It is evident that much remains to be done before the waking Church becomes the awakened Church. A long process of education will be required before the enlarged conception of the kingdom, the Gospel and Christian ethics is generally accepted. But there is nothing to do save to press the good work of awakening and enlightenment, until all the preachers are converted to Christianity and all the churches to religion.

CHAPTER II

THE PROBLEM OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

I

AUTHENTIC history goes back about five thousand years. We have had fifty centuries of agriculture, and men are still starving; thousands are to-day shivering with cold, after fifty centuries of manufacturing; for fifty centuries we have been building, and have not yet learned to house all our people. There may have been a time when these things were unavoidable: the combined industry of the race did not produce enough to feed, clothe and house everybody, and somebody had to come short of enough. But within a century the introduction of machinery has changed all that; enough is now produced to support in comfort every member of the race. We have conquered nature, but we have not conquered poverty.

Because it is a comparatively new country, with a sparse population, yet possessing immense resources, America should not yet have felt the social problems of the Old World. The continent of Europe, with an area exceeding that of the United States by less. than 200,000 square miles, has a population of 400,000,000, who must be sustained from incomparably smaller resources. Think of China, with its 400,000,000 or more, wresting a living from an area

less than half the size of the United States. For a long time to come we should have been free from the economic pressure that in fact we feel so keenly. No nation faces social distress in more acute form, or is more acutely conscious of its social problems. Why? Our colossal American fortunes, the greatest in the world, are the answer. The vast wealth of America has been "cornered" by a few men, and profits the great majority not a whit. Our poor are as poor as the poorest of Europe.

It was hoped and believed for generations, and was the proud boast of Americans, that our democracy would prevent the inequalities of fortune that aristocracy has produced and established in Europe. Perhaps it would, if we really had a democracy. Our pride in America as the world's leader in democracy has had a sad fall, as we have slowly come to perceive that the hard facts are irreconcilable with our bookish theories. America the leader of the nations. in democracy? It is falling far behind those nations that we have so long sneered at as "effete." Our working class is treated with a brutality that finds no parallel in any other great capitalist country.

The reason is not far to seek. For two generations the men of greatest physical vigor and mental power in America have sought a career, not in politics but in business. The unexampled rapidity of our ma

'According to the "Statesman's Year-Book," the area of China proper is 1,532,420 square miles, and the estimated population 407,253,000. The area of the United States (not including territories) is 3,616,484 square miles, population 91,972,267.

terial development, without precedent or parallel in the entire history of the world, has stimulated to a degree hitherto undreamt the passion for gain. The possibility that the poorest boy might die the richest man of his generation, actually realized in Rockefeller and Carnegie, has stimulated to the utmost the normal desire to get on, and turned it into an insane frenzy for wealth. Politics have ceased to be politics, and have become business, usually a very sordid and disgraceful business. Neither justice nor intelligence inspires our legislation, but desire for greater wealth; and all our law-making bodies have fallen under the control of the forces that make for wealth. Administrative and judicial departments of government have followed the same course, and corruption honeycombs every part of the conduct of public affairs. Hitherto, as Professor Zueblin well says, "The American public has betrayed its price, as unmistakably as a cheap grafting politician; the price is prosperity, which, unaccompanied by justice, makes a nation of grafters." Our workingmen have for many years been exhorted to vote, not for a principle or for rights, but for "a full dinner pail," and the greater number of them have justified the estimate of their character held by the cheap politicians who devised the slogan.

"Triumphant democracy" is no longer the synonym of the United States. The oppressed peoples of the Old World once looked to us for ideals, instruction and inspiring example. And so, in our complacency, "Democracy and the Overman,” p. 70.

The

we went to sleep, and the world has run by us. old fable of the hare and the tortoise has a new illustration at our expense. "Free and enlightened" America is the slowest country in the world to respond to the reform sentiment, the slowest country to do justice to the workers. England repealed her conspiracy laws against workingmen in 1825, but in 1836 the Supreme Court of New York declared trades unions illegal; and it was not until 1884 that Maryland repealed her conspiracy laws-the last State in the Union to do so. The secret of our discomfiture lies in the fact that we have understood democracy to be concerned with political institutions only, and to imply merely that all men should have the equal power expressed by a vote. We have been the slowest of civilized peoples to learn that real democracy means the equal sharing of all men in the gifts of nature, the product of labor and the opportunities of development. Democracy means adequate life

for all.

On the whole, there has been steady progress in all quarters of the globe, through several generations, not to say through all the centuries, toward political democracy. A survey of the field of history shows despotism yielding to oligarchy, oligarchy giving place to aristocracy, aristocracy gradually transformed into democracy. But while this has been true of institutions, in life there has been no such progress. As truly as five thousand years ago, everywhere on earth the millions toil that the thousands may enjoy. One who, in these conditions, permits himself to wax elo