The proposition to revert to an earlier period suggests
nothing more than the repetition of an experience out of which the
present state of affairs has evolved.
Nor is there ground for the hope that in time institutions and
relationships will be regulated on principles of altruism. It is not
apparent indeed that such regulations would yield even the present
allowance of happiness incident to our own immature method of
capturing what wealth we can without relation to social factors. As
unfortunate as we are in pursuit of that blind method, it is safe to
predict that the world would be a madder place than it is to-day if
every one devoted himself to doing what he believed was for the good
of everybody else.
The hope of social revolutionists that private business would
overreach itself and defeat its own purpose, grew out of the
expectation that its tribute exactions would draw the subjects of
capital together in a common defensive movement; that the movement on
account of its numbers would overturn business and that in place of
private management democratic control would be instituted. Some
such outcome, sooner or later, seems inevitable if civilization is
scheduled to advance. The labor union movement, unlike the political
socialist revolutionary movement, undertakes in its operation to
supply labor with a certain working content, which the administrative
scheme of industry has excluded from the experience of its workers.
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