The Holy Earth Part 4

The influence of ownership on the performance of the man is often well ill.u.s.trated when the farm laborer or tenant becomes the proprietor. Some of my readers will have had experience in the difficult and doubtful process of trying to "run a farm" at long range by means of ordinary hired help: the residence is uninhabitable; the tools are old and out of date, and some of them cannot be found; the well water is not good; the poultry is of the wrong breed, and the hens will not sit; the horses are not adapted to the work; the wagons must be painted and the harnesses replaced; the absolutely essential supplies are interminable; there must be more day labor. Now let this hired man come into the ownership of the farm: presto! the house can be repaired at almost no cost; the tools are good for some years yet; the harnesses can easily be mended; the absolutely essential supplies dwindle exceedingly; and the outside labor reduces itself to minor terms.

Work with machinery, in factories, may proceed more rapidly because the operator must keep up with the machine; and there are also definite standards or measures of performance. Yet even here it is not to be expected that the work will be much more than time-service. In fact, the very movement among labor is greatly to emphasize time-service, and often quite independently of justice. There must necessarily be a reaction from this att.i.tude if we are to hope for the best human product.

The best human product results from the bearing of responsibility; in a controlled labor body the responsibility is shifted to the organization or to the boss. a.s.suredly the consolidating of labor is much to be desired if it is for the common benefit and for protection, and if it leaves the laborer free with his own product. Every person has the inalienable right to express himself, so long as it does not violate similar rights of his fellows, and to put forth his best production; if a man can best express himself in manual labor, no organization should suppress him or deny him that privilege. It is a sad case, and a denial of fundamental liberties, if a man is not allowed to work or to produce as much as he desires. Good development does not come from repression.

Society recognizes its obligation to the laboring man of whatever kind and the necessity of safeguarding him both in his own interest and because he stands at the very foundations; the laboring man bears an obligation to respond liberally with service and good-will.

Is it desirable to have an important part of the labor of a people founded on ownership? Is it worth while to have an example in a large cla.s.s of the population of manual work that is free-spirited, and not dominated by cla.s.s interest and time-service? Is it essential to social progress that a day's work shall be full measure?

_The group reaction_

One of the interesting phenomena of human a.s.sociation is the arising of a certain standard or norm of moral action within the various groups that compose it. These standards may not be inherently righteous, but they become so thoroughly established as to be enacted into law or even to be more powerful than law. So is it, as we have seen, with the idea of inalienable rights in natural property that may be held even out of all proportion to any proper use that the owners may be able to make of it; and so is it with the idea of inviolable natural privileges to those who control facilities that depend on public patronage for their commercial success. The man himself may hold one kind of personal morals, but the group of which he is a part may hold a very different kind. It is our problem, in dealing with the resources of the earth, to develop in the group the highest expression of duty that is to be found in individuals.

The restraint of the group, or the correction of the group action, is applied from the outside in the form of public opinion and in attack by other groups. The correction does not often arise from within. The establishing of many kinds of public-service bodies ill.u.s.trates this fact. It is the check of society on group-selfishness.

These remarks apply to the man who stands at the foundation of society, next the earth, as well as to others, although he has not organized to propagate the action of his cla.s.s. The spoliation of land, the insufficient regard for it, the trifling with it, is much more than an economic deficiency. Society will demand either through the pressure of public opinion, or by regularized action, that the producing power of the land shall be safeguarded and increased, as I have indicated in an earlier part of the discussion. It will be better if it comes as the result of education, and thereby develops the voluntary feeling of obligation and responsibility. At the same time, it is equally the responsibility of every other person to make it possible for the farmer to prosecute his business under the expression of the highest standards.

There is just now abroad amongst us a teaching to the effect that the farmer cannot afford to put much additional effort into his crop production, inasmuch as the profit in an acre may not depend on the increase in yield, and therefore he does not carry an obligation to augment his acre-yields. This is a weakening philosophy.

Undoubtedly there is a point beyond which he may not go with profit in the effort to secure a heavy yield, for it may cost him too much to produce the maximum; so it may not be profitable for a transportation company to maintain the highest possible speed. With this economic question I have nothing to do; but it is the farmer's moral responsibility to society to increase his production, and the stimulation reacts powerfully upon himself. It is a man's natural responsibility to do his best: it is specially important that the man at the bottom put forth his best efforts. To increase his yields is one of the ways in which he expresses himself as a man and applies his knowledge. This incentive taken away, agriculture loses one of its best endeavors, the occupation remains stationary or even deteriorates, and society loses a moral support at the very point where it is most needed.

If the economic conditions are such that the farmer cannot afford to increase his production, then the remedy is to be found without rather than by the repression of the producer. We are expending vast effort to educate the farmer in the ways of better production, but we do not make it possible for him to apply this education to the best advantage.

The real farmer, the one whom we so much delight to honor, has a strong moral regard for his land, for his animals, and his crops. These are established men, with highly developed obligations, feeling their responsibility to the farm on which they live. No nation can long persist that does not have this kind of citizenry in the background.

I have spoken of one phase of the group reaction, as suggested in the att.i.tude of the farmer. It may be interesting to recall, again, the fact that the purpose of farming is changing. The farmer is now adopting the outlook and the moral conduct of commerce. His business is no longer to produce the supplies for his family and to share the small overplus with society. He grows or makes a certain line of produce that he sells for cash, and then he purchases his other supplies in the general market.

The days of homespun are gone. The farmer is as much a buyer as a seller. Commercial methods and standards are invading the remotest communities. This will have far-reaching results. Perhaps a fundamental shift in the moral basis of the agricultural occupations is slowly under way.

The measuring of farming in terms of yields and incomes introduces a dangerous standard. It is commonly a.s.sumed that State moneys for agriculture-education may be used only for "practical"--that is, for dollars-and-cents--results, and the emphasis is widely placed very exclusively on more alfalfa, more corn, more hogs, more fruit, on the two-blades-of-gra.s.s morals; and yet the highest good that can accrue to a State for the expenditure of its money is the raising up of a population less responsive to cash than to some other stimuli. The good physical support is indeed essential, but it is only the beginning of a process. I am conscious of a peculiar hardness in some of the agriculture-enterprise, with little real uplook; I hope that we may soon pa.s.s this cruder phase.

Undoubtedly we are in the beginning of an epoch in rural affairs. We are at a formative period. We begin to consider the rural problem increasingly in terms of social groups. The att.i.tudes that these groups a.s.sume, the way in which they react to their problems, will be determined in the broader aspects for some time to come by the character of the young leadership that is now taking the field.

_The spiritual contact with nature_

A useful contact with the earth places man not as superior to nature but as a superior intelligence working in nature as a conscious and therefore as a responsible part in a plan of evolution, which is a continuing creation. It distinguishes the elemental virtues as against the acquired, fact.i.tious, and pampered virtues. These strong and simple traits may be brought out easily and naturally if we incorporate into our schemes of education the solid experiences of tramping, camping, scouting, farming, handcraft, and other activities that are not mere refinements of subjective processes.

Lack of training in the realities drives us to find satisfaction in all sorts of make-believes and in play-lives. The "movies" and many other developments of our time make an appeal wholly beyond their merits, and they challenge the methods and intentions of education.

There are more fundamental satisfactions than "thrills." There is more heart-ease in frugality than in surfeit. There is no real relish except when the appet.i.te is keen. We are now provided with all sorts of things that n.o.body ever should want.

The good spiritual reaction to nature is not a form of dogmatism or impressionism. It results normally from objective experience, when the person is ready for it and has good digestion. It should be the natural emotion of the man who knows his objects and does not merely dream about them. There is no hallucination in it. The remedy for some of the erratic "futurism" and other forms of illusion is to put the man hard against the facts: he might be set to studying bugs or soils or placed between the handles of a plow until such time as objects begin to take their natural shape and meaning in his mind.

It is not within my purview here to consider the abstract righteous relation of man to the creation, nor to examine the major emotions that result from a contemplation of nature. It is only a very few of the simpler and more practical considerations that I may suggest.

The training in solid experience naturally emphasizes the righteousness of plain and simple eating and drinking, and of frugality and control in pleasures. Many of the advent.i.tious pleasures are in the highest degree pernicious and are indications of weakness.

Considering the almost universal opinion that nature exhibits the merciless and relentless struggle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, it is significant that one of the most productive ways of training a youth in sensitiveness and in regard for other creatures is by means of the nature contact. Even if the person is taught that the strong and ferocious survive and conquer, he nevertheless soon comes to have the tenderest regard for every living thing if he has the naturist in him. He discards the idea that we lose virility when we cease to kill, and relegates the notion to the limbo of deceits. This only means that unconsciously he has experienced the truth in nature, and in practice has discarded the erroneous philosophy contained in books even though he may still give these philosophies his mental a.s.sent.

It is exactly among the naturists that the old instinct to kill begins to lose its force and that an instinct of helpfulness and real brotherhood soon takes its place. From another source, the instinct to kill dies out among the moralists and other people. And yet it is pa.s.sing strange how this old survival--or is it a reversion?--holds its place amongst us, even in the higher levels. The punishment of a life for a life is itself a survival. Entertainment even yet plays upon this old memory of killing, as in books of adventure, in fiction, in playgames of children, and worst of all on the stage where this strange anachronism, even in plays that are not historic, is still portrayed in pernicious features and in a way that would rouse any community and violate law if it were enacted in real life.

It is difficult to explain these survivals when we pretend to be so much shocked by the struggle for existence. We must accept the struggle, but we ought to try to understand it. The actual suffering among the creatures as the result of this struggle is probably small, and the b.l.o.o.d.y and ferocious contest that we like to picture to ourselves is relatively insignificant. There is a righteous element in the struggle; or, more truthfully, the struggle itself is right. Every living and sentient thing persists by its merit and by its right. It persists within its sphere, and usually not in the sphere of some other creature.

The weeding-out process is probably related in some way with adaptability, but only remotely with physical strength. It is a process of applying the test. The test is applied continuously, and not in some violent upheaval.

If one looks for a moral significance in the struggle for existence, one finds it in the fact that it is a process of adjustment rather than a contest in ambition.

The elimination of the unessentials and of the survivals of a lower order of creation that have no proper place in human society, is the daily necessity of the race. The human struggle should not be on the plane of the struggle in the lower creation, by the simple fact that the human plane is unlike; and those who contend that we should draw our methods of contest from wild nature would therefore put us back on the plane of the creatures we are supposed to have pa.s.sed. If there is one struggle of the creeping things, if there is one struggle of the fish of the sea and another of the beasts of the field, and still another of the fowls of the air, then surely there must be still another order for those who have dominion.

_The struggle for existence: war_

We may consider even further, although briefly, the nature of the struggle for existence in its spiritual relation. It would be violence to a.s.sume a holy earth and a holy production from the earth, if the contest between the creatures seems to violate all that we know as rightness.

The notion of the contentious and sanguinary struggle for existence finds its most p.r.o.nounced popular expression in the existence of human war. It is a wide-spread opinion that war is necessary in the nature of things, and, in fact, it has been not only justified but glorified on this basis. We may here examine this contention briefly, and we may ask whether, in the case of human beings, there are other sufficient means of personal and social development than by mortal combat with one's fellows. We may ask whether the principle of enmity or the principle of fellow feeling is the more important and controlling.

We are not to deny or even to overlook the great results that have come from war. Virile races have forced themselves to the front and have impressed their stamp on society; the peoples have been mixed and also a.s.sorted; lethargic folk have been galvanized into activity; iron has been put into men's sinews; heroic deeds have arisen; old combinations and intrigues have been broken up (although new ones take their place).

A kind of national purification may result from a great war. The state of human affairs has been brought to its present condition largely as the issue of wars.

On the other hand, we are not to overlook the damaging results, the destruction, the anguish, the check to all productive enterprise, the hatred and revenge, the hypocrisy and deceit, the despicable foreign spy system, the loss of standards, the demoralization, the lessening respect and regard for the rights of the other, the breeding of human parasites that fatten at the fringes of disaster, the levying of tribute, the setting up of unnatural boundaries, the thwarting of national and racial developments which, so far as we can see, gave every promise of great results. We naturally extol the nations that have survived; we do not know how many superior stocks may have been sacrificed to military conquest, or how many racial possibilities may have been suppressed in their beginnings.

Vast changes in mental att.i.tudes may result from a great war, and the course of civilization may be deflected; and while we adjust ourselves to these changes, no one may say at the time that they are just or even that they are temporarily best. We are never able at the moment to measure the effects of the unholy conquest of peoples who should not have been conquered; these results work themselves out in tribulation and perhaps in loss of effort and of racial standards through many weary centuries. Force, or even "success," cannot justify theft.

But even a.s.suming the great changes that have arisen from war, this is not a justification of war; it only states a fact, it only provides a measure of the condition of society at any epoch. It is probable that war will still exert a mighty even if a lessening influence; it may still be necessary to resort to arms to win for a people its natural opportunity and to free a race from bondage; and if any people has a right to its own existence, it has an equal right and indeed a duty to defend itself. But this again only indicates the wretched state of development in which we live. Undoubtedly, also, a certain amount of military training is very useful, but there should be other ways, in a democracy, to secure something of this needful training.

The struggle for existence, as expressed in human combat, does not necessarily result in the survival of the most desirable, so far as we are able to define desirability. We are confusing very unlike situations in our easy application of the struggle for existence to war. The struggle is not now between individuals to decide the fitter; it is between vast bodies hurling death by wholesale. We pick the physically fit and send them to the battle-line; and these fit are slain. This is not the situation in nature from which we draw our ill.u.s.trations.

Moreover, the final test of fitness in nature is adaptation, not power.

Adaptation and adjustment mean peace, not war. Physical force has been immensely magnified in the human sphere; we even speak of the great nations as "powers," a terminology that some day we shall regret. The military method of civilization finds no justification in the biological struggle for existence.

The final conquest of a man is of himself, and he shall then be greater than when he takes a city. The final conquest of a society is of itself, and it shall then be greater than when it conquers its neighboring society.

Man now begins to measure himself against nature also, and he begins to see that herein shall lie his greatest conquests beyond himself; in fact, by this means shall he conquer himself,--by great feats of engineering, by completer utilization of the possibilities of the planet, by vast discoveries in the unknown, and by the final enlargement of the soul; and in these fields shall be the heroes. The most virile and upstanding qualities can find expression in the conquest of the earth. In the contest with the planet every man may feel himself grow.

What we have done in times past shows the way by which we have come; it does not provide a program of procedure for days that are coming; or if it does, then we deny the effective evolution of the race. We have pa.s.sed witchcraft, religious persecution, the inquisition, subjugation of women, the enslavement of our fellows except alone enslavement in war.

Here I come particularly to a consideration of the struggle for existence. Before I enter on this subject, I must pause to say that I would not of myself found an argument either for war or against it on the a.n.a.logies of the struggle for existence. Man has responsibilities quite apart from the conditions that obtain in the lower creation. Man is a moral agent; animals and plants are not moral agents. But the argument for war is so often founded on this struggle in nature, that the question must be considered.

It has been persistently repeated for years that in nature the weakest perish and that the victory is with the strong, meaning by that the physically powerful. This is a false a.n.a.logy and a false biology. It leads men far astray. It is the result of a misconception of the teaching of evolution.