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335
LLO
PRICE ONE PENNY.
THE
!
I NEW CONSCIENCE,
:
OR
RELIGION OF LABOUR.
j
BY
■
HENRY D. ILLOYD.
Reprinted by permission from the “ North American
Review f and Revised by the Author.
•
EDITION.
THIRD
LONDON :
Published for the New Fellowship, at 34, Great Ormond
Street, W.C.
1893.
No. 6.
Fellowship Series.
��Four hundred years before the workingman of Nazareth
in behalf of the toilers of the world came to deliver his
message of love and a sword, a new conscience stirred
some obscure heart in Greece to speak for liberty for the
labourer.
Plato was dreaming of the elevation of man through
impossible Republics and preposterous stirpiculture, and
had no ear for this new voice. But Aristotle, man of
science, knowing that the humblest of opinions may come
to be the biggest of facts, puts it on record, though
evidently merely as an eccentricity of contemporary
thought. “ There are some,” he says, “ who think that it
is only the fashion of despotic government which makes
one man a slave and another free, and that the tie must be
unjust because it is founded in force.” His was one of the
greatest of minds, but it never divined that in this whisper
of the new conscience of a few nameless Greeks lay the
full diapason of a cry, before which would fall many a wall
of citadeled oppression, built on sand because founded on
force : unjust and therefore unsound. That still small
voice rolls around the world, shaking the oppressor out of
his seat, whether king, priest, man-stealer or monopolist.
To the accompaniment of the guns of Fort Sumter and the
Wilderness it sang the chorus of union and liberty, which
Lincoln in 1861 heard sounding forth from the mystic
chords of the American heart. Those unknown Greeks
were the first Abolitionists. Lincoln signed only a chapter
of the emancipation which they proclaimed, and that not
the last chapter. Ceaseless growth means ceaseless
emancipation. The symphony Lincoln heard plays on.
One by one the cries of imprisoned and imprisoner blend
into the strains of a widening freedom.
�THE NEW CONSCIENCE.
4
It is the fashion of scholars to speak of the Greek
intellect, the Roman will, the Hebrew conscience. The
Hebrew had a conscience, not because he was a Hebrew,
but because he was a man. The same birthright belongs
to the Greek and to all of us. It was the voice of con
science, “ that prophetic sign of my divine monitor,” which
always spoke to Socrates when what he was about to do
would be wrong, and by the same revelation God wrote
the Ten Commandments on the hearts of men before they
were graven on the tables of stone.
Fichte says that the greater the wealth and rank the
greater the vice. Seldom does the new conscience, when
it seeks a teacher to declare to men what is is wrong,
find him in the dignitaries of the church, the state, the
culture that is. The higher the rank, the closer the tie
that binds those to what is, but ought not to be. It is the
tramp, Christ, who has not where to lay his head, the
peasant Luther, the poor mechanic William Lloyd
Garrison, who are free to listen to new truth, and brave
and free to speak the words that lead men out of old
church, and old state, and old industry. The new con
science which warns civilisations to do justice to the
workingmen, has always encountered the opposition of the
mighty ones of earth. If this spirit of love and liberty
stirred in the heart of any Jews of the old dispensation,
their priests, unlike the scientific observer of Athens, let
the fact find no record in their scriptures. Aristotle
declared that no man could be a workingman and lead
a life of virtue. In ancient times, learned, pious,
patriotic, noble, all agreed that the victor who had the
r’ght to kill had the right to command, and that he who
was given his life had no right to demand his liberty.
Lawyers invented the doctrine that the slave could not
buy his freedom, for the money he proffered for it must be
his master’s. The early Christian Church did not so much
disapprove of slavery as of the enslavement of its own
members.1 In the United States religious synods voted
that the slavery agitation should be suppressed by laying
on the table, unread, all petitions, resolutions, and other
papers about it, and Evangelical Alliances forbade young
people to dance, but refused to declare it sinful for a bishop
�5
THE NEW CONSCIENCE.
to hold slaves. Boston hissed the fanatic who declared
that the theatre would receive the gospel of anti-slavery
truth earlier than the churches. But in two years slaves
on the stage in “Uncle Tom” shot their hunters amid
loud applause, while the pulpit remained silent or hostile.
As for property, its broadcloth mobs attacked meetings of
women for proclaiming the new freedom, dragged
Garrison. through the streets of Boston to hang him for
maintaining the right of the black workingman to fuller
growth, and its Presidents and Supreme Court Judges ran
with the bloodhounds to catch the fugitive labourer. The
courts then, as now, made many things successful which
they can never make respectable.
When the subject of the extension of slavery in the
territories was before Congress, a Southern member
arose and told how he loved his black “ mammy.” He
had been nursed at her breast with her own black baby.
“ I love that black mammy,” the Southern member
fervently exclaimed, “ and when I go into Nebraska I
want to take her with me.” “ We do not object,” said
Ben Wade, “to your taking your black mammy with you
to Nebraska; but we don’t mean to let you flog her or sell
her when you get there.” Pro-Slavery law and order
easily proved that to buy and sell workingmen in the
market was constitutional, pious, profitable, based on
contract, benign. All that the new conscience equid reply
was : “ Hear the whistling of that lash, that drip
o
*f
blood,
the cries of that mother, the cries of the children ; see
those empty homes, those human faces twisted out of
shape, master’s as well as man’s.”
It was ridiculous, was it not, to meet those judges and
bishops and millionaires and great editors with this talk
about the lash, and blood, and the sacredness of the
persons of working men and working women ? There'
was no argument in it, only sentiment. The gravestones
of Arlington and Gettysburg prove that sentiment can
*
*
force a hearing.
There came a day when the black mammy could not be
sold or flogged, at home or abroad, when families could
* National Cemeteries in which the soldiers killed in the Civil
War are buried.
�6
THE NEW CONSCIENCE.
not be torn asunder at the auction block, when the great
brothel was closed where half a million of women were
flogged to prostitution, or worse still, degraded to believe
it honourable, when a professedly Christian nation ceased
to deny, by statute, the Bible to every sixth man and
woman of its population. This was what the new con
science did for the slaves with the help of religion, but
against the opposition of the church ; with the help of
the spirit of justice, but against the opposition of lawyers,
judges and legislatures ; with the help of the true science
of labour, but against the efforts of the economists and
capitalists. After all is over, lawyer, priest, professor,
and money-maker find that they were wrong and con
science right, that the theory that treated men and brothers
as chattels or goods was illegal, unjust, irreligious, un
economical, and wealth-destroying.
For twenty-three hundred years the argument never
reached a higher plane than that attained by the forgotten
Greeks, who held that they were unnatural ties which were
founded on force. This revolt against ties founded on
force finds another echo, in the aspirations and ideals of
those who are to-day seeking for themselves and others
the right to work in secure tenure of employment, to live as
long a life as their neighbours live, to live it as freely and
to rear healthfully and happily children to live after them.
It was the force of battle that overcame the labourer of
the old régime ; it is the force of the market that subdues
the labourer of to-day. The tie between the labourer and
the master is still one of force, although it is not now one
of visible chains. You say, “The labourer is free, he
consents.” Yes, free as the captive was—to work for
what he can get or die. Like him he consents to save his
life, or, more accurately, a part of his life. The Con
gressional Committee, investigating the strike of the
Reading Railroad’s men, asked General Manager Whiting,
as reported by the Associated Press : “ Have you made no
effort to supply the places of the striking miners ? ”
“No, sir.”
“ Why ?”
“ Because we desire and expect our old men to come
�THE NEW CONSCIENCE.
7
“ On your own terms ? ”
“ At the old rates, yes.”
“What force do you rely upon to bring these men
luack ? ”
“Well, sir, their necessities.”
It is not by free will that the workingmen of to-day
■work ten, twelve, or fourteen hours, take competitive
wages, live in poor tenements at high rents, spend their
■days as the mere servants or grooms of machinery, and,
sending out their little boys and girls, and their pregnant
wives to work, sacrifice almost everything that makes
-•family life for you and me so sweet. They do not submit
;by consent to live a life not much above half the average
length of that of the prosperous. Workingmen the world
•over are struggling to free themselves by every means of
strikes, protest, organization, even to the desperation of
physical violence. Singular behaviour, is it not, for men
"who are only doing what they want to do? They are
■kept down by force, by the force of competition instead of
■conquest, by the strategy of the generals of supply and
demand. Once it was the force of the wairior, now it is
the force of the capitalist. It was their weakness and the
■strength of others which formerly made the workingmen
merchandise, and force still keeps them at the mercy of
the markets. But the unresting heart of man is always in
-revolt against ties founded on force.’ Yesterday it de•clared that government is the control of man by man, and
7that the rights of rulers are drawn from the consent of the
..governed. To-day it avows that property is the control of
man by man. That the rights of the ruled are the source
■of the rights of the rulers in property as much as in
.government. That if the common people can be allowed
to vote in government, they can be allowed to vote in that
•other government, property. That if they do not insist
•upon their right to vote upon all affairs of property, they
■will lose their right to vote in matters of government.
'That there is no conscience, new or old, which compels
the many to die undeveloped in order that the few may
Hive misdeveloped.
What stirred the warriors’ heart to spare the captive
instead of killing him was the first beat of a new conscience.
�8
THE NEW CONSCIENCE.
When it grew stronger it said: He is more than a com
modity. Grown stronger still, it says to us: His labour is
more than a commodity. The central doctrine of the
slave power was that the labourer was merely merchandise.
The central doctrine of the money power is that labour is
merely merchandise. Society supports the latter, as it did
the former, with the consolidated array of all its institutions
and laws. But both doctrines, and all that is built upon them,
are absolutely destructive not only of the liberties of the
labourer but of the liberties of all. The conscience that said
the labourer shallnot be a commodity though despised of the
builders is now a cornerstone. A new conscience takes its
stand before all our institutions, and says to them: Labour
shall not be a commodity, for the labour is the labourer.
Under the theory of merchantable man the employer
said: My workmen. Under the labour commodity theory
the employer says: My workmen. Neither means mysheep to feed, but my sheep to shear. Congressman
Hutton, of Missouri, says about the Reading strike: “I
am tired of reading about strikes. Capital should be at
liberty to pay whatever it sees fit for labour, and to employ
whom it chooses.” An iron manufacturer lately said: “ If
you employed on a large scale you would soon find that
you ceased to look at your men as men. They are simply
so much ¡producing power.”
If the Captains of Industry can reduce ore to iron only on
these terms of reducing men to units of power, the sooner
the Captains of Industry are discharged, and their places
filled by Brothers of Industry, the better.
Henry Ward Beecher, after the Emancipation of
Slavery, said, amid enthusiastic applause, “We have struck
the shackles from the slave, and made him free and a
citizen. Now he must take care of himself, and work out
his own social and industrial salvation.” “Why? asked
the new conscience, Is he not still your brother ? Because
you have abolished one of the wrongs done him by you,
does that give you the right to maintain the other wrongs t
Are you not still his neighbour? When you work with
him, and divide proceeds into profits and wages, will the
God of Plymouth Church considerately turn his back, so asnot to see whether you love your neighbour as yourself?
�THE NEW CONSCIENCE.
9
The remark of the great pulpit-orator epitomizes the
whole spirit of our civilization towards the labourer.
The ancients bought and sold men; we buy and sell the
heartbeats only. The new theory that though the working
man is not a thing, his labour is a thing, marks but a slight
advance on the old. It means that the labour can be
bought and sold regardless of the man behind it; that the
buyer, the employer, can take any advantage of the seller,
provided he does it under the formulas of supply and
demand; that to buy his life of him cheap and sell it dear
is all we have to do with the labourer; that the only con
science the buyer needs is to observe the rules of the
market; that he can depress or raise prices without moral
responsibility for the backs bent or hearts broken by his
manipulations; that he can take more than he gives,
regardless that the “ goods ” he gets are the lives of workers
who cannot survive if they receive less than they give; that
buyer and seller have a right to deal with each other as if
they were business animals instead of business men. The
labour is the labourer, because the man has to live twentyfour hours in order to be able to work eight or ten. His
heart and head, his thoughts, his wants, his aspirations, all
co-operate to produce the so-called commodity which, at the
sound of the factory bell, is ready to begin the work of the
day. When the man leaves the factory, he but takes the
“ commodity ” away to recuperate his wasted energies for
another day. That which he has left within those walls is
not a thing. It is himself. “ The great fundamental prin
ciple of anti-slavery is that man cannot hold property in
man,” said Garrison, The doctrine that “ labour is a
commodity ” gives man property in man, and is therefore
iniquitous and void. If labour is a commodity, the labourer
is a commodity, and chattel-slavery still exists, freed only
ofall its Biblical and patriarchal restraints, possessed of powers
for abuse more dangerous because indirectly exerted.
If you shall not buy the whole man, you shall not buy or'
sell part of a man. You shall not count into your purses
the ruddy drops, from morn till noon, from noon to dewy
eve, and then say, “ I know not whence they came or how.”
We who “buy” labour, who take the expenditure of
life that labour can part with, and do not return to the
�io
THE NEW CONSCIENCE.
labourer that share in the produce of labour which will
permit him to repair his vitality, maintain a family, attend
to his political duties, save enough for sickness and old age,
have enough for such play and rest as will enable him to
live to his allotted span, are, in the words of the Bible,
“ man-stealers.” In our day and civilization such a man
stealer is as bad and wicked as the slave-holder in his.
We who take from any business profits or interest on
capital, while any of our employees are suffering for want
of means for full growth as individuals, or citizens, are
man-stealers, and we as man-stealers are to-day, as of old,
robbing children of their years of joy, men of their prime,
and mothers of their motherhood. It is no excuse for
merchant or manufacturer or mine-owner or railroad cor
poration that the “ system ” permits, even commands, such
wrongs. Mankind and God never separate the sinner and
sin. The sinners will go down with the “system” if they
don’t change it. The money power so contracts with the
working man, working woman, or working child that it gets
the whole of him or her or it, as Wordsworth says, “ health,
body, mind, and soul,”—it gets the whole twenty-four hours
of him, her, or it—and says, “I cannot share with you
enough to let you live at the rate of twenty-four hours a
day for a natural life. I and my system can find others in
the free labour market so wretched that by themselves
they cannot live a week. They are willing to give me out
right ten hours a day if I will but pay them enough to live
at the rate of fourteen hours a day for the few years their
bodies can stand it. As you know our God is a God of
competition, supply and demand, “free” contract. You
must take the wages the other man will take, or yield to
him your “ sacred right to work.” This may seem hard to
you, but you must admit that it is right, for all our good
and brave business men and their college professors will
easily prove to you that you are not a man, but merely a
seller in the market, and your labour is not your life, only
a commodity. When the employer, the nation, the world of
employers sit in comfort, and the employed are massed in
the tenements whence comes the bitter cry of the outcast,
and where poverty, prostitution, intemperance and prema
ture death are chronic, are they on one side any less the
�THE NEW CONSCIENCE.
ii
oppressors, are those on the other side any less the victims
of force, because the fashionable world says, “ Labour is a
commodity?” The incantations of political economists
cannot cure disease. Conscience cares nothing for the fine
phrases of professors, statesmen, lawyers, clergy, employers,
for their theories and philosophy of business. It says,
“ What have you done ? ” What are the results ? Bother
your theories and doctrines of rights ! Show me the facts,
not the formulas ! It looks at Chicago and New York, at
Cain in his palaces and Abel in the slums, at the profits of
one “ brother ” and the wages of the other. It does not
ask what church de you go to on Sunday, nor who were
your professors in political economy. No, it only repeats
the question asked under similar circumstances some thou
sands of years ago, What hast thou done ? Where is thy
brother?
Let us listen while a delegation from the Money-power
remonstrates with the new conscience for its unreasonable
sentiments and ideas. Here they come, one by one, and
range themselves about. First speaks the Merchant
prince :
I have a right to buy where I can buy cheapest.
Conscience.—See these little stunted hollow-eyed girls
coming out of that factory !
Lawyer.—Wages are settled by contract.
Conscience.—Where can I find white-haired working
men ?
Capitalist.—Every man has a right to do what he will
with his own.
Conscience.—-What is the price of a Senatorship to-day?
Statistician.—Never were food, fuel, clothing so cheap.
Conscience.—Little Mary Mitchell works in Waterbury’s
rope works five days a week, from six in the evening till
six in the morning.
Railroad King.—Every man makes his own career. I
was a working man myself twenty years ago, and now I
keep a carriage, a butler, and several judges and legislators
“ in four States,” and—
Conscience.—That tired-looking man is a conductor of a
sleeping-car belonging to a company owned by half-a-dozen
men worth three hundred million dollars, which is not
�12
THE NEW CONSCIENCE.
enough for them, so they squeeze a few more dollars a
month out of him by making him on every alternate trip
do twenty-eight and a half hours’ continuous work without
sleep.
Banker.—Our wealth is increasing one billion dollars a
year. We have boards of trades, the best railroads in the
world, packing houses that can kill ten thousand hogs.
Conscience.—The sickening stench, the blistered air, the
foul sights of the tenements, and the motherhood and the
childhood choking there !
Conservative.—This is the best government in the world.
America is good enough for me.
Conscience.—Listen to that “ tramp, tramp, tramp” of a
million men out of work.
Philanthropist.—The church is renewing its youth. We
give millions of dollars for hospitals and foreign work and
domestic missions to carry the gospel to the poor of all
nations.
Conscience.—I hear a voice in the Abbey that cries, We
do not want charity; give us work.
Manufacturer.—Without this system of industry the sub
jugation of North America to civilisation would have been
impossible—we could never have shown the world the mag
nificent spectacle of—
Conscience.—There is a little boy standing ten hours a
day up to his ankles in the water in the coal mine !
Coal Monopolist.—I have a statistician who can prove—
he can prove anything—that the working man is a great
deal better off than he ever was, that he makes more than
I do, that small incomes are increasing and large ones
decreasing, and there is no involuntary poverty, and that
the working men could live on twenty-five cents each a day,
and buy up the United States with their savings—and—
Conscience.—How long shall it be cheaper to run over
working men and women at the railroad crossings in the
cities than to put up gates ?
Clergyman.—The poor we are to have with us always.
Conscience.—That sewing woman you see pawning her
shawl has lived this winter with her two children in a
room without fire. Are you wearing one of the shirts she
finished ?
�THE NEW CONSCIENCE.
13
Statesman.—The working man has the ballot and the
newspapers. He is a free citizen.
Conscience.—As the nights grow colder see how the
number of girls on the streets increases!
Now what can a man of affairs, a business man, a reason
able man, one who understands political economy and the
Constitution of the United States and all that do with such
a disputant as this ? The more the pride of America
points to its magnificence, and boasts of its Declaration of
Independence, the more does the new conscience point to
the wrongs and sufferings of these miserable men, women,
and children—and so few of them too !
All extreme cases, you say ? Just so. It was the
possibility of its extreme cases that destroyed slavery. The
possibility of such extreme cases as these demand the
abolition of the system and the philosophy which permits
them.
Upon the false theory that men cease to be brothers
when they buy and sell, upon the theory that employer
and employee are not fellowmen, but merely dealers in a
non-human market, is built up the false society in which we
live. The new industry and finance have put the labour of
mankind under the control of the Money Power, which
declares its right to deal on all sides with men according
to the rules of a prize-ring called Supply and Demand.
Conscienceless and greedy as the old slave power, its
competitive rents give us the slums. Its competitive wages
leave women the choice between suicide of body or
suicide of soul, and tempt men to find in the stimulant
of drink a substitute for the stimulant of food. Professing
the gospel of competition, it imports contract labour, breaks
up trade-unions, employs and disemploys labour in order
to buy cheap of men who have no commodity but them
selves to sell. But when it turns about as seller, it
confronts the buyer with pools, trusts and combinations
denying competition. The revolution of the new industry
and the concentration of wealth have given the Money
Power unlimited means to buy, and the morals which
permit it to buy men as commodities, permit it to buy
everything, even the.things once held too sacred for traffic.
The system that denies the manhood of man in the most
�14
THE NEW CONSCIENCE.
sacred function of all, labour, must deny it in all the
relations based on this foundation. The system which
permits the welfare of the labourer to be settled by
competition, the law of the market, the false claim of
property to do what it will with its own, must allow all
welfare to be settled by the same philosophy. If the
Money Power can make life and the means of life mere
commodities, it makes it right to buy life as cheap as
possible, to sell it as dear as possible. It makes it, when
bought, the buyer’s own. Hence the capitalist’s claim of a
right to do as he will with his own is the claim of a right to
do as he will with human lives. Such a system, and it is
exactly ours, has no moral reserves with which to meet the
Money Power when it applies these principles as it is
doing to-day in every direction to the moral ruin of society.
Just this result is being worked out. The Money Power
with its huge fortunes and corporations built up on the
right to treat life as a mere commodity, more and more
treats everything else as a mere commodity—from the
virtue of employees to that of trustees, public and private.
It refuses to respond when called to account. It simply
asserts its right to buy cheap and sell dear, and to do what
it will with its own. Andrew Carnegie, before the Nine
teenth Century Club, dismisses the labour agitation by
saying in eftect, “Since no man in the United States need
be a pauper unless by his own deliberate act, there is no
labour question.” Must American citizens wait to redress
their wrongs until they have been made veritable paupers
by the Steel Rail Trust and its confederate price con
spiracies? That was not the way of the fathers. The
price of tea in the American Colonies was cheaper after the
imposition of the stamp tax than before. Nothing could be
so light as that—a burden of less than nothing. But
Justice Dana, in the presence of a great assemblage of the
angry townspeople of Boston, standing under the Liberty
Tree, administered an oath to Mr. Secretary Oliver that he
had not distributed and would not distribute the cdious
stamps.
The people of Boston did not wait until they had been
made paupers. “ Enslave but one human being,” said
Garrison, “and the liberties of the world are put in peril.”
�THE NEW- CONSCIENCE.
15
Surrender to the Money Power the right to make but one
price, the control of all prices will surely follow. They
who control the prices of a nation control the liberties of
its markets, and those who control the liberties of its
markets will come to control all its other liberties.
The student of the evolution of freedom from Athens
and Calvary to Appommattox and Trafalgar Square, says,
When you see a cause against which all the powers of
law, church, culture, and wealth are united, there is a
cause worth looking into. If there was nothing in it, why
should all these mighty institutions be so disturbed about
it ? And if you find all customs, statutes, learnings, creeds,
logics, bazaars, and currencies against it, look at it still
more searchingly. All these have always at the first been
united against any new conscience, and have always
conspired against it, even to the death. Let those who
are the great because others are small—let those who are
the happy because others are wretched—let those who are
rich because others are poor—listen out of their golden
security for the crier of the new consience. His voice
foretells a new day. If the working men and farmers
have once, twice, thrice recognised and saved great
truths neglected by the powers of the earth, it is quite
possible they may do it again. It is possible they are
doing it now. The ardent, sighing for a cause, bemoaning
that they were born too late for the Anti-Slavery agitation,
have, in to-day’s ferment of the poor and lowly, the
greatest cause of history.
The abolition of chattel
slavery has but cleared the ground. Toynbee Hall in
London, and similar schools elsewhere, have been formed
to carry university culture down to the working men. The
movement is wrong from end to end. It is the universities
that are in need of culture—of the culture of the working
men in hardship, and equality, and sacrifice.
The great New England divine, Lyman Beecher was
very much put out because the fanatic William Lloyd
Garrison would not leave the slavery question to settle
hself. It would do so, Beecher said, in a couple of
centuries. Erasmus deplored, in the case of Luther, that
the great change of the Reformation was not allowed to
work itself out slowly, calmly, and without violence and
�16
THE hEW CONSCIENCE.
disruption. But there has always been one thing that put
God and man into a hurry-injustice.
It is a singular truth that only in poor and primitive
communities is there enough for all. Charles Dickens
could see no beggars in Boston forty years ago. Like the
early England, the early new England was one of great
poverty, but of great independence and equality. “ No
rich man, no poor in it,” said Wendell Phillips, one of the
patricians of modern New England, “ all mingling in the
same society; no poor house, no beggars, opportunities
equal.” Thorold Rogers says, in his Economic Interpre
tation of History, “ The means of life were more abundant
during the Middle Ages than they are under our modern
experience. There was, I am convinced, no extreme
poverty. The essence of life in England during the days
of the Plantagenets and Tudors was, that every one knew
his neighbour, and that every one was his brother’s
keeper. Though there was hardship in this life, the hard
ship was a common lot.” It is only when communities
get rich that there is not enough for all. The indepen
dence and equality of early England and New England
were close to the ideals of Christ. But towns and the
temptations of riches have been too much for the virtue of
the quickest of hand and eye, and they have moved away
into Beacon Street and the West End, and left their
brothers in the tenements and factory towns. But if there
was enough before the steam-engine and the Pool, there is
enough now. Those who control the labour of England,
Old and New, must direct it more evenly to equal
advantage, or they must give way to those who will.
The lot of the people must be settled by the common
people. If railroads and factories cannot be built and
operated without their labour, neither can the proceeds be
divided without their consent and co-operation. If the
common people can be allowed to vote freely in govern
ment, they can be allowed to vote freely in property. It
is not necessary to befuddle the subject with the fogs of
political economy or constitution or legal intricacies. The
simplest elements of justice, freedom, and love, supply the
only profundities needed. The question between the
money-power on one side and the people on the other,
�THE NEW CONSCIENCE.
with the labourers and farmers in the van led by men like
Emerson, Mazzini, and Carlyle, is simply and sharply a.
question of More! more fi>r the People, less for the Power..
If you want to quibble about words, and say that all men
are working men, then the question must be defined as
one between rich working men and poor working men
between working men with luxuries, and working men.
without; those around the parks and those on the farms
those who own the machinery, and those who operate it;
between the working men who monopolise, and those who
are monopolised; between the workmen who get the
privilege of living in shanties as their share of coal-mining
in Pennsylvania, and the working men who get dividends
on five hundred million dollars of coal stock. Bring on all
the statisticians in the world to figure out that the farmers
and working men are better off than they were. Thorold.
Rogers proves it is not true, but if it were, it is beside the
point. They are not getting their share. Never was
there a country, says a popular preacher of Chicago, in
which the rich have done as much as in America for the
poor. But the truth is, never was there a country in
which the poor have done so much for the rich.
The leaders of the revolution of the new industry have
quite mistaken the terms of the contract with society under
which they have been hired to do these great things.
Society hired them to work for society. But the captains
have assumed that all they led in making was to be their
own, and that they could do what they willed with their
own. They still have something to learn.
The Conservative cries out, “You are going to destroy
society.”
Did it destroy society to abolish slavery ?
The Conservative cries out, “ This is revolution ! ”
No, it is the remedy.
The revolution has already occurred. That took place
when the mighty wheels of the new industry whirled the
peasant and his children away from his little homestead,
the artisan away from his cottage loom and his village
shop and non-competitive brotherhood, and herded them
into tenement houses and factories. It was the revolution
which took the husbandmen, labourer, and artisan out of
�18
THE NEW CONSCIENCE.
the Golden Age of the 15th century, which preceded the
new industry. Then living was cheap and men were
dear, the working day in field and town was but eight
hours a day. Master and men both belonged to the same
union, no man could compete with another of the same
fraternity, and the employee had the same right to his
place that the employer had.
It is the revolution which has changed all that.
During the last century has come the realisation of the
vision of the ancient Greek poet who foresaw a time when
“ the shuttle would weave and the lyre would play ot
itself."'
That is the revolution.
Time was when judges sent men to jail for forestalling,
•cornering the markets. That was in the “ dark ages.”
Now the money power establishes “ trusts” in everything,
and our judges tell us that the burden of monopoly is “light.”
That is the revolution.
The new industry has broken up the brotherhoods of the
-old industry, and has swung the few strongest and cleverest
of the working men into palaces, and front pews, so far .
■away from their old comrades and fellow workers that, as
one of them said : “ I have no time to remember their
faces, much less their names.”
That is the revolution.
It is the revolution that has capped the new industry with
the high finance, and tied up the people in the paper chains
■of charters, contracts, and stock-exchange securities.
‘“The time is coming,” said the Earl of Derby not long
ago, “ when the people of Europe will repudiate their
national debts, which now take eight hundred million
■dollars a year from them.”
That is the revolution. And the gospel of the revolu
tion is the doctrine that you can do anything with your
-fellow-man provided you do it in the market.
The remedy is in the new conscience, which says simply
that a man shall never be so much of a buyer or seller as
to cease to be a brother, and that labour shall not be made
a market thing.
Before us is the practical question, What is the next
step ? The next step, like the first step, is more liberty
�THE NE W CONSCIENCE.
*9
for the labourer. His emancipation still invokes us. Con
science has freed him from frightful abuses, but frightful
abuses remain. His growth is not yet full and free. Civi
lization groans under the evils of the revolution wrought
by the new industry and its philosophy. The denunciation
by our prophets, the outcries of the farmer and working
men, the attempts to regulate factories, railroads, mines,
tenements, infant-labour are all confessions of the evil,
and confessions of the impotence of the system which pro
duced those ills to remedy them. A gospel of hatred is
rising in classes and masses which hate employers, hates
employees, hates household service, hates household ser
vants, hates foreigners, hates pools, hates trades-unions,
hates the grangers, hates reformers, hates politics. All
these are symptoms of a high fever. But a new mankind
has been conceived and will be born—a winged beauty
out of the earth-measuring worm—which will not know
force, and fraud, and hatred, and will let love, their
natural tie, bind men and nations together. The prac
tical work of to-day is to abolish the cannibals of compe
tition, warriors of supply and demand, tyrants of monopoly,
monsters of the market, devourers of men, women and
children, buyers and sellers of life. The progress of
humanity, says Emerson, consists of recognition of the
truth that every private and separate good is delusion.
Property, capital, and money making as now permitted
are still systems of man hunting. Monopoly is force, and
force is slavery, and slavery must be abolished. A lover
of birds, Maurice Thompson, tells us that as he wanders
through the southern forests he knows afar off when he
as nearing a human habitation by the songs of the birds
near the cabin, which declare to all the world, by a
special tenderness of tone, that they love man and have
made their nest near his. The heart of man is not less than
■the heart ot the bird.
Churches come and go, but there has ever been but one
religion. The only religion has been that which clears off
one by one from the face of the earth-stains that hide
the God imprisoned in the flesh, which breaks down one
by one every barrier which incarnation has put in the way
of the growth of the God within in the likeness of the God
�20
THE NEW CONSCIENCE.
without. In the sight of the new conscience wherever man
walks, there is the Holy Land, and it raises the cross of
the new crusade which shall deliver it from the infidels
who deny the divine right of the people that the will of
God shall- be done on earth as in heaven. It insists that
every question between men is a religious question, a
question of moral economy before it becomes one of politi
cal economy, and will make all political, industrial, and
social activities functions of a new Church—a church of
the deed as well as of the creed—a church that will not
only preach Christ, but do Christ—a church where science,
the revelation of what has been, will never be at war with
religion, the revelation of what ought to be—a church
which will make its worshippers share this world as well
as the next world—a church which will recognize no
vested right of property in man except the right to love
and be loved—a church which will declare that the
difference in the death rate between the classes and the
masses is evidence of murder done for money—a church
which will look upon idleness by the side of industry,
wealth by the side of poverty, luxury by the side of want,
health by the side of disease, as impious and profane in
the highest degree, the real sins against the Holy Ghost—a
church which will stop the manufacture of poor houses,
because it will stop the manufacture of poverty—a church
which will not let any man offer charity to those to whom
he refuses justice—a church which will not help the poor,
but will set them to helping themsslves, and will slay the
infidel in the path—a church which will abolish all middle
men in morals, and will make every man doubly guilty
who grinds the face of his fellow by an agent, guilty for
himself and guilty for the agent—a church that will offer
not even the lowliest member of the communion of man
kind crumbs from the table, but a seat at the table and a
full meal three times a day every day—a church that will
consider it more practical to keep its buildings open and
its congregation at work in relays night and day than to
let “brothers" starve and freeze or go astray for want of
sympathy or advice—a church which will persecute the
heretics who give the highest bidder the best pews in the
churches and the best chance in the courts—a church
�THE NE W CONSCIENCE.
zi
which will teach that the life eternal is the life we are
living now—a church which will not let the poor give up
all of this world on the unsecured promise of the rich to
divide the next world—a church that will judge civilization
not by the six million dollar cathedral on Murray Hill,
*
but by the children in the back alleys—a church that will
“dine with the poor and preach to the rich,” until there
are no more poor—a church which says that those who
are to be brothers hereafter must be brothers here—a
church that will know what its members believe only by
what they do—a church which recognizes nothing as love
which does not bear justice as the fruit—a church of law
and order, but the law is for the rich as well as the poor,
and the order is to be peaceful growth for the least of
■these little ones—-a church which will prevent the anarchy
from below by punishing the anarchy from above—a
church which will deny the right of infanticide to the
employer, now denied by society only to the parents—a
church which declares the sacred right to work to mean
that he who works a full day shall live a full day, and that
■employment is a right, not a charity—a church which will
restore reverence to men by giving them leaders in church,
state and business worthy cf reverence—a church which
will make every social wrong a moral wrong, and every
moral wrong a legal wrong—a church which will teach
men to turn the other cheek when they can do it as free
men, not as slaves—a church which will deliver with the
message of peace, the message of a scourge for the money
changers in the temple—a church which will tell the
merchant-prince that between him and his ruined com
petitor, and between him and his employees there is a
moral question greater than the question of markets—a
•church which will abolish the merchant-prince, and the
■factory corporation sooner than let them abolish the child
hood of children—a church which will not let the
•employers profess on the fourth of July that all men are
born equal, and then fatten the rest of the year on the
advantages of organization which they deny to the
■employee—a church in which God will be natural and men
One of the fashionable quarters of New York.
�22
THE NEW CONSCIENCE.
supernatural—a church which will abolish charity and
philantrophy, for these cannot be between brothers, and
need not be where justice is—a church in which no man
will have a right to do with his own what he will, but only
a right to do what is right—a church which will take the
weak and despised out of the earthy Inferno of dirt, and
want, and ignorance, to which they have been condemned
by the oppressor—a church which will keep a hell hot in
this world to punish the oppressors here for every blow
they strike at God through his image, man—a church
which will tell the sinner that repentance fit for heaven
only begins by restitution and reparation on earth—a
church which will teach that brothers must share both the
mess of pottage and the birthright—a church which will
worship God through all his sons made in his image,
through a mediator, Mankind, which, having suffered all
and sinned all, can sympathize with all, and will carry all
the weak and weary ones safe in its bosom—a church
which will realize the vision of Carlyle of a Human
Catholic Church.
Henry D. Lloyd.
�“Fellowship is heaven and lack of fellowship is hell: fellowship is life, and
lack of fellowship is death.”
HE NEW FELLOWSHIP was formed by a few persona
who believed that in order to realise the social ideal of'
Freedom, Equality, and Brotherhood, it was desirable that
those who upheld it should co-operate to give it the fullest pos
sible effect in their relations with one another and with the world.
The movement to secure equal social freedom by political agen
cies should be supplemented by an independent ethical movement
a movement which should keep the fundamental moral issues un ob
scured, help to make clear the springs of political activity, purge
social and family life of its selfishness, and insist upon the claims of'
an ideal of fellowship in the pursuit of a Common Good. It is.
not sufficient to urge the claims of this ideal by word of mouth only;
but it must be recommended by the example of lives lived in obedi
ence to it, and by its embodiment, as far as possible, in all social
institutions and relationships. The more fully and strikingly it finds
expression in these ways, the more certainly will follow those poli
tical changes which are necessary to give all men the chance of
realising it.
Further information respecting the New Fellowship may
be obtained from the Hon, Secretary, J. F. Oakeshott, 8i
Great Ormond Street, W. C.
�The following Publications of the New Fellowship can be
obtained at 34, Great Ormond Street, W. C. :—
SEED-TIME, the Quarterly Organ * .
THE MANIFESTO OF THE NEW
THE ElHICS
?.DAMS
.
3d.
.
FELLOWSHIP. 3d.
OF SOCIAL REFORM.
.
.
THE MORAL
ASPECT OF THE
PROBLEM. By Thomas Davidson
By Maurice
. 2d.
.
ECONOMIC
.
. 2d.
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF WILLIAM FREY. By
Professor Beesly ...... 2d.
ON THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. By William
Frey ........ 2d.
THE NEW
LABOUR
CONSCIENCE,
...
OR
RELIGION
.
THE CLASSES AND THE MASSES
"WEALTH AND THE COMMONWEALTH
.
.
OF
.
id.
.id.
id.
�
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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The new conscience, or religion of labour
Description
An account of the resource
Edition: 3rd ed.
Place of publication: London
Collation: 22 p. ; 19 cm.
Series: Fellowship Series
Series number: No. 6
Notes: Publisher's list on back cover. Reprinted with permission from the "North American Review" and revised by the author.
Creator
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Lloyd, Henry D.
Publisher
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New Fellowship
Date
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1893
Identifier
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G2853
Subject
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Labour
Socialism
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (The new conscience, or religion of labour), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
Christian
Labour and labouring classes
Labour and Labouring Classes-Great Britain-History
Socialism
Socialism and Christianity