A Trinity of Modern Life

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 33, 2 November 1929, Page 21

A Trinity of Modern Life

j j KILL, trusteeship, and scientific method—these three indicate the * main sources of strength in modern civilisation. Taken together they constitute a magnificent endowment deeply rooted in the past, maintain the civilisation of to-day, and invite development in the interests of a better civilisation yet to be.”—Dr. L. P. Jacks. “The citizen is essentially a trustee, and the function performed by him or her is that of bearing and fulfilling responsibility. The greater the benefit the citizen enjoys from the State or the social system the more extensive becomes his responsibility. The security, for example, which he gets from the protection of the law is guaranteed him, not that he might enjoy the selfish isolation, but that he might have a secure basis for serving the community. His rights create responsibilities at every point,” writes Dr. L, P. Jacks, Principal of Manchester College, Oxford, in the “Clarion.” “The worst wrong we can do the citizen is to place him in a condition where he is of no value to other people, where he has no opportunities for service, where he has no duties that are worth doing, where he is either so pampered on the one hand or so impoverished on the other that he is no use to anybody. “The citizen has the right to work —yes; but he has not only the right to work for fair wages, he has also the right to work for no wages at all if he chooses to do so, as many of the best men in the world have done and always will do. The free citizen has the right to enjoy happiness, but ho has also the right to suffer pain if he is so willed. The right to suffer pain is one of the most significant rights of men and women. A good social system is one which would increase the responsibility reposed in the citizens, and not the one which deprives them of responsibility by treating them as if they were all regimented units in a mass.

“Though man was made to be a worker, he was not made for any kind

of work we might choose to give him. He was not made for the work of a machine, and he was not made for the work of a beast of burden. If we give a man the work of a beast of burden or the work of a machine we wrong his nature just as deeply as if we gave him no work at all. The kind of work human nature asks for, takes to, and delights in, is work which gives the doer of it a sense of his personal usefulness, and so maintains his selfrespect and entitles him to the respect of his fellow men.

“The man or woman whose occupation is of no aocial value is a frustrated human being, no matter whether he or she lives in a palace, a prison, or a slum. This ideal of a socially valuable occupation has not had the prominence given to it that it deserves as the great alm of education. “In these days society is sadly in need of an industrial version %f morality. Man as a political being, man as a voter, has been well taught by the political moralist—though he has not always learnt even that lesson —but man as a worker has been left to find his moral way as best as he could. He has been ill-instructed. The love of our fellow men, to take an instance, is a very lofty virtue.

“It has been extensively preached, but the industrial version of the love of man, so far as I know, has never been effectively presented. The love of our fellow men has been brought before us as if it were a beneficent extra, a virtue which we exercise in our leisure time, which has nothing to do with the hammering and the ploughing and the manufacturing, with the accountkeeping and the book-writing by which we earn our daily bread. “I venture to think that the love of man has very much to do with these occupations. If it is a reality it will express itself by the quality of the goods we put on the market and by the thoroughness of the service we offer. The love of man would make us ashamed of any false service, or any wrongs inflicted on our brother man.”