It is indeed probable that the growth of class fellowship will help to foster that spirit of art in work which we so notably lack, and the repose and content which this brings.There is truth in the view that a confused and standardless competition destroys art, which requires not only a group ideal but a certain deliberation, a chance to brood over things and work perfection into them.When the workman is more sure of his position, when he feels his fellows at his shoulder and knows that the quality of his work will be appreciated, he will have more courage and patience to be an artist.We all draw our impulse toward perfection I ot from vulgar opinion or from our pay, but from the approval of fellow craftsmen.The truth, little seen in our day, is that all work should be done in the spirit of art, and that no society is humanly organized in which this is not chiefly the case.
It is also true that closer fellowship?dominated by good ideals --should bring the sympathetic and moral motives to diligence and efficiency into more general action, and relegate the 'work or starve' motive more to the background.Some of us love our work and are eager to do it well;others have to be driven.Is this because the former are naturally a superior sort of people, because the work itself is essentially more inviting, or because the social conditions are such that sympathy and fellowship are more enlisted with it? Allowing something for the first two, I suspect the third is the principal reason.What work is there that would not be pleasant in moderate quantities, in good fellowship, and in the feeling of service? No great proportion, I imagine, of our task.Washing dishes is not thought desirable, and yet men do it joyfully when they go camping together.
Class organization is not, as some people assert, necessarily hostile to freedom.All organization is, properly, a means through which freedom is sought.As conditions change, men are compelled to find new forms of union through which to express themselves, and the rise of industrial classes is of this nature.
In fact, the question of freedom, as applied to class conditions, has two somewhat distinct aspects.These are:
1.Freedom to rise from one class into another, freedom of individual opportunity, or carriere ouverte aux talents This is chiefly for the man of exceptional capacity and am--bition.It is important, but not more so than the other, namely:
2.Freedom of classes, or, what is the same thing, of those individuals who have not the wish or power to depart from the sphere of life in which circumstance hu; placed them.It means justice, opportunity, humane living, for the less privileged groups as groups; not opportunity to get out of them but to be something in them; a chance for the teamster to have comfort, culture and good surroundings for himself and his family without ceasing to be a teamster.
The first of these has been much better understood in America than the second.That it is wrong to keep a man down who might rise is quite familiar, but that those who cannot rise, or do not care to, have also just claims is almost a novel idea, though they are evidently that majority for whom our institutions are supposed to exist.Owing to a too exclusive preoccupation with ideals of enterprise and ambition, a certain neglect, and even reproach, have rested upon those who do quietly the plain work of life.
Ours, if you think of it, is rather too much success on the tontine plan, where one puts all he has into a pool in the hope of being one of a few survivors to get what the rest lose; it would be better to take to heart that idea of Emerson's that each may succeed in his own way, without putting others down.It is a great thing that every American boy may aspire to be president of the United States, or of the Standard Oil Company, but it is equally important that he should have a chance for full and wholesome life in the more probable condition of clerk or mill hand.While we must admire the heroes of Samuel Smiles, we may remember that they do and should constitute only a small minority of the human race.
And the main guaranty for freedom of this latter sort is some kind of class organization which shall resist the encroachment and neglect of which the weaker parties in society are in constant danger.Those who have wealth, position knowledge, leisure, may perhaps dispense with formal organization (though in fact it is those who are strong already who most readily extend their strength in this way), but the multitudes who have nothing but their human nature to go upon must evidently stand together or go to the wall.
Endnotes I make frequent use of this word to mean an activity which furthers some general interest of the social group.It differs from "purpose" in not necessarily implying intention.Democracy and Social Ethics, 219.