Class-Consciousness

I

JANE ADDAMS, in Twenty Years at Hull House, implies that the two doctrines of economic determinism and class-consciousness have deterred her from accepting socialism. Now, the form in which these doctrines were currently presented by earlier socialists was sufficiently crass to repel any one idealistically inclined. Yet, looked at closely, economic determinism at least is a very innocent bogey. When we assume our free power to control social progress, we may proceed under a great delusion. So may we in assuming that we move about lightly in space, while really an incredible weight of atmosphere presses from every point upon us. It would be foolish to worry about that weight, however, when we are catching a trolley; and fatalistic ideas, whether attacking us from the side of sociology, theology, or science, are cheerfully disregarded the moment we enter the race of life. Determinism simply assures us that the threads of moral purpose are knit into the woof of the universe, instead of trailing vacuously through space. Just as we have deeper faith in a spiritual nature than our fathers, who clung to special creations, our children will find the privilege of coöperating with the Will disclosed to reverent study of the changing order, higher than the effort to impose on that order methods invented by private preference. ‘ Cercando libertà,’ was Dante’s aim: the generations move onward; attaining it only in measure as, to use Wordsworth’s fine phrase, they come to know themselves ‘free because embound.’

When the early exponents of economic determinism uttered their thrilling call, ‘Proletarians of all lands, unite!’ it was a call to free men. But was that call a wise one? Shall we echo it? The question raises the vital issue of class-consciousness as a desirable factor in social advance. Only with the advent of the two theories together, did the Utopian socialism of the earlier nineteenth century become an effective force. As that force advances, enters practical politics, permeates life, the doctrines are phrased less crudely, but they are not abandoned; and class-consciousness at least proves itself to-day no academic theory, but a driving power.

To indorse it, is a serious matter. It means that we welcome discontent, it might call us to rejoice in revolt. It demands that we hail with satisfaction, instead of dismay, the steady dogged rise of proletariat claims to higher wages, shorter hours, larger compensations in injury. It means that while we may be mildly pleased with the announcement of a new profit-sharing scheme on the part of employers, our hearts leap with more confident gladness when an increase of wages has been won by a group of employees. We shall approve of any shrinking in the ranks of free labor, any accession to the ranks of the organized; shall encourage the spread of radical and subversive teaching among the working people, make an Act of Thanks for Milwaukee, note with joy the socialist propaganda in New York, and desire by all rightful means to persuade the helpless unthinking mass of the Workers that power and responsibility are in their hands.

The majority of educated men are obviously not yet at this point. What we find to-day, on the part of most honest people, including our judicially minded Chief Executive, is a general claim to non-partisanship in case of industrial disturbance: a virtuous if platitudinous plea that the public stand off while the matter is decided on its merits. And of course in a sense this is quite the right attitude. Only it is not the whole story. It never was, it never will be; the convictions that control and create life are not generated in this way. Pure disinterestedness never occurs. It belongs to equations, not to men; at best it is academic, not human. In a given crisis, the undertow of sympathy, not the estimate of right in detail, is the big thing, the thing worth noting. Nor is this any more lamentable than the fact that a special episode in a drama must be justly judged, not on its own merits, but in its relation to the whole drift of the play.

The undertow is changing, the tide is at the turn. It is disquieting or inspiriting, according to one’s prejudices, to observe the extraordinarily slow shifting of sympathy in matters industrial, during the past twenty-five years, toward the side of the workers. True, men still naïvely demand a clear case, a miracle that has perhaps never yet been seen. But here is the change: of old, when the workers were proved in the wrong, the public exulted; to-day, it is disappointed. The change is amazing, but it is still wavering; nor do men yet recognize the underdrift of sympathy in which they are caught.

This drift is the recognition that the working classes must achieve their own salvation, and that such salvation demands not only fragments of improvement grudgingly bestowed, but a general pressure, if not toward social equality, then at least to the point where a ‘living wage’ shall secure the chance to all manhood to rise to its highest level.

As the drift slowly becomes conscious, people grow troubled. For they see that it involves two things: —

First, the sharp belief that privilege must be cut down before our general life can flourish. Now, the finer idealism does not shrink from this idea in itself. Disinterested men, including many who have a stake in the game, are coming to admit it; many are even inclined to accept the central socialist tenet, that no effective cure for our social evils will be found until a large proportion at least of wealth-producing wealth be socially owned. Many people disagree with this proposition, but it no longer shocks the common mind. The sacred and inalienable righteousness of the principle of private property was once even among radical thinkers an assumption to be built on; it is becoming a thesis to be proved.

But there is another implication from which the moral sense recoils: that is, from encouragement of classconsciousness as a militant weapon. For are we not coming to object to any weapons at all? Just when the old political militarism is coming to be at a discount in the idealist ranks, this new form of war — conflict in industrial relations — makes its appearance among pitiable mortals; and our enthusiasm is enlisted to foster in the working people the very traits which civilization is struggling to leave behind! True, ballot rather than bomb is the weapon commended, physical violence is honestly deplored by both sides, and even extremists ardently hope that we may spell our Revolution without the R. None the less are the passions educed by the whole situation essentially those of the battlefield; men exult in wresting advantages from their antagonists, they are trained to regard one another as adversaries, not brothers. And this in the very age theoretically agog for peace! The good people who would fain see all social progress proceed from the growing generosities of realized brotherhood, find a mere travesty of their desires in gains won through self-assertion. Shall the lovers of peace sympathize with a movement for quickening discontent and making hatred effective? Shall we lend our approval to destroying whatever meekness the poor may have, and summon them to curse that Poverty which a certain word calls blessed? It is time to call a halt!

There is doubtless some unconscious prejudice on the side of privilege in all this. But there is something better too, and every honest socialist knows it. The theory of class-consciousness does offend the conscience of the moralist as often as the sister doctrine of economic determinism offends the intellect of the philosopher.

II

Frank confession behooves us at the outset. Class-consciousness is a weapon, and to applaud it does involve a militant attitude. If people say that it is ipse facto discredited thereby, we can only enter a plea for consistency. Virtuous disapproval of the workingclass struggle sits ill on the lips of those who point out with zest the stimulating qualities of the competitive system and vote enthusiastically for the increase of armaments. It is a curious fact that the man who talks Jingo politics most loudly, and defends with most vigor the admirable necessity to commerce of the triumph of the strong, is habitually the very person most outraged at the pressure of a united proletariat group toward freedom. Yet he may be hard put to it to persuade the man from Mars that to fight for one’s country is glorious while to fight for one’s class is an inspiration of the devil. Good Paterfamilias, sweating to discomfit your competitors for the sake of your darlings at home, how convince our visitor that in defending the interests of your family you fulfill a sacred duty, while your employee, fighting for the interests of his industrial group, flings a menace at society?

There is only one ground on which the distinction can be maintained: the assumption that family and nation are holy things to be protected at any cost, while class is an unholy thing which deserves no protection. The position has force. But, curiously enough, those ready to agree to it are the stubbornly ’class-conscious.’ However, the matter is too serious to be met by an oblique argument. The instinct which considers class-feeling to be inferior to family feeling or patriotism, probably rests on the opinion that the forces which create class are not only divisive, but selfish and material.

Mazzini proffered an interesting plea for the superiority of political over social passion on this very ground, that the first alone was idealist and disinterested. However threatened, belief that the family is a spiritual and sacramental unit, is deeply ingrain. And yet must we not recognize the same foundation in all three cases? And need we be sorry? Patriotism rests upon reliance on the protection afforded by the state; the family is created by the craving for self-perpetuation. Classfeeling, too, has its sacramental sweetness. Of the strands from which it is woven many derive no color from personal advantage.

As for warfare, we all agree that its moral values are provisional, and look eagerly to that promised time ‘when war shall be no more.’ But while the vision tarries, no one who accepts that provisional value in one field should disallow it in another. Most of us moreover hold it to be a real value, and still thrill unabashed to martial strains. Why did Thackeray present soldiers as the only men among the weak egotists of Vanity Fair to preserve a standard of selfless honor? Why did Tennyson hail the clash of arms as the only means of transforming the smug clerks of England into her patriots? Not because these authors approved a militant ideal, but because they knew such an ideal to be nobler than prosperous sloth and self-absorption. Battle is deep embedded in our finiteness. As Helen Gray Cone nobly puts it, —

The Apocalypse which ends with Jerusalem, Vision of Peace, is chiefly occupied with chronicling in succession of awesome symbols the eternal Wars of the Lord. In the Teachings of Christ there are three bitter sayings against smooth conventionality for one against violence, for the context shows that the saying about non-resistance is personal, not social, in application. We may not dismiss class-consciousness as evil on the mere score that it arouses the passions of war. To determine its value, its end must be questioned, and the qualities evoked by the conflict must be scanned.

III

Let us take the last task first, for in fulfilling it we may almost hope to reassure those gentle folk, — notably on the increase even while nominal Quakerism declines, — the lovers of peace at any price. We may not approve war for the sake of its by-products alone, but when these are valuable we may find in them some consolation for such war as is bound to exist. The class-conscious movement has two precious results: its inner disciplines, and its power to widen sympathies.

Even the most recalcitrant grant the value of an army from the first point of view. Military life affords a unique training in the very virtues most needed by a democratic state: humility and self-effacement; courage, and swift power of decision, — the qualities of subordination and of leadership. We all hope to foster these qualities through the opportunities of peace, but so far our success is so imperfect that we can hardly disregard the help presented by the crises of war. Nowhere is this help more striking than in the class-conscious movement. Consider those class-conscious groups called trade-unions. Seen from without, especially in time of stress, a union may appear actuated by the worst impulses: ruthless in pressing unreasonable demands, callously indifferent to inconveniencing the public, stubbornly selfseeking. Seen from within, the aspect alters. Here is no longer a compact unit fighting for selfish ends, but a throng of individuals, each struggling no more for himself than for his neighbor. In such an organic group — composed, be it remembered, of very simple and ignorant people — you shall see each member submitted to severe discipline in the most valuable and difficult thing in the world, — team-work.

Wordsworth found in Nature the over-ruling power ‘to kindle and restrain,’ and it is not far-fetched to say that this same double function, so essential to the shaping of character, is performed for working people by the trade-union. It kindles sacrifice, endurance, and vision; it restrains violent and individualistic impulse, and fits the man or woman to play due part in corporate and guided action. Those who have stood shoulder to shoulder with the women during one of the garment-workers’ strikes that have marked the last two years, have watched with reverence the moral awakening among the girls, born of loyalty to a collective cause. It was the typical employer, defending the American fetish of the Open Shop, who remarked,— when his clever Italian forewoman asked him, ‘Ain’t you sorry to make those people work an hour and a half for twelve cents?’ —‘Don’t you care. You don’t understand America. Why do you worry about those peoples? Here the foolish people pay the smart.’ And it was the spirited girl who replied to him, ‘Well, now the smart people will teach the foolish,’ — and led her shop out on strike.

Which better understood America and its needs? There is no question which had learned the truth that freedom consists, not in separateness but in fellowship, not in self-assertion but in self-effacement. The employer of so-called ‘free labor’ denies this sacred truth: for the liberty he defends is that of the disintegrating dust, not that of the corpuscle of living blood. By his vicious doctrine, ‘ each man free to make his own bargain,’ he is doing his best to retard the evolution of the workers toward the citizenship of the future.

To note the services of the unions in the quickening of international sympathy, we need only point to the situation in one of our mining communities. For in the union is the only power competent to fuse the bewildered immigrant masses into some unity of aim. Where else in our melting-pot may we look for a fire to dissipate selfishness, misunderstanding, and distrust, in the heat of common aspiration? Trade-unions are no homes of sentiment. Yet beneath their frequent corruptions and tyrannies is an extraordinary undertow of just such idealism as the United States most needs. Struggling for harmony within, pitted against the capitalist class without, the union finds its gallant work full of dramatic terror and promise. Again and again the strain is over-great. Like all other group-passions, class-feeling tends easily to the bitterness of clique or the tyrannies of oligarchy. The scab is unable to rise above the idea of selfprotection. Irishman will not work with Italian, nor Gentile with Jew. The union, finding a feeble response to disinterested motives, resorts to intimidation to build and hold its membership. Corruption, fierce enough to incline one toward an anarchistic return to Nature, is as much in evidence as in politics. None the less, with slow serious searching, the process goes on by which a ship or a state finds itself, as each atom becomes dimly infused with the holy sense of its relation to the Whole.

Socialism, the other great class-conscious force, is as yet little found among us except when imported. Menacing enough, the anarchical type that drifts to us from southern Europe; as ignorant as indifferent concerning American conditions; expecting, like many another creed, to save the world outright by the application of a formula. Yet, here too, we may already discern assets to be cherished. Memory rises of illumined eyes belonging to a young Italian. Brought up, or rather kicked up, in a stable at Naples, a young animal when twenty, unable to read, careless of all except the gratification of desire, he found himself errand-boy in a restaurant frequented by a small socialist group. Then came the awakening: ‘How behave longer like a beast, Signora? I could not disgrace the comrades! How should Luigi get drunk? There was the Cause to serve. I served it there, I serve it here. I now live clean. Life is holy.' Luigi had experienced that purifying, that rare, that liberating good, allegiance to an idea! Thinking goes on in all class-conscious groups: and while we feebly try to moralize and educate the poor, forces are rising from their very heart, generated by the grim realities of the industrial situation, competent to check self-absorption and widen horizons.

Nor in our straits can we afford to despise the international passion of socialism, for it is a strong force at work among the people, capable of kindling in them the sense, so needed here, of universal brotherhood. Adjustment of loyalties between old countries and new is a delicate problem sure to be increasingly pressing among us. No good American wants the old forgotten; no right-thinking immigrant should wish the new ignored.

He who loves two countries is richer than he who loves one only; but as matter of fact our newcomers usually end in loving none. These spiritual exiles present the pathetic spectacle, not of one man without a country, but of great throngs.

At the North End in Boston, Denison House conducts a Sunday lecture course for Italians. The control disclaims responsibility for opinions presented on this practically free forum. Yet American members consented with some reluctance to invite a speaker representing a society organized to strengthen the bond to Italy, and suspected of discouraging naturalization. With anxiety of another type, we asked a socialist club to send its orator for our next meeting. But what the speaker did was to talk with fire and eloquence, grateful to his grave Latin audience, on the theme of the necessity to the Italian in the United States of a new patriotism broad enough to disregard old lines, and to express itself in loyal American citizenship, and in coöperation with all that was progressive in the life of the United States. The inspiration of class-conscious internationalism was plain in the speech, and it did more to quicken a civic conscience than any words of ours could have achieved.

IV

Noting these things, comparing them with the dreary barrenness of the psychical life which obtains among the unaroused masses, how can we fail to see in the class-struggle one of those inspiriting forces which are the glory of history? Abraham Lincoln had probably never heard the famous phrase of Marx, but he had his own version of it: ‘The strongest bond of human sympathy outside the family,’ said he, ‘should be one uniting all working people of all nations and tongues and kindreds.’ On what grounds rests this surprising and deliberate statement of our greatest American? On his intuition of the sanctity of labor, and probably also on his perception of a vast liberating power in this feeling for class.

From tribal days, group-consciousness has always involved a defiant attitude toward those outside the group, yet it has always been one of the chief forms of moral education. The larger the group toward which loyalty is evoked, the greater the emancipation from pettiness; and if class-consciousness is the most impressive form of group-consciousness up to date, it is because the working people include a majority of human kind. Class feeling quickens that imaginative power which democracy most needs. The tired workman, absorbed in his machine, suddenly finds far horizons open to his spirit. He hears the heart-beats of his brothers in Italy, in Russia, in Bohemia, in Denmark; and behold! a new means for accomplishing the central work of the ages, for releasing him from that self-centred egotism which is at once the condition of his finite existence and the barrier that he must transcend if he is to know himself a partaker of the infinite.

The means is new; for until economic development had reached its present point, class-consciousness could not have risen to the status of a worldpower. Those whom it affects are the masses, voiceless through the long historic story: without coherence, other than that of trampled dust; without common aim, other than such as animates a herd of terror-driven cattle. Only occasionally, under stress of some sharp immediate oppression, has a brief sense of fellowship sprung into transient flame, soon sinking into ashes. To-day that healthful fire is creeping steadily and stealthily on, spreading from land to land, from speech to speech. We shall do well to welcome it, for what it will burn is dross, not gold.

It is the very newness of the force that shocks and terrifies. Race and nation have long broken humanity into groups on perpendicular lines. Class introduces a broad horizontal division. The mighty emotions it generates move laterally, so to speak, inter-penetrating the others. They may be competent to overcome in large degree, as we have claimed, the deep-seated antagonisms, racial, political, religious, that separate men and hinder brotherhood. But is not a danger involved? These older loyalties were, after all, in their essence sacred. Does not loyalty to class threaten bonds rightly and jealously cherished? Will it not dull the allegiance of men to family, nation, and church?

The fear is real; to a certain point it is justified. The conflict of loyalties is the persistent tragedy of civilization. Even those accredited by time have been hard enough to harmonize among themselves. The three-fold passions which inspired chivalry at its height were loyalty to king, to lady, and to God; how brilliantly do all three shine in that mirror of the chivalric ideal, Malory’s Morte Darthur ! How desperate the struggle among them which ends in the destruction of the Table Round! To-day, the immemorial clash between allegiance to State and Church rends many a distressed heart in France and Italy. Does not socialism bring more curse than blessing when it introduces to an already distracted race a fresh appeal at cross-purposes with all the old?

Socialists themselves well illustrate the danger. The negative attitude toward family ties, marked enough among certain socialist groups, springs to be sure from other sources and is not relevant here to consider. But it is sober fact that socialism is, among many of its adherents, replacing all other religions, and filling the only need they experience for a faith and an ideal. We may in fairness ascribe this situation to temporary causes, and dismiss the difficulty, noting that all the best leaders stress the purely nonpartisan and secular nature of the movement. But we have still to reckon with the indifference of the movement to patriotism, an indifference rising into antagonism in the earlier stages. Marx, in the Communist Manifesto, said that the working people have no fatherland. Bakunin could write: ‘The social question can only be satisfactorily solved by the abolition of frontiers.’

This strong language, however, marked the infancy of the movement and is increasingly discarded. Patriotism has deep roots, and socialists are men. The issue has been hotly discussed in those socialist conventions where a rare and refreshing interest in great intellectual issues obtains. And ‘The view is gaining ground among socialists,’ says Sombart, ' that all civilization has its roots in nationality, and that civilization can reach its highest development only on the basis of nationality.’ It is this growing conviction which makes the socialists sympathetic champions of oppressed peoples like the Poles and Armenians. ‘The socialist purpose,’ says a prominent leader, ‘is to give to the proletariat an opportunity of sharing in the national life at its best. Socialism and the national idea are thus not opposed: they supplement each other.’

It is comfortable to know that such utterances are increasing. So far as the practical situation goes, there are no better Americans than trade-union men, and the possible service in the next act of our national drama of the very internationalist feeling of socialism has been already signaled. Meanwhile, we cannot wonder if the movement, entranced with its new vision of a universal brotherhood of workers, has for the time disparaged other ties. That is human nature. On account of the narrowness of our capacities, loyalties, as we have seen, conflict, and the large tragedies of history go on. We in our blindness would again and again meet the situation by suppressing one of the rival forces. That is not Nature’s way: wiser than we, who would destroy life in the saving it, she goes on adding system to system, claim to claim, till, through the very anguish of adjustment and coördination, life deepens and unfolds. The complexity of the physical systems which control us does but correspond to the complexity of the body. The lungs breathe all the better because at the same time the heart is beating, the hair growing, and digestion going on. Progress consists in the addition of new functions. The delicate apparatus may easily get out of gear; one system may interfere with another. This is not health, but disease, equally dangerous whether it affect the body physical or the body politic. But it cannot be cured by retrogression in the scale of being. Health, physical, mental, or social, consists in the harmonious interaction of a number of activities practically undefined and constantly on the increase. We find it hard to realize the full wealth of our own nature, but there is no more limit to the loyalties a man may profess than to the corporate activities he may share. As Chesterton remarks, he can be at once an Englishman, a collector of beetles, a Roman Catholic, and an enthusiast for cricket. He may also without difficulty, when once adjustment is completed, be class-conscious, nation-conscious, and religion-conscious; the more his affiliations, the richer his possibilities, for through these avenues only can he escape from the prison of self. And the advent on a large scale of a new loyalty and a new system of attraction signals, not the destruction of the old, but the enriching of all social life and its advance to a higher level in the scale of being.

V

Class-consciousness then can be dismissed on the score neither of its militant implications, nor of the menace it offers to older devotions. Both in its political aspect and in its more intimate reaches of private experience, we find it to be at once a disciplinary and an awakening force; it kindles and restrains.

But now we must go further. We have been dwelling mainly on the qualities it evokes, and the opportunities it offers. We have not yet asked ourselves squarely the final, the crucial question: What end does it propose?

To answer, we must turn from its inner reactions to its outer relations, and take into account the other combatants in the class-war.

By common consent, the term class-conscious is usually applied to the working people. But in accurate speech, it should not be so limited, for it describes quite as truly the stubborn struggle of the employing class to maintain supremacy. The persistence of this class in defending its prerogative is as natural a product of the industrial situation as the pressure of the proletariat. Why is not the emotion as right and admirable when experienced by employer as by employed?

It is more admirable, many will hasten to reply. We need not at this point answer the obviously partisan cry. But if we are to convince the dispassionate man, our supposed interlocutor, that our own cry is less partisan, if we are to justify that strong undertow of sympathy toward the popular cause of which we spoke at the outset, we must lean on an instructive assumption. This is the conviction that the time when the defense of prerogative was valuable to society as a whole is nearing its end, and that the ideal of the proletariat, not that of the capitalist, is implicit in the truly democratic state.

Do we or do we not want to put an end to class in the modern sense? This is the real, if paradoxical issue. The situation is curious and interesting. As we have already hinted, those who deplore most angrily the rise of classconsciousness in the proletariat foster it most eagerly in their own camp, and would with the greatest reluctance see class-distinctions disappear. On the other hand, the leaders who labor most earnestly to strengthen working-class solidarity do so because they hate class with a deadly hatred, and see in such solidarity the only means of putting an end to it altogether. If we agree with them to the point of holding that class, like war, is provisional, it would seem that these are the people to whom our sympathy is due.

Professor Royce has well shown us that the aim of all minor loyalties is to bring us under the wing of that mother of all virtues, loyalty to the Whole. One draws a long breath at this grandiose, appealing image of the unachieved end of all human striving. Which serves it best, — socialism with its class-conscious connotations, or capitalism with its repudiation of the new bond? The question implies the answer. The capitalist movement has avowedly no aim beyond self-protection and the maintenance of a newtype of benevolent feudalism. The working-class movement, on the other hand, is probably the only form of group-consciousness yet evolved in history, to look beyond its own corporate aim. It is inspired by a passion of good-will for all men, and never loses sight of a universal goal. Nay, it is concerned with the welfare of the very enemies whom it is fighting, for it is aware that rich as well as poor are today so fast in prison that they cannot get out. Have we not good reason then to honor it and to exalt it above even patriotism in our thoughts?

The man fighting for his country does not look beyond that country’s welfare. But the wider outlook is an integral part of the class-conscious inspiration. The popular movement marches to the tune of Burns: —

is the rallying cry of the people. What they seek is not the transfer of privilege, but the abolition of privilege; and while they work first for the emancipation of their own class, they believe not only that this class comprises the majority of mankind, but that its freedom will enable all men alike to breathe a more liberal air. With the disappearance of privilege, all possibility of the class-war would of course vanish, for the very sense of class as based on distinction in industrial assets and opportunities would be replaced by new groupings founded, one would suppose, on more subtle and intimate affinities of pursuit, capacity, and taste. In all history-creating movements, the urge of life has been the impelling force; nor can we deny that it has on the whole worked for good to the whole as well as to the part. But it is the great distinction of socialism that, while frankly accepting and fostering such primal passion, it is at the same time more or less clearly aware of a more disinterested aim. Class will never become to our minds a permanent factor in social life, on a level with nation or country. In this fact we may find a legitimate reason for the distrust of class-consciousness that prevails. But, thinking more deeply, in the same fact is the indorsement and justification for the only movement which is to-day setting its face toward the destruction of class distinctions, and which has thus for its very object the annihilation of that sense of separateness which as a weapon it must temporarily use.

VI

We need then have no fear lest class-consciousness, any more than economic determinism, catch us in the net of materialism. Mazzini did well when he turned to the workers as the hope of the future, and told them that their duties were more important than their rights; only he should have stressed the fact that in claiming their rights they are fulfilling the most disinterested of duties. Rising to this altitude, we have made a great discovery; as Moody’s lovely lyric has it, we have found a sky ‘behind the sky.’ The materialistic interpretation of history tries in vain to hold us within the zone of the lower heavens, for,—

Yet there are always new heavens waiting, nor is it denied us to fly much higher than we have ventured yet into the upper air of pure spiritual passion. We have done full justice to the teaching that expounds the importance of the economic base, and vindicates the forces rooted in economic necessity and self-interest. But another question is waiting, nor can we close without asking once more whether all productive forces are directly related to this base, or whether we may reserve a place for the effective power of pure altruism.

Whether we look out or in, the question for most of us is answered in the asking. Heroic devotion springing from ranges quite out of the economic sphere fills the human annals; and this not least in the case of social progress. From the days of John Ball to those of John Howard, philanthropists who have waged brave successful battle against abuses, reformers who have lifted the general life to a higher level, have appeared from any and every social stratum, drawing their inspiration from depths greater than class can reach. All through history, the pressure of the unprivileged toward freedom has been supplemented at critical moments by the undercurrent of sympathy in the hearts of the privileged, and the one group has supplied leaders to the other. It would almost seem that the socialist movement is particularly rich in such leaders. Marx, if you come to that, was not a working man; nor Lassalle, nor Morris, nor Kropotkin, nor many another who in prison or exile has proved himself true to the workers’ cause. Among contemporary leaders it is safe to say that the large majority are from the middle class. Looking at the high proportion of ‘ intellectuals ’ among effective socialists, one is even a little bewildered. Yet the situation is simple. It is evident, whatever radicals may say to the contrary, that if the proletariat could produce its own leaders there would be no need of social revolution.

The cry of the dispossessed is compelling. The working classes must show the way to social advance. They alone, free from sentimentality, the curse of the privileged, and from abstract theorizing, the curse of the scholastic, have that grim experience of the reaction of economic conditions on the majority from which right judgment can be born. But if their function be to furnish momentum, and corporate wisdom, the power of individual initiative and directorship will often in the nature of things be generated among those governing classes in whom these gifts have been fostered. If education and administrative experience are valuable enough to share, it is obvious that the dumb proletariat must to a certain extent look to the classes that possess them for the revelation of its own sealed wisdom and the guidance of its confused powers. The enlightened energy of those who come from other groups to serve it should not be slighted. Their high impulses, their rich devotions, are also, to ultimate vision, within, not without, the evolutionary process, — a process broader, deeper than current Marxianism admits. In them that wider loyalty, toward which class-consciousness itself is groping, has been born already, and to assert that they have no part in social advance and that the working class must produce unaided the new society, would be to deny democracy at the root.

The best, the final work of democracy will be to give us all the freedom of the City of the Common Life. This all Americans know in theory. Let us beware lest we deny it in deed by withholding our faith from the great classconscious movement of the working people, which alone holds in practical form the ideal of a world where divisions based on economic accident and arbitrary causes shall be obliterated, and life be lifted to new levels of freedom. The instinctive sympathy with proletarian movements should cast aside timidity and incertitude, and realize that its roots strike deep into a true philosophic and religious conception of social advance. It should imply, not only indorsement, but coöperation. So only the effective reality of our national assumptions can be vindicated, and the day hastened when the Greater Loyalty shall be ruler of the world. So we can prove that the ideal central to this Republic at its outset was no histrionic Tree of Liberty cut from its native soil, to wither even as the echoes of the encircling dance and song should die away, but a growth firm-planted in the fruitful earth, and slowly, surely developing till it becomes a Tree of Life whose leaves shall be for the healing of the nations.