civilization does not believe in the essential similarity of all normal human beings in potency of happiness. Millions of earnest and honest men are today doing their part of the world's work as well as they can, living within their income, trying to save something for a rainy day, but absolutely without guarantee of a chance to earn a living if others should take their present place.
This fact has been pointed out over and over again by men who use harsh and unjust language; men who call themselves by party names that prejudice whatever truth they have to utter; men who advertise schemes so fantastic that everything they say is summarily presumed to be absurd. But the time cometh and now is when some men of all industrial and social classes are bound to put their prejudices under arrest, and to examine with candor the basis of complaint. This will be done without confounding the capitalistic system with the personal character of rich men. It will distinguish the economic and social function of corporate organizations from particular acts of specified corporations. It will keep the discovery of real anomalies among social conditions sharply distinct from proposed programmes of rearrangement.
I hold no brief for any party or school of social complainants, and I shall not try to represent any body's diagnosis of present conditions but my own. My personal belief is that social improvement in assimilation of this principle is not only sorely needed, but certain to be accomplished. It is no more likely to come however from the accusers of the responsible elements in present society than from the accused. The active agents of present industrial and social order are not the enemies but the friends of human progress. The conditions within which we are working today are not the invention of men deliberately hostile to their fellows. They are the result of enterprise on the part of every sort of human beings, in all of whom, up to date, self-interest is the law of last resort. We have, accordingly, a social order which favors one kind of interest to the hurt of others. Our civilization makes property more sacred and secure than personality. This fact no more brands the organizers of
