The task of taking stock of myself has not proven a pleasant one. I
have been trying to figure out what society has granted me, and to what
extent I have responded with an equivalent. I find that I wear clothes
I did not make. I consume food I did not grow nor prepare. I inhabit
a dwelling which I neither designed, built, nor furnished. I enjoy
facilities of transportation, though I have built neither roads nor
vehicles.
Figure it as I may, I discover my account to be in a bad way. The
assets present a goodly array, but they dwindle mightily before the
overwhelming formidableness of the list of liabilities. I have been
running into debt to society at an alarming rate. Funny I never thought
of it until stocktaking day.
Altogether the discovery is disconcerting in the extreme. My
conscience is not a satisfactory book-keeper under these conditions.
That conscience of mine will not allow my charging up against the
liabilities the unction I would lay to my soul that I have been
sympathetic, and held high ideals. And, indeed, when I essay to
apply the unction I realize that I cannot find my soul. Where had my
soul gone? What had become of that much-prized soul? I have lost my
soul in this insolvency. I tried to increase my spiritual assets by
attaching myself to certain religious organizations, but could find
no consolation there, till at last I decided that I ought to go into
spiritual bankruptcy and ask for a receiver. In this wide world, where
you can get most everything, I have failed to find the spiritual court
with jurisdiction that qualifies it for that position. I have searched
everywhere, and find to my amazement that all are in the same fix.
Society as a whole is spiritually bankrupt--it, too, has lost its soul.
The cause of this strange state of affairs I found to be not due to the
direct intention of life to defraud itself, but society’s spiritual
auditors made a grave mistake in stocktaking. The trouble seems to
be that these functionaries have underestimated the ultimate cost of
things. They thought that the price it pays for its labor represents
the cost. We have thought that pieces of mud, gold, and silver are
equivalent to life, and that by paying a certain wage we had acquitted
ourselves of all obligation. Then, by supplanting men in the workshops
with women and children, we reduced the cost, because we paid less
for about the same stent of work. We thought society economical by
putting children at work at mining our coal; that the seventy-five
cents paid for their daily efforts represents the cost to society for
getting the coal out of the mines. But this is not the cost; it is the
price. The cost to society towers away above the price that figures
in the commercial account current. The cost of working childhood at
coal-mining is the brutalization of the embryo citizen; the killing of
the love instinct that is in him, and destroying the possibilities of a
glorious manhood. The price has been paid but the big end of the cost
is still a liability.
By putting women to work in noisome sweat-shops we cheapen the price of
shirt-waists. But we do not reduce the cost. Unfitting the toiler for
normal motherhood, we encourage the production of poorly born children
from her tired frame, and such progeny are in the account. Look there
for the cost. We cannot destroy souls without finding the item writ
large in the account at judgment day!
Man must work to enjoy life. When his work is to his liking, and he is
fitted to perform the service, the cost is very little, or none at all.
Then his work is educative and he develops; it is nourishing and he
grows. If he be doomed to monotonous work that calls up no note of joy
in his heart, and where no thought is necessary, wherein some muscles
are overexerted while others have insufficient play, we make our toiler
lopsided, and for his loss of symmetry and unfoldment society must pay,
and it is in the account over and above the price we have paid with the
dross of money.
When work is pleasure it requires no spielmark requital--the pleasure
is its sufficient pay. Where there is not joy in the work no price is
sufficient. “It is only by thought that work can be made pleasurable,
and it is only by work that thought may be made healthy.”
Society is morally bankrupt. We have sold our birthright for a mess of
pottage. The wealth of a nation does not consist of an inventory of its
gold and silver coin vaults, nor its gold and silver epaulettes on the
trappings of its military and naval heroes, nor its gold and silver
trimmings on the apparel of dear Lady Disdain, nor in the gold and
silver that flows through the arteries of commerce. The solid assets of
society consist of its arts, not in pictures and statues in the museums
nor in the monuments in the parks; not in the grandeur of the public
buildings, but the pleasure in the lives of the people, made beautiful
by devotion to the arts of peace.
Oh, Angels of Heaven and devils from Hades, come and help me to lament
the great “I am”! Let us weep crocodile tears for man that built the
world. Man has conquered nature, cleared the forests, erected great
cities, and civilized a world--and has lost his own soul.
Art for art’s sake; money for money’s sake; knowledge for the sake
of knowledge; science for the sake of science; virtue for virtue’s
sake--but nowhere anything for Man’s sake. Man built a world and left
himself out.
O Divine Mathematics! What a net balance is this!