One may present the thrift of labour as a matter of duty to society. But Morris saw that it was more than that; and he lit it with the sunlight of the warmer virtues. It is not merely society that we have to consider, or the direction of its superfluous energy. 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. She has taken the place for us of the old original sin; and the belief in her is far more primitive than the belief in original sin. She is in fact but a modern name for all the malignant idols that savages have worshipped with sacrifices of blood and tears that they did not wish to make. It is strange that, priding ourselves as we do on our modern scepticism which has taught us to disbelieve in the miracle of the Gadarene swine, we yet have not dared to affirm the plain fact that this nature, this human nature, does not exist. There is no force, no process, whether within us or outside us, that compels us to act contrary to our desires and our interests. There is nothing but fear; and fear can be conquered, as by individuals, so by the collective will of man. It is fear that produces war, the fear that other men are not like ourselves, that they are hostile animals governed utterly by the instinct of self-preservation.

So it is fear that produces the class war and the belief that it must always continue. It is our own fears that cut us off from happiness by making us despair of it. The man who has capital sees it as a means of protecting himself and his children from poverty; it is to him a negative, defensive thing, at best the safeguard of a negative, defensive happiness. So others see it as something which he has and they have not, something they would like to snatch from him if they could. But if he saw capital as a creative thing, like the powers of the mind, like the genius of the artist, then it would be to him a means of positive happiness both for himself and for others. He would say to himself, not How can I protect myself with this against the tyranny of the struggle for life? not How can I invest this? but What can I do with this? He would see it as Michelangelo saw the marble when he looked for the shape within it. And then he would rise above the conception of mere duty as something we do against our own wills, or of virtue as a luxury of the spirit to which we escape in our little leisure from the struggle for life. Virtue, duty, would be for him life itself; in creation he would attain to that harmony of duty and pleasure which is happiness.

If only we could see that the superfluous energy of mankind is something out of which to make the happiness of mankind we should find our own happiness in the making of it. There is still for us a gulf between doing good to others and the delight of the artist, the craftsman, in his work. The artist is one kind of man and the philanthropist another; the artist is a selfish person whom we like, and the philanthropist an unselfish person whom we do not like. What we need is to fuse them in our use of capital, in our exercise of the superfluous energy of mankind. There are single powerful capitalists who know this joy of creation, who are benevolent despots, and yet are suspect to the poor because of their great power. But it never enters the head of the smaller investor that he, too, might create instead of merely investing; that, instead of being a shareholder in a limited liability company, he might be one of a creative fellowship, not merely earning dividends but transforming cities, exalting things of use into things of beauty, giving to himself and to mankind work worth doing for its own sake, work in which all the obsolete conflicts of rich and poor could be forgotten in a commonwealth. That is the vision of peace which our sacrifices in the war may earn for us. We have learned sacrifice and the joy of it; but, so far, only so that we may overcome an enemy of our own kind. There remains to be overcome, by a sacrifice more joyful and with far greater rewards, this other old enemy not of our own kind, the enemy we call nature or human nature, the enemy that is so powerful merely because we dare not believe that she does not exist.



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