Page:Challenge of Facts and Other Essays.djvu/117

98 then "justice" can mean nothing but the unrestricted play of supply and demand. Nobody will be bound to cease grumbling at the result, but each will accept it as the best that he could get in a world of toil and disappointment. He will be satisfied that his neighbors have not robbed him. If, on the other hand, we do not believe that there are any economic forces at work in the matter, or that, if there are any, they work under any necessary laws, then we must regard the adjustment of interests as a product of arbitrary effort. There can then be no right and no justice at all; the only thing to be expected is war, industrial war, carried on by the parties in interest each for himself and to the utmost. Such is the only result to which we can come, and the socialists have generally reached it. There is no doubt that it is a clear issue between two schools of political economy which are diametrically opposed to each other. If there are economic laws, then it behooves us to find them out and submit to them; for they must control all economic interests, and only under them can we establish peace, order, and justice. If there are no economic laws, then war is the normal and only possible condition of society, unless we take refuge under the pitiless despotism of the socialistic state, with its hierarchy of volluptuaries at the top and the stolid barbarism of its brutish masses at the bottom. To reject the economic laws, accept the condition of industrial war, and then look to "ethics" to rule the social tempest, is beneath discussion.

An industrial war is not like a military combat. It is an extension of the old commercial war, which consisted in inflicting a positive harm on one's self in the hope of causing a contingent harm to one's enemy. It is at best like the schoolboy game known as "cutting jackets."