Page:Socialism, Its Growth and Outcome - William Morris and Ernest Belfort Bax (1909).djvu/24

 10 of another age, has now become a sham. With this sham moreover its accompanying morality is also steeped, although it has a use as serving for a cover of a morality really the birth of the present condition of things, and this is clung to with a determination or even ferocity natural enough, since its aim is the perpetuation of individual property in wealth, in workman, in wife,, in child.

The so-called morality of the present age is simply commercial necessity, masquerading in the forms of the Christian ethics: for instance, commercial honour is merely the code necessitated by the needs of men in commercial relations which without it could not subsist, and which has au fond nothing in common with the Christian "do unto others as thou wouldst," etc., maxim, in the name of which it is on occasion invoked. The only connection that current commercial ethics has with the Christian is, as we said above, a purely formal one. The mystical individualist ethics of Christianity, which had for its supreme end another world and spiritual salvation therein, has been transformed into an individualist ethic