“We have to begin over again,” said White at last, and took up Benham’s papers where he had laid them down. . . .

9

One considerable section of Benham’s treatment of the Fourth Limitation was devoted to what he called the Prejudices of Social Position.  This section alone was manifestly expanding into a large treatise upon the psychology of economic organization. . . .

It was only very slowly that he had come to realize the important part played by economic and class hostilities in the disordering of human affairs.  This was a very natural result of his peculiar social circumstances.  Most people born to wealth and ease take the established industrial system as the natural method in human affairs; it is only very reluctantly and by real feats of sympathy and disinterestedness that they can be brought to realize that it is natural only in the sense that it has grown up and come about, and necessary only because nobody is strong and clever enough to rearrange it.  Their experience of it is a satisfactory experience.  On the other hand, the better off one is, the wider is one’s outlook and the more alert one is to see the risks and dangers of international dissensions.  Travel and talk to foreigners open one’s eyes to aggressive possibilities; history and its warnings become conceivable.  It is in the nature of things that socialists and labour parties should minimize international obligations and necessities, and equally so that autocracies and aristocracies and plutocracies should be negligent of and impatient about social reform.

But Benham did come to realize this broader conflict between worker and director, between poor man and possessor, between resentful humanity and enterprise, between unwilling toil and unearned opportunity.  It is a far profounder and subtler conflict than any other in human affairs.  “I can foresee a time,” he wrote, “when the greater national and racial hatreds may all be so weakened as to be no longer a considerable source of human limitation and misery, when the suspicions of complexion and language and social habit are allayed, and when the element of hatred and aggression may be clean washed out of most religious cults, but I do not begin to imagine a time, because I cannot imagine a method, when there will not be great friction between those who employ, those who direct collective action, and those whose part it is to be the rank and file in industrialism.  This, I know, is a limitation upon my confidence due very largely to the restricted nature of my knowledge of this sort of organization.  Very probably resentment and suspicion in the mass and self-seeking and dishonesty in the fortunate few are not so deeply seated, so necessary as they seem to be, and if men can be cheerfully obedient and modestly directive in war time, there is no reason why ultimately they should not be so in the business of peace.  But I do not understand the elements of the methods by which this state of affairs can be brought about.