Some Social Responsibilities of a Young Community.

By Rev. Rutherford Waddell, M.A.

Responsibilities to whom, or what? First, to the Past. It has put into our hands a great heritage—a heritage of race, riches, thought, law liberty, literature, language, religion. These things are the fruitage of the slow centuries of the toils and tears of our fathers. Key have given us these things in trust. It is a great trust, and, therefore, a great responsibility. Now, youth has a tendency to refuse to be bound by its past. What is true of the individual is true of the community. My point, therefore, is that to do this is fatal to true and full development. Nations, as persons, belong to the past. They are its children. They are organically connected; their roots are in it. They draw their best sustenance from it. There is a floating atmosphere of traditions, memories, sentiments, customs, modes of thought and feeling and action, whose air we breathe, which is in our blood and our brain, and from which we cannot suddenly separate ourselves without severing arteries essential to a harmonious life. No nation has ever attempted to do it without disaster. France, e.g., a century ago made an experiment of the kind. The Revolutionists, as Mr. Rusell Lowell puts it, "carefully grubbed up every root that drew its sustenance from the past, and have been finding out ever since, to their sorrow, that nothing with roots can be made to order."

page 18

I know, of course, it is possible to abuse this truth—possible to make it procuress to a blind conservatism—possible

. . . . to sit, the idle slaves
Of a legendary virtue, carved upon our father's graves;

still, I think this is the lesser danger that besets us, and gives the right to insist on the other truth.

In the second place, the Present lays certain social responsibilities upon us. The word "social" itself points a moral. It is a new word. It belongs to this century, and chiefly to the latter half of it The keynote of the past was individualism, now it is socialism—(I use: the term in its broadest sense). Formerly the watchword of reforms was the rights of man; now it is the duties of man. The battles of our fathers used to be over theological questions; now they are over such questions as temperance, labour and capital, land laws, sanitary laws, factory laws, &c. Mazzini long ago was right in saying that "every political question was rapidly becoming a social question." What, then, is the social responsibility of a young community in the present? The most important I can think of is the assertion of its organic unity. That covers everything. The word "social" implies that we belong to each other. How?—as the units of a sand-heap? No, but as the members of a body. Therefore, the stronger is bound to serve the weaker. It is more than a duty—it is a necessity of existence. Moreover, "if one member suffer, all the members suffer; with it." A popular political economy says that every man should mind his own business. That may be the way to make money. It is not the way to make manhood; and the nation that neglects that is not long for this world. France, e.y., pours the scum of her scoundrel ism into adjacent islands. This is the product of the sins of men and women whom we never saw; yet we have to suffer for their sins. Thus, we are all bound together. The race is a unity. What enriches one enriches all—what impoverishes one impoverishes all. If this were realised, how could we permit such miseries in our midst as the "sweating" revelations discovered? It is a disgrace that such things should be in a young community. Who benefits by low prices? Nobody. Ultimately, everybody is the poorer. A few grow rich for a little, but, their gold is spotted with human blood. And is that a thing to be proud of? And whose business is it to put an end to these and all other wrongs? It is everybody's business. We are so related that the suffering of one must touch all, for, as I have said, we are not a sandhill, but an organism. We have tried individualism, isolation, long enough. Its fruit is death. As Rossetti, in one of his fine sonnets, puts it—

Because man is parcelled out in men
To-day; because for any wrongful blow
No man not stricken, asks, "I would be told
Why thou dost strike?" but his heart whispers then,
He is he. 1 am I. By this we know
That the earth falls asunder, being old.

So we do. That is what wrecked all the old civilisations and threatens all the new. Let us be warned.

page 19

Another present responsibility of a young community is education. This is doubly special to us, because we are young, and because we are a democracy. Our ideal is Lincoln's "Government of the people by the people, for the people." This irresistibly postulates universal education. An aristocracy, an oligarchy may do without it; a democracy cannot. It is essential to its very life. Our kings of to-day are not in Windsor or Wellington; they are at the street corners, in workshops, in fields. But if these cannot govern themselves, how are they to govern each other? There must be education—education equally for the poorest as for the highest. It must be a real education, not a cramming of 'ologies, but a drawing out of faculties. It must embrace the whole of the nature, not a part only. It must contemplate more than material ends—more than how to make a living. The seat of our best emotions is not in our stomachs. It is in our souls; and neither men nor nations are profited if they gain the world and lose these. Bacon said of wars that they went on their bellies; but a democracy cannot, or, if it does, it will soon go to dust? Our danger is that we are going to try to live by bread alone. There is a lack of the ideal, the spiritual, in our education. It is made too subservient so bread and butter considerations. It wants a high outlook, a moral perspective. I would like to see, therefore, the State putting its ablest to teach, and paying them well. I would like to see the way to the highest education made free to the poorest child in our community. It is costly to do all this, you say? Yes, but it is far more costly not to do it. True education is never expensive. Ignorance always is.

In the third place, we owe responsibility to the Future. I put emphasis here on the word "young." The child is father to the man. Trite is this truth, but it must still be repeated. As with the individual, so with the community, so with the nation. What the future of this country will be depends on us who are here to-day. History and heredity assure us of this. Great is our trust, and great therefore our responsibility. Think for a minute how great. Take our material resources. We boast of our rich soil and mineral wealth. We do well. But all this is a trust—we have but a life interest in it. It belongs to the future as well as to us—we are simply stewards. It is required in a steward that he be found faithful. Faithful! Are we? What do we see? Year by year we see this vast trust passing into the hands of private individuals, syndicates, and companies. We see a responsible Minister of the Crown actually asking praise of his country for his skill in thus bartering away the rights of the people and of posterity. It is a pitiable spectacle. It is as if one sitting on a plank that bridges the chasm between two precipices should rejoice at the agility with which he is sawing through his own seat. I agree with those who, like Dr. Abbott, criticise Henry George as not being sufficiently radical. He objects to private property in land: I object to primate property in anything. So does the Bible. It knows nothing of absolute ownership. Here is our country—its soil, its gold, its silver, its coal, and all the rest. Who made these? Who stored these up?—and for whom? For a London syndicate, or a private capitalist? No, these are great trusts. None of us have a vested interest in them.

page 20

They belong to those who come after us, as well to those who are here to-day. If we alienate them we are as dishonest as the steward who appropriates his employer's gold.

Then there is our scenery. We make much of this, and rightly. It is our best asset, even financially. It is quite singular in its variety. Within a few hours' travel you may pass through all the wonders and wealths of the five zones, and yet fire and axe are busy by river and lake, and hill and city, reducing forests and ferns to ashes. Why should not Government step in and stop the Vandals and Huns who are turning our natural beauties into desolations? These also are trusts, and to allow them to be destroyed as we do is not only a disgrace to ourselves, but a crime against posterity. Why should not Government also set aside large reserves all over the country for parks and gardens? Why should not Municipal Councils make like provision in our towns and cities? We are a small folk yet, but shortly we shall have a teeming population. Now is the time to secure that our children shall have light and lungs, open spaces, fresh air, healthy cities, and lovely landscapes. This is the opportunity that never returns. One law "now is worth ten half-a-century hence. It may be true, as somebody has said, that legislation can never be the driving force of social reform; but it should at least be the ratchet-wheel holding every advance. It should preserve and extend what we have. It should keep our land, our mines, our scenery, as a sacred trust for the people and posterity.! Let me fortify myself here by John Ruskin. In the "Seven Lamps of Architecture," he says that few think of self-denial, of economy, of planting forests and raising cities for posterity; "yet these are not the less our duties; nor is our part fitly sustained upon the earth, unless the range of our deliberate usefulness include not only the companion! but the successors of our pilgrimage. God has lent us the earth for our life—it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who come after us as to ourselves, and we have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath." How true is this, and how pertinent to us! For our outlook is low and near. Our young men, one is often vexed to find, think only of the present. The materialism that threatens us is not that of Haeckel or Buchner—it is the materialism of land and gold—the materialism that binds us to earth, and keeps our eyes from the sun and the stars. We need to get our vision enlarged, to realise that society is an organism, and! national life a continuity. We want to be taught that the individual may indeed escape here the visible consequences of his sins by dying but that while the individual life is fleeting, the collective life of the community and of the State abides, and carries stamped upon it for long centuries the faults and follies of its ancestors.

We want to realise, too, that the best fruit is slowest in ripening, and that the further off we place our aim, the richer and more abiding our success. If Zealandia will help to teach us these things, then I may be permitted to say to it the words Mathew Arnold wrote to a Republican friend—

page 21

God knows it. I am with you! If to prize
Those virtues, prized and practised by too few,

Man's fundamental life; if to despise
The barren, optimistic sophistries
Of comfortable moles, whom what they do
Teaches the limit of the just and true
(And for such doing they require no eyes).
If sadness at the long heart-wasting show
Wherein earth's great ones are disquieted;
If thoughts not idle, while before us flow
The armies of the homeless and unfed—
If these are yours, if this is what you are,
Then I am yours, and what you feel I share.