Now to my biological analogy: It was recently my privilege to be
conducted over the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New
York City. You will remember that to it some millions of dollars have
been assigned, for the purpose of discovering the cause and cure of
bacterial diseases. In one department of the Institute a Japanese
professor showed under the rays of the ultra-microscope specimens of a
remarkable bacillus, the existence of which he had been the first to
detect. It was that kind of bacillus which, if it is present in the
marrow of a man's spinal cord, induces a state of the body that is
called locomotor-ataxy. This state is one in which the man who
manifests it is unable to control properly the movements of his feet
and legs. He has lost command from the supreme cerebral centre; the
lower nerve ganglia seem to have become insubordinate and to act on
their own initiative. But is locomotor-ataxy a disease? Clearly your
answer will depend upon whether you are on the side of the man or the
microbe. If you sympathize with the man and are thinking of him, it is
a disease; but if your heart is with the microbe there in the spinal
cord, the locomotor-ataxy will be to you life and health abundant, and
that not only for the individual specimen whom you pick out for
observation, but for his whole family which, as the ataxy advances,
reproduces itself proportionately, and with an inconceivable rapidity.
What is to determine whether you are on the side of the man or the
microbe? Surely the constitutional bent of your emotional and
volitional preference. It is not a matter for the science of fact to
consider. Mere intellect, mere reason, knows nothing of health and
disease, unless it assumes this distinction as its starting-point. It
knows only the order of sequences. Suppose, then, we were to find that
civilization had pitted itself against Man, so that it was a case of
Man _versus_ Civilization, as Herbert Spencer conceived an antagonism
between Man and the State. Should we not be compelled, in order to
decide what condition of things was one of health, to open up conscious
relations with our deepest trend of heart and will, and find out
whether we flowed with humanity or with civilization? Nor would there
be any escape from the necessity of remaining true to our own trend and
favoring whatever flowed the same way. In case of a clash between the
social order and humanity, the health of each is to the other as a
disease and, therefore, the question inevitably arises, "Which is in
our judgment to be preserved?" and each one's answer must depend on
whether he finds himself after full deliberation irresistibly drawn to
the one side or the other. Civilization may be to man as the microbe to
the locomotor-ataxy subject; but innate civilizationists would delight
in the surrender of humanity to the social order. To them what would
humanity be but civilization's opportunity, its habitat, its
food-supply? I am saying that, to prove trade immoral it is not enough
to show that man is a sacrifice to the economic order; you would be
required also to demonstrate that man ought not to be sacrificed to any
social order, that he must always be the final end, and never a mere
means. But that is exactly what you can never demonstrate to any one
who is not innately, spiritually, naturally, on the side of man against
all other objects of interest. I mean that there is no arguing with any
one who constitutionally hesitates to side with man. You might pray for
such a one; but it would be folly to reason with him, for the
foundation is not in him upon which your reasonings could mount. All
this seems to me necessary to say, because I get the impression from
books on political economy that most writers and readers first
dehumanize themselves as a prerequisite to a discussion of the morals
of trade.