principle. In his office he has been perhaps an authority; in any social gathering-at a dinner-party, for examplelet him be a person never so important, he is just as much and just as little of an authority as any one else. Nor may it be said that the host and hostess are now the authorities; although they occupy commonly the two ends of the table it is not for the purpose of preserving order.

In brief, there is no "social system". "System", we may see now, is abhorrent to the motive of the social. And a "social organization" is a plain contradiction in terms. Bosanquet will have it that a man is not a man except as he is a member of "organized society"; what I would point out is that he is not a man except as he is more than a member of an organization. To see the contradiction, compare a group of four men who meet once a week, with no hard and fast engagement, to play a game of bridge, and a similar group of twenty-five or thirty. The latter can hardly be maintained without organization. But it will be noted that just so far as the element of organization enters the situation the social element departs. A "social glass", or cup of tea, is properly named; to call the income-tax a "social institution" is misplaced senti

ment.

Yet there is order, even within the group of four; an order sustained, not by any form of authority, but by mutual understanding. And there are, if you please, distinctions: just those intensively personal distinctions indeed, eluding all attempts to standardize them, which constitute the essence of a relation distinctively social. And I suppose that every one "has his place" (if that be important) in the regard and respect of his fellows. It is not, however, "that station in life to which it hath pleased

God to call him", but inevitably the station that he is able to win by his talents and to demonstrate as his own by the force of his personality.

Nor may it be said that the world of leisure is an inactive or unproductive world. But in this world things have to be done with a careful regard for the rights and the tastes of those doing them; and the operating method is not the method of command and obey, but the method of co-operation by agreement. And the principle of agreement is the principle of mutual understanding with regard to taste and convenience-not mutual self-sacrifice, but that artistic completeness of convenience, rendering full justice to each, which, though never absolutely attainable, becomes ever more nearly attainable as men come to a truly personal understanding with one another.

The practical moral problem-the problem both moral and practical-is then to import these humanly social relations into the conduct of men in business, so as to transform-without loss of efficiency, perhaps even with an eventual increase of efficiency-the world of business into a moral world. How far this can be done, how immediately in any given case, need not concern us here. What I would point out is that any such problem is faced with at least an immediate issue between the human considerations and the business considerations. To get things done is one consideration, to get them morally done is quite another. In this issue the ideal of the ordered society stands not for humanity but for utility.

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Morality, I have said, is the self-conscious living of life. From this point of view it is an advance in morality when

men learn to choose what they will do, and to insist upon choosing, rather than when they "learn to obey the constituted authorities". And in illustration of this I will close this chapter with some remarks bearing upon "the decay of reverence”—which I will put somewhat in the form of a fable. It has often occurred to me to speculate upon the moral status of the lower animals, and to wonder why ethical theories are so seldom tested by reference to our attitude towards these, our animal kinsmen. I fear it may be because in the background we detect the presence of ominous questions.2 Some time ago, however, I thought of asking, What if the horses and cattle were suddenly endowed with self-consciousness and the power of speech? Suppose that the draft-horses became aware of what they contributed in the economic process, or that the food-cattle came to know that they were to be eaten and could tell us that they knew? I fear that after a discussion of this subject with one of the then cultivated and instructed members of this species, we should find that a good beefsteak had lost some of its flavor. On the other hand, I imagine that the cattle would flatly refuse to be eaten. It would be useless to call Dr. Paley to explain to them out of the Bible that God intended them to be food for man; and no less useless to dwell upon the superior importance of human life as compared with theirs. They, very properly, would never see it. If we threatened coercion, they could, as a last resort (what we should do in their place), threaten

2 In his Autobiography Anthony Trollope offers an amusingly naïve justification of his favorite sport of fox-hunting, based gravely upon a computation of the pain suffered by the fox as compared with the pleasure of a hundred or two hunters. Trollope forgets that the importance attributed by him to the gratification of the hunting-instinct of the hunter places the hunter who chases the fox in the same order of nature with the fox who chases the hareand then why bother about morality? The fox does not.

race suicide or possibly immediate, individual suicide. Our only recourse would be to treat them as persons worthy of consideration, i. e., as gentlemen, by offering suitable inducements, though what these inducements would be, I must leave the reader to imagine. But one point is clear: we should be facing a situation distinctively moral, confronted with moral agents whose rights, though newly created, we could upon no ground venture to ignore.

Well, the significance of the fable is that this is precisely the situation confronting "the intelligent classes" in the present crisis of social life. "The masses", so called, "the workers", in present-day terms, have just lately (in the history of the race) acquired self-consciousness and the power of speech. Until yesterday these workers, representing numerically all but an insignificant fraction of the race, remained inarticulate in moral philosophy and nearly so in literature. As pointed out above, all Greek ethics, which continues to set the questions for academic ethics, is the ethics of a leisure class. Classical literature makes us almost forget that, then as now, life was supported by work. In ancient literature the worker, usually a slave, remains unrepresented except as Christianity voices his claim to respect in another world. In the Greek view of life he forms a part, not of the moral world, but of the natural world, along with the horses and the cattle. All of our ideas of higher culture are derived from, and still are impregnated with this conception of a social situation which involves the distinction of master and servant. So that, in spite of the change of ideas brought about by the industrial revolution, which makes it now possible to give

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the status of gentleman to a successful business man, we do not yet clearly conceive what a really non-servile higher culture would be.

Meanwhile the industrial revolution, built upon the steam-engine, by segregating and massing the workers has made them class-conscious. In the utilitarian school of ethics we have, for the first time I should say in moral philosophy, the expression of an industrial view of life. One of the consequences of this view is now being presented to the world in emphatic and imperative if also somewhat insolent tones (in which, as betraying a sense of power, they are not peculiar) by the labor unions; whose leaders are proving themselves to be men of no mean intelligence, political and administrative. And of late the labor world, while not relaxing its demand for wages, has announced a claim for participation in the direction of industry. The claim is doubtless shocking, but viewed calmly it seems that nothing could be more characteristically moral. What it means is: personal dignity (dignity in spite of a certain concomitant insolence) is asserting the rights of gentlemen.

Faced with this situation, it is useless to tell them authoritatively where they belong; precisely from the moral standpoint, that remains to be seen. Nor will it avail to refer to the superior wisdom of the intelligent classes. Alas, I fear that, by the side of many of the labor men, the economic philosophy of "the intelligent classes" is only too often naïve! And it is rather late in the day for "the fear of God". They have been warned; and it is a

3 What this means is shown in Mrs. Gaskell's "North and South", in which that clear-minded woman finds it evidently something of a task to show how the daughter of a very poor Anglican clergyman could be conceived to love, and honorably to marry, a well-to-do manufacturer, although a graduate of Oxford-this, of course, seventy years ago.