Our plan, so generous, so liberal, so high-minded in many ways, has failed to produce the results we desired, while it has worked itself out to the point of menace.  It is for us to see these facts clearly, and so to act, and so promptly, that we may not have to await the destroying force of cataclysm for the correction of our errors.

IV

THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM

The solution of the industrial and economic problem that now confronts the entire world with an insistence that is not to be denied, is contingent on the restoration, first of all, of the holiness and the joy of work.  Labour is not a curse, it is rather one of the greatest of the earthly blessings of man, provided its sanctity is recognized and its performance is accomplished with satisfaction to the labourer.  In work man creates, whether the product is a bushel of potatoes from a space of once arid ground, or whether it is the Taj Mahal, Westminster Abbey or the Constitution of the United States, and so working he partakes something of the divine power of creation.

When work is subject to slavery, all sense of its holiness is lost, both by master and bondman; when it is subject to the factory system all the joy in labour is lost.  Ingenuity may devise one clever panacea after another for the salving work and for lifting the working classes from the intolerable conditions that have prevailed for more than a century; they will be ephemeral in their existence and futile in their results unless sense of holiness is restored, and the joy in production and creation given back to those who have been defrauded.

Before Christianity prevailed slavery was universal in civilized communities, labour, as conducted under that regime, was a curse, and this at length came home to roost on the gaunt wreckage of imperialism.  Thereafter came slowly increasing liberty under the feudal system with its small social units and its system of production for use not profits, monasticism with its doctrine and practice of the sanctity of work, and the Church with its progressive emancipation of the spiritual part of man.  Work was not easy, on the contrary it was very hard throughout the Dark Ages and Mediaevalism, but there is no particular merit in easy work.  It was virtually free except for the labour and contributions in kind exacted by the over-lord (less in proportion than taxes in money have been at several times since) from the workers on the soil, and in the crafts of every kind redeemed from undue arduousness by the joy that comes from doing a thing well and producing something of beauty, originality and technical perfection.