What justifies it, then? The unwritten law of heaven?
No. The law of humanism? No. The law of the jungle? Yes.
Now for our second question. By what law, admitting many exceptions,
are men on the whole trying to change this situation at once indecent
and impious? This is a yet more important query. Our world has
obviously awakened to the rottenness in Denmark. But where are we
turning for our remedy? Is it to the penitence and confession, the
public-mindedness, the identification of the fate of the individual
with the fate of the whole group which is the religious impulse? Is it
to a disinterested and even-handed justice, the high legalism of the
Golden Rule, which would be the humanist's way? Or is it to the old
law of aggression and might transferring the gain thereof from the
present exploiters to the recently exploited?
It would appear to be generally true that society at this moment is
not chiefly concerned with either love or justice, renunciation
or discipline, not with the supplanting of the old order, but
with perpetuating the naturalistic principle by means of a partial
redivision of the spoils, a series of compromises, designed to make it
more tolerable for one class of its former victims. Thus in capital we
have the autocratic corporation, atoning for past outrages on humanity
by a well-advertised benevolent paternalism, calculated to make men
comfortable so that they may not struggle to be free, or by huge gifts
to education, to philanthropy, to religion.
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