13. Need of Motive Power from Above.

In considering this or any other sketch of arrangements contemplated, we must stand on our guard against what is perhaps the master delusion of Socialism : I mean the idea that any imaginable constitution of society whatever has virtue enough in itself to render oppression impossible. Happiness and good order do not spring from mere environment. Perhaps it is their habitual conversation in mills and workshops that helps Socialists to imagine that human well-being might be manufactured like any other product, could we only erect the requisite machinery.

Give a man, they say, an interest in the interest of his fellows ; let him find himself benefited in the common good ; and he will remain indeed selfish as before, but his selfishness will work no harm, it will all turn to the good of the community. In being selfish he will be public-spirited. He will commit no crime against society, simply because he will be beyond the reach of temptation.

How can a man steal, who abounds in bread ? or commit adultery, where there is every facility for divorce ? or be idle, when by wages he must live ? or perjure himself, when he believes in no God ? or commit murder, when every man he meets is his partner and help-mate? How indeed?

Shrewd old Aristotle has an answer to the point, which I think worth quoting with some adaptation here :

“It is not only for the necessaries of life that men commit crime, for which Socialists think to find a remedy in the confiscation of capital, so that people may not turn highwaymen for cold or hunger ; a further temptation is the longing to get gratification and appease desire. For if people have a desire of something beyond the necessaries of life, they will commit crimes to satisfy that craving. Nay, they will form to themselves artificial desires, that they may have gratification without paying for it by previous uneasiness. . . . As a matter of fact, it is the superfluities rather than the bare necessaries of life, which are the motives of the most heinous crimes. Men do not usurp a kingdom to get out of the cold. . . . It is solely as a preventive of petty crimes that the principle of the Socialist polity is efficacious. . . . No doubt there is a certain advantage in Democratic Socialism as a safeguard against the rivalry of classes, but it is nothing to boast of. For in the first place the men of light and leading, the possessors of ability and ingenuity, will take umbrage at not being set above the rest, as they deserve, and will turn to attacking the Constitution and sowing sedition. And secondly, there is no satisfying the greed of human kind.¹ People are content at first with an allowance of two shillings, but no sooner is this the constitutional sum than they claim a larger one, and so on ad infinitum. For it is of the nature of desire to extend indefinitely, and the mass of mankind live for the gratification of desire.”²

¹ The Professor of Greek in the Socialist Commonwealth will often have these words on his lips.

² Aristotle, Politics, ii. 7, with slight adaptation.

Aristotle mentions philosophy as a remedy. Under a purely natural dispensation philosophy would have been the guide of life. But in the present order of Providence, not philosophy but the faith of Christ is appointed to lead man to his goal.

That goal is beyond this world, that we may so pass through the good things of life as to arrive at eternal joys.

As things stand, there is no way to those joys except by faith in Christ.

Christian “godliness is profitable to all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.”³

³ 1 Tim. iv. 8.

It is a mistake to look upon Christianity as a necessary institution indeed for bringing up men for heaven, but a drawback and disadvantage to their temporal estate.⁴

⁴ Pius IX. in the Syllabus, n. 40, condemned the proposition that “The doctrine of the Catholic Church is adverse to the interests and well-being of human society.”

Mankind cannot prosper as a race unless they live for heaven ; and living for heaven in the actual order of things means Christianity.

There is no other name under heaven given to men but the name of Jesus, whereby we must be either saved eternally or rescued from present social miseries.

There is no other love but the love of Jesus Christ, that can take the selfishness out of a man.

Demagogues, philanthropists, are all selfish—they want to advertise themselves, unless the love of the Crucified has taught them the art of self-suppression.

There is nothing but the vision and hope of good things beyond this world, that can thoroughly loosen a man’s heart from honour and money and what money can buy.⁵ But we need unselfishness and detachment—poverty of spirit, in fact—that human society as a whole may thrive and prosper.

⁵ “No conviction that unselfishness pays, has ever made any man permanently and persistently unselfish” (Balfour)

If a man looks upon intoxicating drink as the supreme good of humanity, that very persuasion disqualifies him for taking his drink wisely.

Part of the reformation of a drunkard, or of any sensualist, is the creation in him of higher tastes.

But whoever takes the supreme good to be money, whether in the shape of capital or wages, it matters not—whoever has set his whole heart on money and its incidents, is as incapable of using his money well as the drunkard his wine.

Whatever we take to be the supreme good, we want to have as much as possible of it for ourselves—the drunkard all the liquor he can carry ; the worshipper of wealth and wages, all the money and luxuries he can lay his hands on.

Both men are thoroughly selfish : they are unfit co-operators in any social scheme : they will wrangle and squander, peculate and revolutionize.

I speak of what will occur in the world generally.

Man’s nature needs to be spiritualized that we may deal with temporal goods unselfishly.

Never was there greater infatuation than the Socialist proposal, to set all mankind a-hungering after material goods alone, and then to make men up into fraternities and co-partnerships, in the fond expectation that they will not rend and prey upon one another.

The survival of the fittest—in popular language, the weakest to the wall—is a stern law of nature. It works itself out too little checked in the present capitalist system. It will work itself out under any system than can be proposed, Co-operation, Profit-sharing, Socialism—except it be counteracted by the further law of faith, hope, and charity, causing the stronger to hold their hand.

But Socialism rejects faith, hope, and charity.

It levies war alike on Capital and on Christianity.

It has yet to learn that Christianity is the stronger institution of the two.