It is also the
happiness, the life, of actual men and women. We shall not cease to
waste work until we think always of the worker behind it, until we see
that it is our duty, if with our money we have command over him, to set
him to work worth doing. Capital now is to most of those who own it a
means of earning interest. We should think of it as creative, as the
power which may make the wilderness blossom like the rose and change the
slum into a home for men and women; and, better still, as the power that
may train and set men to do work that will satisfy their souls, so that
they shall work for the work's sake and not only for the wages. Until
capital becomes so creative in the hands of those who own it there will
always be a struggle for the possession of it; and to those who do
possess it it will bring merely superfluities and not happiness. If it
becomes creative, no one will mind much who possesses it. The class war
will be ended by a league of classes, their aim not merely peace, but
those things which make men resolve not to spoil peace with war.
We shall be told that this is a dream, as we are always told that the
ending of war is a dream. "So long as human nature is what it is there
will always be war." Those who talk thus think of human nature as
something not ourselves making for unrighteousness. It is not their own
nature. They know that they themselves do not wish for war; but, looking
at mankind in the mass and leaving themselves out of that mass, they see
it governed by some force that is not really human nature, but merely
nature "red in tooth and claw," a process become a malignant goddess,
who forces mankind to act contrary to their own desires, contrary even
to their own interests.
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