Page:Earth-Hunger and Other Essays.djvu/217

Rh in its struggle to assert itself against militancy; but the industrial classes, as fast as they have attained wealth, have deserted industrialism to seek alliance with aristocracy, or to adopt the modes of life which the militant tradition marks as more honorable. The revolt against the notion that some forms of useful service to society are in themselves more worthy than others, is as yet, therefore, by no means complete. The so-called labor movement is full of evidence that the old notions still prevail in the manual labor classes; that those classes do not themselves heartily believe in the dignity of labor; that they are not proud of their own social functions; that they have been imbued by their leaders, not with honorable self-respect and a spirit of determination to vindicate their own worth in the social body, but only with enough vague aspiration to produce an irritated sense of inferiority. The socialistic movement bears strongest evidence to the strength of the old traditions; the assertions of fact from which it starts, in respect to the position, relations, rights, and wrongs of classes, are all obtained by applying the feudal traditions to the existing situation. The socialists by no means urge that the hod-carrier and the statesman in existing society shall be regarded as performing functions each in his way useful to society and both equally honorable if performed with equal fidelity. That is the bourgeois and capitalistic doctrine. The socialists assume that the two are not now equally worthy in popular esteem or social weight, or, consequently, in industrial fact, and they assert that the existing order must be changed so as to make them equal, not in worth, but in the personal enjoyment which can be won from the social functions and in the ideals of humanity which can be attained through them.