ABSTRACT
In the Communist State a most valuable experiment is in progress which will help to show how much wealth can be allowed to the individual as a stimulus to effort and saving, without conferring 67privileges and powers which are undesirable from the point of view of the Community. These privileges amount to so many barriers between their possessors and their non-possessors, such that only a spiritual genius can wholly surmount them. The sympathy which enabled St. Francis to identify his own interests with those of the poorest and most suffering made it impossible for him to retain his privileges. Lesser degrees of such sympathy are of course common enough, and are to be measured by the change in mode of life which accompanies them. Christians who even now believe that the inequalities of Society are a Divine ordinance must also see Divine sanction in the distribution of wealth which allows not only two coats but twelve to one man, while his brother has none. This point of view is not favourable to the cultivation of sympathy. On the other hand, Christians who wish to avoid the mischievous privilege of the superfluous coats must also wish to see the distribution of their wealth carried out in the most business-like way possible, i.e., by the machinery of the State, which alone can secure the equitable distribution of the means of subsistence and with it the universal levelling of wealth’s barriers to mutual understanding and good will. Throughout the vast population of Russia, mutual understanding and sympathy, in other words, human unity, have been made easier for future generations than in any other ‘civilized’ country 68(except, perhaps, for a few tiny communities). Have the errors in the mode of achievement been so unusual and so deadly as to poison all the good? The progress of every civilization in the world, not least our own, has been attended by innumerable errors and evils, and yet it is usual to judge such good as does surround us on its own merits.
