have to face, is an awakening working class the world over, intent on changing its social status, determined to have a redistribution of power, and continually gaining in knowledge. In their need of social change they are a majority. Increasingly they assert that nothing short of a new order will meet their needs. When their purpose is clarified and their methods chosen they will claim the recognized right of a majority.

Lest the work of their hands should presently come to naught, those who recognize the need of social change but would confine it to reform measures, those who think of reconstruction in terms of the repair or rebuilding of the broken house of humanity, will do well to consider whether the old house is big enough for the peoples of the earth to live in. If now, mankind demands a roomier habitation, is it sufficient to make some changes to the old house or must we start afresh with new plans and specifications?

As a matter of fact, the figure is inadequate. It is a new mode of Hf e that humanity seeks and not merely a new house to live in. The changes that are now taking place in the social order are not mechanical but vital. What is going on is no mere tinkering with the machinery of human society but one of those tremendous upheavals which mark a new period in human living. One of the great migrations of history is happening. It is not, as in days past, a people swarming out to find new pastures and new lands to till; it is a movement of the race in search for more space for the development of the human spirit.

The social order is not a framework external to humanity; it is composed of humanity itself. It is the thought and life, the customs and habit of the people; it is not a machine but a living organism, composed of personaKties welded together in vital association. Its forms and institutions are not only expressions of life; they are life itself. The family, the school, the church, the State, industry, are all composed of people. At times static as institutions, they are nevertheless throbbing with the Hves of the individuals who make them. Occasionally they furnish the means for their constitutent members to express their discontent with the existing state of life and their determination to attempt something better. At present, everyone of these institutions is dynamic with the spirit of change. The extraordinary activity of the human race at the present time is not merely because humanity is busy trying to make a new home, but because it is passing into a new stage of development. One of the points in social evolution has been reached at which epochal changes occur, and from which vital developments proceed.

The outstanding fact of the present situation is that humanity is now seeking to come together as a whole, is becoming conscious of itself as an organic unity and is striving to organize its life upon that basis. The social order is forming upon a world scale. This process involves not simply a new world order but new life; not merely change in organization but in spirit and purpose, in ideal and motive. The dynamic forces of human association are developing new power. The urge for a new life is greater among the masses of the people than among the ruling classes. The leaders of the nations have failed to organize a new order because they have been unable or unwilling to trust the new life that surges throughout the world. Its first manifestation is the universal faith and hope that a new order of things was about to come. It is doubtful if any period of human history, unless it was that Immediately preceding the birth of Jesus, has known such a universal expectancy of the dawn of a new day. A great disappointment has fallen upon the earth because the men in power were more concerned to hold back the new life of the people than to lead it to fulfillment. If the vision of a new day is now to leave the earth cold and dull, it will be because lO THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER: PRINCIPLES AND PROGRAMS

the people themselves are without the capacity to realize their hope and translate their faith into works. That they will attempt it, is quite evident.

When the general longing for a new world attempts to translate itself into fact, it is seen that the task bears a twofold aspect. The nature of the change required in world organization and world living is seen most graphically in the development of the Peace Conference. In hope and ideal this gathering began as a parliament of men dealing with the future of mankind more than with the past. As a fact, it dwindled into a secret session of a few men adjusting the world on the basis of the old order, its powers and privileges. The work which the Peace Conference started to do in obedience to the ideals of humanity was generalized under the term ''democracy." There was to be more democracy in the world as a result of the war. The situation was complicated because democracy in the modem world has a twofold aspect. To most of the idealists who were enjoying the major privileges of the present economic order, it meant the extension of political democracy to subject nationalities and backward peoples; to some other idealists of the prixdleged classes and to millions of toilers, it meant the application of democracy to the economic life, its development to cover the whole industrial and social activities of mankind. The situation was still further complicated because there was a necessity to tmfold both these meanings at one and the same time. Before political democracy had completed itself, either in Germany and Russia, or in Great Britain and the United States, the demand for social democracy pressed hard upon the government. One reason for the war was that political democracy had not developed in Eastern and Central as in Western Europe. The same reason accounts very largely for the form and nature of the Russian Revolution. The world suddenly foimd itself torn apart by a twofold struggle; the attempt to

THE NATURE OF THE NEW ORDER II

apply democratic principles on the one hand to national ambitions and desires, and on the other hand to the interests of classes. In Central and Eastern Europe, while the upper and middle classes are set for seK-determination, the peasants and the workers are equally set on self-realization. The one endeavor means only a change in the form of government; the other means a changed form of government united with a different form of economic organization.

The twofold aspect of the task now confronting humanity is seen again in the debate over the League of Nations. Will it be a League of Contract to conciliate and mediate the disputes of free and independent sovereign States separately pursuing their economic necessities and ambitions, or will it be a League of Service, in which the Nations will gradually grow together into one body mutually ministering to their common economic necessities and promoting the common development of humanity? Its value as an instrument of the new order is determined by the answer to this question. If the League is to be a combination of the same kind of governments that existed before the war, pursuing the same objectives, the world will receive from it no new spirit and not even a new form, only an enlargement of the old. For a new life there must be a new purpose.

The measure of value for the League of Nations is not its worth as a regulative agency in international affairs, but the degree to which it positively embodies the desire and purpose of mankind to find a better way of living together, in which there shall be more honesty and justice, more kindness and service. It is the spirit of man that has to be satisfied, as well as the practical necessities of a situation in which the indispensable business of mankind can no longer be adequately carried on. It must be remembered that before the war broke there was a widespread revolt of the human spirit against the existing order, which has been accentuated and increased by the experience of the conflict. The central characteristic of the general dissatisfaction with modern civilization is a growing perception of the need for a change in the purpose and form of economic organization. This is crystallizing into a widespread conviction that the spirit of man can find no full expression until the necessary business of life is a matter of common concern and service. For millions of people the world over, this is the essence of a new order of Hving. How then can this situation be met by an agreement between governments which do not believe that the basic activities of every day living are matters of common interest and service, but are to be pursued for private gain, and that it is the main function of government to protect the winners, not simply in their own interests but in the interest of those who hope to win in the future? Between such governments an agreement or understanding concerning economic issues, which are the root of the matter, will take one of two forms: it will be an attempt to set up legal machinery to prevent or adjust disputes, or it will be a pooling of interests for the mutual profit of those who have found competition to be unprofitable. In either case, it constitutes only a new piece of political machinery and not a new order of life. As a means of mediation and conciliation its service would be to prevent the disruption of the processes that are making for a common life, to furnish a breathing space for those who wished by common experiment and discussion to discover how to organize life around a new purpose. As a pooling of the economic interests of the greater powers it would mean the consolidation and strengthening of the capitalistic form of economic organization and of the financial imperialism which is its supreme expression. This mode of economic activity has grown up in the machine age side by side with the democratic state, which it has used as its political instrument and expression. Consequently, the idealistic attempt to spread pohtical democracy all over the earth may

THE NATURE OF THE NEW ORDER I3

turn out to be the last stage of our present political and economic order, corresponding to the final world-wide period of the Roman Empire. When it reaches the point where there are no more worlds to conquer, any system is then doomed to decadence. What those who reject poHtical democracy, as the governmental expression of economic autocracy, have failed to see, however, is that the democratic spirit in government is continually instigating revolt against an autocratic economic order, is constantly inciting such changes in government as will enable and express democracy in economic relations. Confined to the formal political realm, democracy becomes the servant, then the slave and at last the victim of the economic oligarchy that is fastening its grip upon the whole world. It can save itself and bring a new order to mankind only by securing an economic expression.

An international oligarchy of the financial interests of the great powers, using the international political machinery to control the undeveloped resources and the labor power of the world for the profit of the owners of concentrated wealth in the great industrial nations, is one of the possibilities of the present situation. There are sufficient people to be reckoned with, as the Paris Conference has shown, to whom making the world safe for democracy means capitalizing the earth that their descendants may draw perpetual interest, to whom the extension of civilization means fastening our type of industrial organization upon every one of the "backward peoples," regardless of their wishes, ideals and aspirations. To these people the League of Nations is merely an opportunity to organize loot on a grander scale, to avoid inconvenient quarrels concerning the divisions of the spoils and to maintain the arrangement by combined force. If the international interests of finance should prove sufficiently compelling to accomplish such an outcome to the present event, the capitaUstic order in its culmination will have dealt a mortal blow to the concept of the absolute sovereignty of the nations. The constituent members of a League of High Finance would have to agree to certain limitations of power for the sake of the profits involved, just as in national industry when the financiers show a group of manufacturers that it is no longer profitable to fight each other and organize them into a combination which by mutual agreement limits the separate rights and powers of its members for their separate profit. Similarly, on the international as on the national scale, such a combination prepares the way for democracy by developing the means and capacity for big scale organization which can later be used democratically to cooperative ends.

An American banker, who has seen at first hand, the misery and industrial collapse of Europe has urged that the United States should provide the raw materials and credit which would start the cycle of production in the suffering countries. This he does because he knows that more misery will foUow unless industry and agriculture can begin to function and also because he sees that the continuance of the present situation threatens the institution of private property and the maintenance of the capitalist order the world over. It is a mixed motive and by mixed motives the ordinary progress of the world is achieved, but not its salvation in a supreme crisis. That requires a single motive; it demands sacrifice. The capitalist order can only prove its ability to save the world by being willing, if need be, to lose itself. That the law of its own being wiU not permit it to meet the supreme test is manifest by what it gave and what it made in wartime, by its influence upon the negotiations at Paris, and now by its reception in this country of this proposal that it should risk something to save Europe and itself. It would appear that the poison of its central principle of self-interest as the motive of action has so weakened its system that it cannot even accomplish as much united action as is necessary to prolong its own life.