These two aspects have had much more to do with its hold in industrial neighborhoods than have its philosophic tenets or the impassioned appeal of its propagandists. The Socialists are ****** almost the sole attempt to preach a morality sufficiently allembracing and international to keep pace with even that material internationalism which has standarized the threads of screws and the size of ( 115) bolts, so that machines may become interchangeable from one country to another. It is the same sort of internationalism which Mazzini preached when distracted Italy was ****** her desperate struggle for a unified and national life. He issued his remarkable address to her workingmen and solemnly told them that the life of the nation could not be made secure until her patriots were ready to die for human issues. He saw, earlier than most men, that the desire to be at unity with all human beings, to claim the sense of a universal affection is a force not to be ignored. He believed that it might even then be strong enough to devour the flimsy stuff called national honor, glory, and prestige, which incite to war and induce workingmen to trample over each other's fields and to destroy the results of each other's labor.
Workingmen dream of an industrialism which shall be the handmaid of a commerce ministering to an increased power of consumption among the producers of the world, binding them together in a genuine internationalism. Existing commerce has long ago reached its international stage, but it has been the result of business aggression and constantly appeals for military defense and for the forcing of new markets. In so far as commerce has rested upon the successful capture of ( 116) the resources of the workers, it has been a relic of the mediaeval baron issuing forth to seize the merchants' boats as they passed his castle on the Rhine. It has logically lent itself to warfare, and is, indeed, the modern representative of conquest. As its prototype rested upon slavery and vas- salage, so this commerce is founded upon a contempt for the worker and believes that he can live on low wages.
It assumes that his legitimate wants are the animal ones comprising merely food and shelter and the cost of replacement. The industrialism of which this commerce is a part, exhibits this same contemptuous attitude, but it is more easily extended to immigrants than to any other sort of workmen because they seem further away from a common standard of life. This attitude toward the immigrant simply illustrates once more that it is around the deeply significant idea of the standard of life that our industrial problems of to-day centre. The desire for a higher standard of living in reality forms the base of all the forward movements of the working class. "The significance of the standard of life lies not so much in the fact that for each of us it is different, as that for all of us it is progressive,"[ 3 ] constantly invading new realms. To imagine that for immigrants it is merely a ques-( 117)-tion of tin cups and plates stored in a bunk versus a white cloth and a cottage table, and that all goes well if sewing-machines and cottage-organs reach the first generation of immigrants, and fashionable dressmakers and pianos the second, is of course a most untutored interpretation. Until the standard of life is apprehended in its real significance and made the crux of the immigrant situation, as recent economists are ****** the power of consumption the test of a nation's prosperity, we shall continue to ignore the most obvious and natural basis for understanding and mutual citizenship.
Because workmen have been forced to consider this standard of living in regard to immigrants as well as themselves, they have made genuine efforts toward amalgamation. This is perhaps easily explained, for, after all, the man in this country who realizes human equality is not he who repeats the formula of the eighteenth century, but he who has learned that the "idea of equality is an outgrowth of man's primary relations with nature.
Birth, growth, nutrition, reproduction, death, are the great levelers that remind us of the essential equality of human life. It is with the guarantee of equal opportunities to play our parts well in these primary processes that government is chiefly concerned" [4 ] and not merely with the re-(118)-pression of the vicious, nor with guarding the rights of property.
All that devotion of the trades union for the real issues and trials of life could, of course, easily be turned into a passion for self-government and for the development of the national life if we were really democratic from the modern evolutionary standpoint, and held our town-meetings upon the topics of vital concern.
So long, however, as the Government declines to concern itself with these deeper issues involved in the standard of life and the industrial status of thousands of its citizens, we must lose it.
If progress were inaugurated by those members of the community who possess the widest knowledge and superior moral insight, then social amelioration might be brought about without the bungling and mistakes which so distress us all. But, over and over again, salutary changes are projected and carried through by men of even less than the average ethical development, because their positions in life have brought them in contact with the ills of existing arrangements. To quote from John Morley: "In matters of social improvement, the most common reason why one hits upon a point of progress and not another, is that one happens to be more directly touched than the other by the unimproved practice." [ 5 ]
