THE INDICTMENT OF DIVES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2086, 15 February 1894, Page 42

THE INDICTMENT OF DIVES.

The justification of private property is the general good. If it could be shown — which it cannot — that individual ownership is incompatible with the general good, no effectual defence of it would be possible. The claims of the social organism, in which rights acquire validity, come before those of the individual. " Solus populi suprema lex." And the test whereby the advantages of one proprietary system over another — for example, of the ryotwary over the zemindary — must be determined is in its results to the community at large. The right to property is not a right of the same primary and aboriginal kind as the right, say, to existence. And even that right is not absolute. It is conditioned by the duty to work. It is limited by the obligation to respect the like right in other men, It is fiduciary and must be exercised for the benefit of, and in subordination to, the community, which may, for a just cause, take the life of any one of its members, or require him to lay down his life for it.

No society can long endure which is dominated by what Professor Marshall describes as " the cruelty and waste of irresponsible competition and the licentious use of wealth." We must say of it as the ,wise Duke of Weimar said of the First Napoleon in the noontide of his glory,- "It is unjust ; it cannot last." The moral law is supreme over nations as over the individuals of whom nations are composed, and can no more be violated by nations than by individuals without incurring the penalty which is "the other half of crime." To me the gravest elgn of the times is the widespread disbelief in the existence of that law — the desire to set up in the place thereof the laws of biology, the laws of physiology, the laws of con .fort. I count it atheism of the worst kind, for it is not the rejection of this or that formula wherewith profession is made, more or leas intelligently, of faith in the Absolute and Eternal ; no, it is the rejection of that conception, of that fact of ethical obligation in which the Thei&tic idea is rooted ; " which carries with it the implied relations of an individual with a Universal Will conceived as perfectly rational," as Supreme Righteousness ; which assures us of a life beyond the phenomenal, when justice shall at last triumph, where its rewards and penalties shall be adequately realised, and so bears witness of a Supreme Moral Governor who shall bring about that triumph. The central idea of the parable cf Dives and Lazarus is that beyond the grave wrong shall be redressed, compensation given ; that no one shall have suffered inequitably or in vain; that restitution shall be made there to those who have been disinherited here. On that teaching the poor lived throughout those agea which, whatever else they were or were not, most assuredly were '• ages of faith." St. Edmund of Canterbury, in his " Mirror," one of the most popular books in mediaeval Eogland, lays it down with startling plainness that the rich can be saved only by the poor; since the poor are they of whom it is said that theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven, and only through them can the rich enter in. Dives has had his consolation here, the hereafter belongs to Lazarus; the rich man must share with the beggar in this world if he would have fellowship and portion with him 5n the next. Such was the contribution of Christianity to "the social problem," as we now speak. Can it be — I do not say settled, for it is always with us, but — rationally handled without that belief in the D.vine Law of Rigthteousness which thus found expression. It is a question •worth pondering. — W. S. Lilly, in the New Review.