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It's true in a deeper sense than they mean. You might equalise economic conditions as much as you please, but you'd never equalise fundamental conditions; you'd never turn the poor into the rich, the Have-Nots into the Haves. You know I'm not a Socialist.
Of course it means an inroad on rent and speculative profit, but that is not an immeasurable calamity. So much, by way of introduction, on the moral and economic aspects of the matter. Our special object is rather theological. We desire to notice the part which religion plays in the struggle between capital and labor; or, more properly perhaps, between the "haves" and the "have-nots."
And for the idle, the gay, the fair, the well-dressed and wealthy, the sturdy workman of his own rough way felt something of the uncharitable disdain which the laborious have-nots too usually entertain for the prosperous haves. But the moment the unwelcome intelligence of Madame Dalibard was conveyed to him, the smooth-faced boy swelled into dignity and importance.
He was so frightfully tired of life and its struggles; tired of being a Have-Not. To help the other Have-Nots, to put pleasant things into their hands as far as might be, seemed to Peter at this moment the thing for which one existed. It is obviously the business of the Have-Nots to do that for one another; for the Haves do not know or understand.
Not the east against the west, the north against the south, the "Haves" against the "Have-nots"; but the evil against the good, that is the real conflict of life. The attempt to deny or ignore this conflict has been the stock in trade of every false doctrine that has befogged and bewildered the world since the days of Eden.
An age of cruel and bitter jealousies between sections and classes; of hatted and strife between the Haves and the Have-nots; of futile contests between parties which have kept their names and confused their principles, so that no man may distinguish them except as the Ins and Outs.
If I were a working man, I should take up the side that you're taking up now; I should have everything to gain, and nothing to lose by it. But your mistake is just this, that when you might identify your own interests with the side of the "haves," as I do, you go out of your way to identify them with the side of the "have-nots," out of pure idealistic Utopian philanthropy.
Hamilton interprets this fact quite correctly from the political standpoint: "The great multitude has won the victory over the property owners and the monied men." Is not private property ideally abolished when the have-nots become the legislators of the haves? The census is the last political form to recognize private property.
The fact that the common men of Rome were more and more likely to be poor slaves furthered the process and deepened the abyss between the haves and have-nots.
With the humanization of the West will come the salvation of those tribes who never divided themselves so absolutely into the "haves" and the "have-nots," or who never attained a high mastery over the physical universe. Are there persons in America who say what, until the present war, many in Old England thought that there is nothing new under the sun?