But here running through the thoughts of the Englishman and the Italian and the Frenchman and the American alike one finds just the same idea of a kind of officialdom in ownership.It is an idea that pervades our thought and public discussion to-day everywhere, and it is an idea that is scarcely traceable at all in the thought of the early half of the nineteenth century.The idea of service and responsibility in property has increased and is increasing, the conception of "hold-up," the usurer's conception of his right to be bought out of the way, fades.And the process has been enormously enhanced by the various big-scale experiments in temporary socialism that have been forced upon the belligerent powers.Men of the most individualistic quality are being educated up to the possibilities of concerted collective action.My friend and fellow-student Y, inventor and business organiser, who used to make the best steam omnibuses in the world, and who is now making all sorts of things for the army, would go pink with suspicious anger at the mere words "inspector"or "socialism" three or four years ago.He does not do so now.
A great proportion of this sort of man, this energetic directive sort of man in England, is thinking socialism to-day.They may not be saying socialism, but they are thinking it.When labour begins to realise what is adrift it will be divided between two things: between appreciative co-operation, for which guild socialism in particular has prepared its mind, and traditional suspicion.I will not over to guess here which will prevail.
3
The impression I have of the present mental process in the European communities is that while the official class and the /rentier/ class is thinking very poorly and inadequately and with a merely obstructive disposition; while the churches are merely wasting their energies in futile self-advertisement; while the labour mass is suspicious and disposed to make terms for itself rather than come into any large schemes of reconstruction that will abolish profit as a primary aim in economic life, there is still a very considerable movement towards such a reconstruction.Nothing is so misleading as a careless analogy.
In the dead years that followed the Napoleonic wars, which are often quoted as a precedent for expectation now, the spirit of collective service was near its minimum; it was never so strong and never so manifestly spreading and increasing as it is to-day.
But service to what?
I have my own very strong preconceptions here, and since my temperament is sanguine they necessarily colour my view.Ibelieve that this impulse to collective service can satisfy itself only under the formula that mankind is one state of which God is the undying king, and that the service of men's collective needs is the true worship of God.But eagerly as I would grasp at any evidence that this idea is being developed and taken up by the general consciousness, I am quite unable to persuade myself that anything of the sort is going on.I do perceive a search for large forms into which the prevalent impulse to devotion can be thrown.But the organised religious bodies, with their creeds and badges and their instinct for self-preservation at any cost, stand between men and their spiritual growth in just the same way the forestallers stand between men and food.Their activities at present are an almost intolerable nuisance.One cannot say "God"but some tout is instantly seeking to pluck one into his particular cave of flummery and orthodoxy.What a rational man means by God is just God.The more you define and argue about God the more he remains the same simple thing.Judaism, Christianity, Islam, modern Hindu religious thought, all agree in declaring that there is one God, master and leader of all mankind, in unending conflict with cruelty, disorder, folly and waste.To my mind, it follows immediately that there can be no king, no government of any sort, which is not either a subordinate or a rebel government, a local usurpation, in the kingdom of God.But no organised religious body has ever had the courage and honesty to insist upon this.They all pander to nationalism and to powers and princes.They exists so to pander.
Every organised religion in the world exists only to exploit and divert and waste the religious impulse in man.
