Again, is it stealing to hold land out of use for speculation, while other men are starving and dying for lack of land to labor upon? Some of us call this stealing, but we are impolitely referred to as "radicals," and if we venture to suggest that anyone should resist this kind of stealing, we are sentenced to slow death from malnutrition and tubercular infection. Again, is it stealing for a victim of our system of land monopoly to take a loaf of bread in order to save the life of his starving child? The law says that this is stealing, and sends the man to jail for this act; yet the common sense of mankind protests, and I have heard a great many respectable Americans venture so far in "radicalism" as to say that they themselves would steal under such circumstances.
One could pile up illustrations without limit; but this is enough to make clear the point, that it is perfectly futile to attempt to talk about "divine" rules for human conduct. Regardless of any ideas you may hold, or any wishes, you are forced at every hour of your life to apply your reason to the problems of your life, and you have no escape from the task of judging and deciding. All that you do is to judge right or to judge wrong; and if you judge wrong, you inflict misery upon yourself and upon all who come into contact with you. How much more sensible, therefore, to recognize the fact of moral and intellectual responsibility; to investigate the data of life with which you have to deal, the environment by which you are surrounded, and to train your judgment so that you will be able
to fit yourself to it with quickness and certainty!
"But," the believer in religion will say, "this leaves mankind without any guide or authority. How can human beings act, how can they deal with one another, if there are no laws, no permanent moral codes?"
The answer is that to accept the idea of the evolution of morality does not mean at all that there will be no permanent laws and working principles. Many of the facts of life are fixed for all practical purposes--the purposes not merely of your life and my life, but the life of many generations. We are not likely to see in our time the end of the ancient Hebrew announcement that "the sins of the father are visited upon the children"; therefore it is possible for us to study out a course of action based upon the duty of every father to hand down to his children the gift of a sound mind in a sound body. The Catholic Church has had for a thousand years or more the "mortal sin" of gluttony upon its list; and today comes experimental science with its new weapons of research, and discovers autointoxication and the hardening of the arteries, and makes it very unlikely that the moral codes of men will ever fail to list gluttony as a mortal sin. Indeed, science has added to gluttony, not merely drunkenness, but all use of alcoholic liquor for beverage purposes; we have done this in spite of the manifest fact that the drinking of wine was not merely an Old Testament virtue, but a New Testament religious rite.
To say that human life changes, and that new discoveries and new powers make necessary new laws and moral customs, is to say something so obvious that it might seem a waste of paper and ink. Man has invented the automobile and has crowded himself into cities, and so has to adopt a rigid set of traffic regulations. So far as I know, it has never occurred to any religious enthusiast to seek in the book of Revelation for information as to the advisability of the "left hand turn" at Broadway and Forty-second Street, New
14
York, at five o'clock in the afternoon. But modern science has created new economic facts, just as unprecedented as the automobile;
it has created new possibilities of spending and new possibilities of starving for mankind; it has made new cravings and new satisfactions, new crimes and new virtues; and yet the great mass of our people are still seeking to guide themselves in their readjustments to these new facts by ancient codes which have no more relationship to these facts than they have to the affairs of Mars!
I am acquainted with a certain lady, one of the kindest and most devoted souls alive, who seeks to solve the problems of her life, and of her large family of children and grand-children, according to sentences which she picks out, more or less at random, from certain more or less random chapters of ancient Hebrew literature. This lady will find some words which she imagines apply to the matter, and will shut her devout eyes to the fact that there are other "texts," bearing on the matter, which say exactly the opposite. She will place the strangest and most unimaginable interpretations upon the words, and yet will be absolutely certain that her interpretation
is the voice of God speaking directly to her. If you try to tell her about Socialism, she will say, "The poor ye have always with you"; which means that it is interfering with Divine Providence to try to remedy poverty on any large scale. This lady is ready instantly to relieve any single case of want; she regards it as her duty to do this; in fact, she considers that the purpose of some people's poverty is to provide her with a chance to do the noble action of relieving it. You would think that the meaning of the sentence, "Spare the rod and spoil the child," would be so plain that no one could mistake it; but this good lady understood it to mean that God forbade
the physical chastisement of children, and preferred them "spoiled." She held this idea for half a lifetime--until it was pointed out to her that the sentence was not in the Bible, but in "Hudibras," an old English poem!
CHAPTER VIII
THE VIRTUE OF MODERATION
(Attempts to show that wise conduct is an adjustment of means to ends, and depends upon the understanding of a particular set of circumstances.)
Some years ago I used to know an ardent single tax propagandist who found my way of arguing intensely irritating, because, as he phrased it, I had "no principles." We would be discussing, for example, a protective tariff, and I would wish to collect statistics, but discovered to my bewilderment that to my single tax friend a customs duty was "stealing" on the part of the government. The government had a right to tax land, because that was the gift of nature, but it had no right to tax the products of human labor, and when it took a portion of the goods which anyone brought into a country, the government was playing the part of a robber. Of course such a man was annoyed by the suggestion that in the early stages of a country's development it might possibly be a good thing for the country to make itself independent and self-sufficient by encouraging the development of its manufactures; that, on the other hand, when these manufactures had grown to such a size that they controlled the government, it might be an excellent thing for the country to subject them to the pressure of foreign competition, in order to lower their value as a preliminary to socializing them.
The reader who comes to this book looking for hard and fast rules of life will be disappointed. It would be convenient if someone could lay down for us a moral code, and lift from our shoulders the inconvenient responsibility of deciding about our own lives. There may be persons so weak that they have to have the conditions of their lives thus determined for them; but I am not writing for such persons. I am writing for adult and responsible individuals, and I bear in mind that every individual is a separate problem, with separate needs and separate duties. There are, of course, a good many rules that apply to everybody in almost all emergencies, but I cannot think of a single rule that I would be willing to say I would apply in my life without a single exception. "Thou shalt not kill" is a rule that I have followed, so far without exception; but as soon as I turn my imagination loose, I can think of many circumstances under which I should kill. I remember discussing the matter with a pacifist friend of mine, an out-and-out religious non-resistant. I pointed out to him that people sometimes went insane, and in that condition they sometimes seized hatchets and killed anyone in sight. What would my pacifist friend do if he saw a maniac attacking his children with a hatchet? It did not help him to say that he would use all possible means short of killing the maniac; he had finally to admit that if he were quite sure it was a question of the
life of the maniac or the life of his child, he would kill. And this is not mere verbal quibbling, because such things do happen in the world, and people are confronted with such emergencies,