“Can you, in a few words, outline a little of your new ‘ethics’ to the lay mind?”
“Easily. It is all ‘lay’ enough. We don’t make a separate profession of religion, or a separate science of ethics. Ethics is social hygiene—it teaches how humanity must live in order to be well and strong. We show the child the patent facts of social relation, how all our daily life, our accumulated wealth and beauty and continuing power, rests on common action, on what people do together. Everything about him teaches that. Then we show him the reasons why such and such actions are wrong, what the results are; how to avoid wrong lines of action and adopt right ones. It’s no more difficult than teaching any other game, and far more interesting.”
I suppose I looked unconvinced, for he added, “Remember we have nature on our side. It is natural for a social animal to develop social instincts; any personal desire which works against the social good is clearly a survival of a lower pre-social period; wrong, in that it is out of place. What we used to call criminals were relics of the past. By artificially maintaining low conditions, such as poverty, individual wealth, we bred low-grade types. We do not breed them any more.”
Again we sat silent. I was nursing my knee and sat looking into the fire; the soft shimmering play of rosy light and warmth with which electricity now gave jewels to our rooms.
He followed my eyes.
“That clean, safe, beautiful power was always here, John—but we had not learned of it. The power of wind and water and steam were here—before we learned to use them. All this splendid power of human life was here—only we did not know it.”
After that talk with Frank Borderson I felt a little clearer in my mind about what had taken place. I saw a good deal of him, and he introduced me to others who were in his line of work. Also I got to know his wife pretty well. She was not so great an authority on ethics as he; but an excellent teacher, widely useful.
One day I said something to her about her lovely spirit, and what she must have been to him—such an uplifting influence.
She laughed outright.
“I’ll have to tell you the facts, Mr. Robertson, as part of your instruction. So far from my uplifting him, he picked me out of the gutter, literally, dead drunk in the gutter, the lowest kind of wreck. He made me over. He gave me—life.”
Her eyes shone.
“We work together,” she added cheerfully.
They did work together, and evidently knew much happiness. I noted a sort of deep close understanding between them, as in those who have been through the wars in company.
I found Nellie knew about them. “Yes, indeed,” she said. “They are devoted to each other, and most united in their work. He was just beginning to try to work, after his own rebuilding; but feeling pretty lonesome. He felt that he had no chance of any personal life, you see, and there were times when he missed it badly. He had no right to marry, of course; that is, with a well woman. And then he found this broken lily—and mended it. There can’t be any children, but there is great happiness, you can see that.”
“And they are—received?”
“Received?—Oh, I remember! You mean they are invited to dinners and parties. Why, yes.”
“Not among the best people, surely?”
“Precisely that, the very best; people who appreciate their wonderful lives.”
“Tell me this, Sister; what happened to the Four Hundred—the F.F.V.s—and the rest of the aristocracy?”
“The same thing that happened to all of us. They were only people, you see. Their atrophied social consciousness was electrified with the new thoughts and feelings. They woke up, too, most of them. Some just died out harmlessly. They were only byproducts.”
I consulted a rather reactionary old professor of sociology, Morris Banks; one who had been teaching political economy in my youth, and who ought to be able to remember things. I asked him if he would be so good as to show me the dark side of this shield.
“Surely there must have been opposition, misunderstanding, the usual difficulties of new adjustments,” I said. “You remember the first years of change—I wish you would give me a clear account of it.”
The old man considered awhile: “Take any one state, any city, or country locality, and study back a little,” he said, “and you find the story is about the same. There was opposition and dissent, of course, but it decreased very rapidly. You see the improvements at first introduced were such universal benefits that there could not be any serious complaint.
“By the time we had universal suffrage the women were more than ready for it, full of working plans to carry out, and rich by the experience of the first trials.
“By the time socialism was generally adopted we had case after case of proven good in socialistic methods; and also the instructive background of some failures.”
“But the big men who ran the country to suit themselves in my time, they didn’t give up without a struggle surely? You must have had some fighting,” I said.
He smiled in cheerful reminiscence. “We had a good deal of noise, if that’s what you mean. But there’s no fighting to be done, with soldiers, if the soldiers won’t fight. Our workingmen declined to shoot or to be shot any longer, and left the big capitalists to see what they could do alone.”
“But they had the capital?”
“Not all of it. The revenues of the cities and of the United States Government are pretty considerable, especially when you save the seventy percent, we used to spend on wars past and possible; and the ten or twenty more that went in waste and graft. With a socialist state private capital has no grip!”
“Did
