PERSONALITY IS GREATER THAN PROPERTY.
Correlated with the postulate which places moral law above physical is the conception that personality is of more worth than property. Upon this is likewise based the idea of the kingdom of God upon earth. This preserves the individuality in the unity of the organism. This is a basis for demands for a health producing, or at least for condemnations of a health-destroying environment, that have made so large a part of this movement. This ideal furnished the inspiration for the stinging indictment in Kingsley's "Cheap Clothes and Nasty." This furnishes the motive impulse for sweating crusades, for the demand for shorter hours, for higher wages, for juster laws as to corporations, etc. Whatever may be the extravagances of many social reformers, this their major premise cannot be vacated.
Some forms of socialism, especially communistic types, are based on things; Christian socialism is based on personality. Kingsley said, "Man after all is the most precious and useful thing on the earth, and no cost spent in the development of human beings can possibly be thrown away." It is upon this point that Ruskin's socialism and Christian socialism are one, though Ruskin presents this truth with a fervor unequaled even by the righteous indignation of many Christian agitators. How poorly this harmonizes with current industrial axioms does not need exposition. Prevalent socialistic demands have stultified themselves by an insistence upon economic dues to the exclusion of less material needs. "Christian socialism is not merely a question of the stomach; it is also a question about equitable distribution of ideal goods, the means of higher culture as the results of a progressive civilization."[1] While this is also true of socialism, it has lost through neglect some of its strongest arguments.
Though Christian socialism has no Ruskin or Morris, yet the æsthetic demands of human nature have not been overlooked. Kingsley was essentially a poet and dwelt upon the artistic satisfaction of human desires.
- ↑ Christian Socialism, p. 201.
