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| Wealth and Want | |||||||
| ... because democracy alone is not enough to produce widely shared prosperity. | |||||||
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The most important of all the material relations
of man is his relation to the planet he inhabits, and
hence, the “impious resistance to the benevolent
intentions of his Creator,” which, as Bishop Nulty says, is
involved in private property in land, must produce evil,
wherever it exists. And, further, as by virtue of the
law, unto whom much is given, from him
much is required, “the very progress of
civilisation makes the evils produced by private property
in land more widespread and intense.”
What is producing throughout the civilised world the present condition of things is not this and that local error or minor mistake. It is nothing less than the progress of civilisation itself; nothing less than the intellectual advance and the material growth in which our century has been so pre-eminent, acting in a state of society based on private property in land. It is nothing less than the newer gifts that in our time have been showered on man, being turned into scourges by man’s impious resistance to the benevolent intentions of his Creator.
The discoveries of science, the
gains of invention, have given to us in this wonderful
century more than has been given to men in any time
before, and, in a degree so rapidly accelerating as to
suggest geometrical progression, are placing in our hands
new material wonders.
But with the benefit comes the obligation: In a civilisation beginning to pulse with steam and electricity, where the sun paints pictures and the phonograph stores speech, it will not do to be merely as just as were our fathers. Intellectual advance and material advance require corresponding moral advance. Knowledge and power are neither good nor evil. They are not ends but means evolving forces that if not controlled in orderly relations must take disorderly and destructive forms. The increasing perplexity, the
growing discontent, mean nothing less than that forces of
destruction swifter and more terrible than those that have
shattered every preceding civilisation are already menacing
ours; that if it does not quickly rise to a higher moral
level; if it does not become in deed as in word a Christian
civilisation on the wall of its splendour must share the
doom of Babylon: “Thou are weighed in the balance and
found wanting!” ... read the whole
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Wealth and Want
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www.wealthandwant.com
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... because democracy alone hasn't yet led to a society
in which all can prosper
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