Now the result of this profound error as to the existence, nature and limitation of these personal rights has meant simply the destruction of a righteous and unified society which works by cooeperation and fellowship, and the substitution of individuals and corporate bodies who work by competition, strife and mutual aggression towards the attainment of all they can get under the impulse of what was once praised as “enlightened self interest.”  In other words—­war.  The conflict that began in 1914 was not a war hurled into the midst of a white peace, it was only a military war arising in the centre of a far greater social war, for there is no other word that is descriptive.  Rights that are not contingent on the due discharge of duties and obligations are but hateful privilege; privilege has issue in selfishness and egotism, which in turn work themselves out in warfare and in the hatred that both precedes and follows conflict.

The net result of a century and a half of industrialism is avarice, warfare and hate.  Society can continue even when avariciousness is rampant—­for a time—­and warfare of one sort or another seems inseparable from humanity, at all events it has always been so, but hatred is another matter, for it is the negation of social life and is its solvent.  Anger passes; it is sometimes even righteous, but hatred is synonymous with death in that it dissolves every unit, reducing it to its component parts and subjecting each of these to dissolution in its turn.  Righteous anger roused the nations into the war that hate had engendered, but hate has followed after and for the moment is victorious.  Russia seethes with hatred and is perishing of its poison, while there is not another country in Europe, of those that were involved in the war, where the same is not true in varying degrees; hatred of race for race, of nation for nation, of class for class, of one social or industrial or economic or political institution for another.  This, above all else, is the disintegrating influence, and against it no social organism, no civilization can stand.  Unless it is abrogated it means an ending of another epoch of human life, a period of darkness and another beginning, some time after the poison has been worked out by misery, adversity and forced repentance.

It is this prevalence of hatred, reinforced by avarice and perpetuated by incessant warfare, that negatives all the efforts that are made towards effecting a correspondence between the divided interests that are the concomitant of industrialism.  Strikes and lockouts, trades unions and employers’ associations as they are now constituted and as they now operate, syndicalism and Bolshevism and proletarian dictatorships, protective tariffs and commercial spheres of influence, propaganda and subsidized newspapers are all energized by the principle of hate, and no good thing can come of any of them.  Nor is it enough to work for the re-establishment of justice even by those methods