full, free life. If the shoulders of the people are used by their most vital representatives only to be climbed upon into positions of individual prestige, the people themselves will be little bettered by generating men of power. The labor leader must find his career inside his class. He must forego the easy advantages of a thousand-pound government salary. There are few wise leaders to-day inside the ranks of the workers.

As the result, the immediately practical next steps in the social revolution are clearly seen, but the creative readjustment that will make England into a free, liberal community is not seen. The worker is about to share control of his working conditions with the "management." His hours will be shortened, his wages will be increased, -the increase has already reached about one third of the industrial population, he will have a voice in workshop conditions, his physical environment in his leisure hours will be ameliorated. His house will be situated in a decent community, with space around it for flowers and home gardening. Vocational training will be given to his children. This will come by a series of experimental measures, beginning with parttime employment in industry for those between the ages of fourteen and eighteen.

form. Now is the time to shape and fuse that molten mass.

"We are going around to-day with a different brain under our cap from the brain we carried three years ago," a leading official of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers said to me.

This is true of him and his fellowworkers, true of the politicians, and true of the employers. Before that brain cools to a new case-bound orthodoxy it must come to grips with larger principles of social reconstruction than any it has been dealing with in trades-union regulations. There is no discharge in this war. We need a new community, eager and unsatisfied, aiming after a nobility of life of which the modern world has had no vision. Let labor look to its task. Time presses. In five years England will have cooled down, and the impulse of the war, throwing old values into the furnace, will have spent itself. Men will reproduce the old world, with its barrenness of materialism, its hunt after cheap amusements, its immense mediocrity, its spiritual deadness, its nervous restlessness, its suppressions of vitality, and its explosions of rebellion, the same old round of dirty little intrigue, because there will be no great purpose to which life is directed, no creative dream of the people.

And in command of the community will be the same old gang of clever politicians feeding out materialistic catchwords of "Peace and prosperity," the adroit editors ministering to sensation as a substitute for creative activity. If the workers dodge and postpone this fundamental point in their emancipation, they will give us a world little better than the Victorian mess. They will give us something very like a prosperous American industrial city such as Detroit. The privileged class, with its neat formulæ of restricted education and established church, has long lost its control of the community. The brief reign of the captains of industry, contributing no ideas on ethics and social relationship, ended in August of 1914. Now comes the worker. Let him better the management of life.

Patient,

kindly, slow, very loyal to the man and. the cause in which he believes, the English worker is the greatest democratic force in the world. For our own salvation we must call on him to use his brain. He allowed the first industrial revolution to swing in on top of him in its meanest and most sordid form. Now that he takes control of the second industrial revolution, he must not try to compress humanity into narrower terms than those which the innumerable varieties of the human spirit have always demanded. The masters of industry tried this, and wrecked. their world.

Into the forefront of their immediate program of action the workers must put the demand for an abolition of child labor and for the creation of a general, full-time elementary schooling up to the age of sixteen years. There must be secondary and continuation schools for all promising pupils up to the age of eighteen. There must be a larger number of universities, and a democratization of all the universities. The best men among the workers must be as thoroughly equipped in modern science, economics, and sociology as the governing class used to be in the humanities. The hope of an enlightened democracy lies in the general extension of state education and in the expansion of individual initiative in such experiments for adults as the Workers' Educational Association.

But the workers must insist that the education shall not be limited to vocational training, to science of research and application, to the imparting of facts. Education must give an interpretation of life. It must construct and impart a system of ethics fitted to our time. A living wage is no answer to such a tangle as that of sex; it is no answer to the concerns of empire and the treatment of the colored races. These are ethical matters, demanding hard thinking and new interpretations of old values. There are a dozen problems clamoring for an answer, and on no one of them is there an adequate body of recorded facts, with the tendencies deduced from them. Apparently, everything

Here

is to be solved by plunging boldly into activity and letting results come. What one feels the absence of in the labor movement is fundamental brain-work. are new processes being developed, new areas opened, a revolutionary shifting of the directive control of the modern world from the little historic group of captains to the vast army of the people themselves; and yet there is no realization that so mighty a transfer of forces calls for a philosophy and ethics of its own. If the workers fail us in this, the patient oldtime spirit will brush aside their little. artificial structure like an empty shell and begin building again.

The whole range of moral problems has been left out of the reckoning. Changed conditions have resulted in an entire alteration of human relationship; but no one has stated the new ethics that will give guidance to the plain man's desire for a free, human, liberal life and for an answer to the meaning of life. The cry of Dostoyevsky still lifts itself in our night: "Surely I have n't suffered simply that I, my crimes, and my sufferings may manure the soil of the future harmony for somebody else. I want to be there when every one suddenly understands what it has all been for. All the religions of the world are built on this longing, and I am a believer."

What interpretation of modern life have we had? Not one. Frederick Taylor tells us to bind every thrust of the hand, every throb of the brain, into an iron scheme of regularity; Tolstoy tells us to jump out of the system altogether. But neither they nor our other literary and scientific prophets have faced all the facts resolutely and thought their way through to a synthesis. Neither peasant mysticism nor scientific management will put greatness into the lives that ninety out of every hundred obscure persons must live. We cannot hope for any saving word from the clever manipulators who cut the cost of production or from isolated artists, high above the combat. The word must come from the worker who, refusing to be factory-bound, turns from his ma

chine after extracting a living wage and becomes an interpreter for his fellows. We wait for this word. It will be a word made flesh, and it will dwell among us. It will not utter itself in handicraft communities or on the lonely farm. will neither flinch from the immutable economic basis of life or try to feed the human spirit on applied science and novel devices of speeding-up alone. It will be a word of faith.

Modern essayists write retrospectively of the "age of faith" as if faith was possible only among naïve men in an age of mental darkness. But faith is the product of a vitality that is fully expressed. It has therefore always been the possession of vital and effectual men, and is found alike in Cromwell and Walt Whitman. It is as inevitably the sanction of wholesome living as joy is the accompaniment and sanction of the creative impulse in love and art. It is not a blind belief in what is not true. Faith is the expression of a belief in life. The last century has been faithless not because it was dynamic and enlightened, but because it was darkened and weary. Democracy, with all its striving, has produced thus far only three men of genius, Mazzini, Lincoln, and Walt Whitman, and one of them said:

Give me, give him or her I love this
quenchless faith.

Is it a dream?

Nay, but the lack of it the dream, And failing it life's lore and wealth a dream,

And all the world a dream.

We moderns have side-stepped these fundamental questions of a spiritual basis. for existence because they troubled our surface life. Meanwhile we heaped up the immeasurable inner forces of unanswered desires, unexpended spiritual vitality, and frustrated impulses until they finally came roaring through and overswept Europe.

There was a time when religion answered this need of the race for a vital expression. It still answers the need of

a part of the community. There are liberal tendencies inside the church making for a faith which does not offend men's intellects and does not preach submission and renunciation. A small, but influential, group of workers still govern their lives by religious faith. But religion in any organized form, in any terms that are concrete and susceptible of measurement and analysis, has ceased to exist for the mass of the people. The old religious penalties and sanctions have been undermined by modern thought. Our new, vague social consciousness has failed as yet to develop any stringent system of ethics. of its own, any code of relationship which is binding. In labor a class war, in sex a medieval suppression, were the extent of present-day vision up to the hour of the war. For many generations the life of spiritual aspiration has been starved. There is no longer any appeal made to it. Our development is altogether in the direction of a materialistic conception of life, by legislation to conquer poverty, by machinery to achieve happiness. It looks on organization as the sole method of progress, efficiency as the end of being, science as answering all the needs of the human consciousness, and scientifically directed force as the final master of human affairs. It is not that the young or the poor go wrong, but that we all go wrong in our commercial civilization. We all live for sensation, for a visible standard of success in terms of sensepleasures. To make life easy, to escape the old perils and hardships, the old disciplines and responsibilities, has become the chief aim of the modern community.

England must make imperious demands. of the new democracy. We refuse to rest satisfied with their improved housing, easier transportation, better working conditions. These are only the means to worthy living. They do not deal with the business of living itself. If the workers of England can create a community that "looks good," the example will be irresistible, and civilization will respond to it in every nation. It is only in the creation of such communities, where the

life of peace is a thing of joy, that we can look for the end of wars. But in their community they must find a place for the life of the spirit, for faith, for the finer values of nationality, for the rewards of merit, energy, and initiative. Because initiative in the old industrial serfdom only bound them the tighter to the management, they have practised "ca canny." But when they take control, failure in initiative will cut the tap-root and spinal nerve of their productivity, their prosperity, and final well-being. They are called on for a wholly other set of qualities than those which they have developed under the stresses of wage conflict. Every situation now demands a different reaction from the one produced when a profiteering employer pulled the strings. Every new invention, every automatic machine, every shortened process, every device for directing muscular force that will cut the cost of production, is working for their benefit. But their newly used initiative must carry further than the workshop. It must wreak itself on the community, and devise a wisdom of life, fulfilling the inextinguishable longing of the human heart, which has gone unanswered in recent years till it found its answer in world

war.

Unquestionably in the last fifty years the labor movement, reacting vigorously against the defenses of privilege projected, often unconsciously, by organized religion and class education, has made a drive against the life of the mind and the life of the spirit. Itself a vital movement, fighting for freedom and justice, it has included among its enemies forces which are themselves the very source of freedom and justice. It has done this because these forces had created institutions, such as the established church and the great universities, which had lagged in the movement toward continuing emancipation. But labor cannot carry on a war with intelligence and spirituality without in the end being burned up by their fine violet ray. No philosophy of income will survive against the higher demands of the human spirit. Labor must be willing to

work with these victorious forces, not against them. In scorning the free play of intellect in the realms of art and pure research, and in scorning the efforts of the spirit to find an interpretation of life leading to spiritual peace, the labor movement has hardened and strengthened the very materialism which is its own worst enemy. If labor holds that it is too busy with its immediate emancipation to trouble with "theoretical considerations," it will be in the position of an army which allows itself to be outflanked and surrounded because it is concentrated on a drive at the center. This is the gravest issue which labor faces. It has won its fight for a decent standard of living and for a measure of control in industry, but it will certainly lose the future if it continues to regard the writer, artist, and ethical teacher as parasites, and if it continues to see them as idlers who are living indolently on the hard work of better men. The labor movement is itself largely the product of a few thinkers, unconnected with organization, members of no party. It will destroy its own sources of supply and will become dried up if it discourages fresh liberations inside its own organism. Its one outlet into the future is its capacity for throwing out experiments in the creation of new varieties, like a plant. It must distrust its own orthodoxy and status quo, its own accepted formulæ and popular teachers, as it distrusts the utterances of bishops and classbound captains of industry. Only so will it manifest a principle of vitality charged with unfailing impulses. Falling short in this, it will betray itself as only a single unrelated, short-lived impulse, clothing itself in one more limited institution, which will become its tomb. The worker must not only tolerate radical interpretative thinking outside his own ranks; he must welcome it among his fellows. The initiative of his leisure. hours must lead out into regions of which he has been shy and suspicious. He must develop his own teachers and prophets and artists. The men of Ghent had already done a little of this inside their coöperative community.

The English worker must be as glad of his sculptor and his poet as he is of his labor leader. By the creative use of his leisure he will justify his control over the coming age. In place of smart revues and sentimental plays perhaps he will give us drama, which has been an unused literary form for three centuries, worthy of revival.

For one hundred years the world has been silent on the meaning of life. The masters were busy with their new devices to squeeze profits, and the workers were too heavy with their toil to think at all. But by these unseen moral compulsions, by the values we create, every free act of our life is governed. Everything we say and do is shot through with the color and accent of our conception of life.

If life is "playing the game," what is the game, and what are the rules? If life consists in making good, what is the good we are making, and what is the method of the making? If life is noblesse oblige, who are the élite, and what is the nature of their obligation?

The Christian ethics, for instance, have never been tried. Do the workers intend to attempt them? Will they state them for us in modern terms? What precisely is our moral foundation to-day? What is the basis of our happiness and virtue?

The suppression of the human spirit, the soul,- that congeries of impulse, desires, and memories, - has gone on under

the industrial revolution with its applied science, its emphasis on realism, and its mechanical detail. How faintly the life of industry has taken hold of the human. spirit was revealed by the great burst of released force that broke through with the war. The nations had been gathering steam for several generations till they blew the lid off. All the time that the hands were busy in repetitive processes the secret subconscious mind was generating its own forces. Suddenly men saw a release from modern life, an escape from the machine, and a substitute for the materialistic conception of existence, and seven nations went out with faith in their hearts. The workers themselves were among the first to go not because they were herded and conscripted, but because adventure and change and faith had returned to a very flat world. There came an almost universal exultation that at last there was something in which to believe, something impersonal and vast on which the primal forces of emotion could discharge themselves. The old industrial order received its sentence then; but unless the new industrial democracy wins for us a creative peace, it, too, is doomed. It must give us an interpretation of life which commends itself to our nobler faculties and not alone to our body needs, or men will again turn themselves to killing in order to escape the greensickness of materialistic peace.