Any political changes which can be presented as an invasion of the “rights” of property have a flavour of wickedness about them. Any abolition of class distinctions connected with reputable modes of earning incomes carries at least a presumption of wrong-doing. The differences of manner, bearing, speech, between the gentry and the common people, are still accepted and valued as genuine contributions to the varied interests of national life. These differences have declined in intensity of feeling from eighteenth-century ruralism to modern urbanity, but they remain strongly marked even in the blending of large city life. Though the sentiment of “worship” only remains for royalty, various grades of “reverence” still attach to the upper classes; gentility and respectability are qualities retaining some emotional value.
This refusal to apply clear reasoning to unveil the defects of political and economic institutions, and the social respectabilities and class distinctions associated with them, is in some measure due to the stubborn objection of “rationalists” to apply to property, income, profit, and other economic concepts the same relentless logic they apply to religious concepts. Few of them have gone so far as to explore the measure of truth which underlies Marx’s assertion that religion is the dope of capitalism.
While, then, the ethical movement is founded upon the conviction that morality is independent of theology, goodness having a directly human origin and appeal,
