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Denmark has enriched our educational experience by the establishment of her famous high schools, which we can hardly imagine her doing had she been a province of Prussia; Norway has given us the greatest of modern dramatists, Henrik Ibsen; and Belgium has not only produced Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, but is industrially the most highly developed country on the continent.
If, then, in any capitalistic country, such as Great Britain or America, the business of production could become socialised to-morrow, the best that could possibly happen would be the transformation of the present employers into so many state officials, who industrially would be the state itself.
The great bulk of men and women were industrially much more nearly on a level than they are today. A poor level, I grant you, for with the exception of the privileged classes, few and small were the political powers and therefore the social control of even men.
I hear reformers sometimes in their zeal picturing the dreadful condition of affairs socially or industrially or politically, and saying that the world is getting worse and worse, that the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer, and the republic is becoming more corrupt week by week and year by year, giving the impression that the world in general is on the down grade.
The conditions of industrial life are in our day in some degree controllable by political power so that at this point woman again finds herself civilly and industrially at greater disadvantage than when her status in all these respects depended principally upon her individual capacity to handle efficiently problems arising within an area limited by purely personal relationships.
In a few more generations humans might be able to accomplish that and public health could improve on factory food. In the meanwhile, the health of humans has declined. Industrially farmed foods have also been lowered in nutritional content compared to what food could be.
For the sake of man, then, that intellectually, politically, socially, industrially, every other way, he may be free to grow, to expand, to adopt all the new ideas that promise higher help, hope, and freedom, for the sake of man, we refuse to be bound by the inherited and fixed opinions of the past. Now two or three points I wish to speak of briefly, as I near the close.
Commercially and industrially alike Great Britain stands at the head of all European nations. Its abundant mineral wealth, especially in coal and iron, has stimulated manufactures to the highest degree, while its insular character and numerous seaports have had a similar stimulating effect upon commerce.
And if the development and advance have been great industrially and commercially, so have they been great, almost greater, socially; for socially we have set examples which the whole world has not been slow to follow. "But Heaven hath a hand in these events." Richard II, Act V.
In the common run of such presentations of the celestial abodes, the office of this corps of servants is a vicarious leisure, their time and efforts being in great measure taken up with an industrially unproductive rehearsal of the meritorious characteristics and exploits of the divinity; while the background of the presentation is filled with the shimmer of the precious metals and of the more expensive varieties of precious stones.
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