Thorstein Veblen
CHRISTIAN MORALS AND THE COMPETITIVE SYSTEM.

The International Journal of Ethics, Vol. XX, (Jan., 1910), pp. 168-185.
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In the light of the current materialistic outlook and the current skepticism 
touching supernatural matters, some question may fairly be entertained as to the 
religious cult of Christianity. Its fortunes in the proximate future, as well as 
its intrinsic value for the current scheme of civilisation, may be subject to 
doubt. But a similar doubt is not readily entertained as regards the morals of 
Christianity. In some of its elements this morality is so intimately and 
organically connected with the scheme of western civilisation that its 
elimination would signify a cultural revolution whereby occidental culture would 
lose its occidental characteristics and fall into the ranks of ethnic 
civilisations at large. Much the same may be said of that pecuniary competition 
which today rules the economic life of Christendom and in large measure guides 
western civilisation in much else than the economic respect.
Both are institutional factors of first-rate importance in this culture, and as 
such it might be difficult or impracticable to assign the primacy to the one or 
the other, since each appears to be in a dominant position. Western civilisation 
is both Christian and competitive (pecuniary); and it seems bootless to ask 
whether its course is more substantially under the guidance of the one than of 
the other of these two institutional norms. Hence, if it should appear, as is 
sometimes contended, that there is an irreconcilable discrepancy between the 
two, the student of this culture might have to face the question: Will western 
civilisation dwindle and decay if one or the other, the morals of competition or 
the morals of Christianity, definitively fall into abeyance?
In a question between the two codes, or systems of conduct, each must be taken 
at its best and simplest. That is to say, it is a question of agreement or 
discrepancy in the larger elementary principles of each, not a question of the 
variegated details, nor of the practice of the common run of Christians, on the 
one hand, and of competitive business men, on the other. The variety of detailed 
elaboration and sophistication is fairly endless in both codes; at the same time 
many Christians are engaged in competitive business, and conversely. Under the 
diversified exigencies of daily life neither the accepted principles of morality 
nor those of business competition work out in an untroubled or untempered course 
of conduct. Circumstances constrain men unremittingly to shrewd adaptations, if 
not to some degree of compromise, in their endeavors to live up to their 
accustomed principles of conduct. Yet both of these principles, or codes of 
conduct, are actively present throughout life in any modern community. For all 
the shrewd adaptation to which they may be subject in the casuistry of 
individual practice, they will not have fallen into abeyance so long as the 
current scheme of life is not radically altered. Both the Christian morality and 
the morality of pecuniary competition are intimately involved in this occidental 
scheme of life; for it is out of these and the like habits of thought that the 
scheme of life is made up. Taken at their best, do the two further and fortify 
one another? do they work together without mutual help or hindrance? or do they 
mutually inhibit and defeat each other?
In the light of modern science the principles of Christian morality or of 
pecuniary competition must, like any other principles of conduct, be taken 
simply as prevalent habits of thought. And in this light no question can be 
entertained as to the intrinsic merit, the eternal validity, of either. They 
are, humanly speaking, institutions which have arisen in the growth of the 
western civilisation. Their genesis and growth are incidents, or possibly 
episodes, in the life-history of this culture - habits of thought induced by the 
discipline of life in the course of this culture's growth, and more or less 
intrinsic and essential to its character as a phase of civilisation. Therefore, 
the question of their consistency with one another, or with the cultural scheme 
in which they are involved, turns into a question as to the conditions to which 
they owe their rise and continued force as institutions - as to the discipline 
of experience in the past, out of which each of them has come and to which, 
therefore, each is (presumably) suited. The exigencies of life and the 
discipline of experience in a complex cultural situation are many and diverse, 
and it is always possible that any given phase of culture may give rise to 
divergent lines of institutional growth, to habits of conduct which are mutually 
incompatible, and which may at the same time be incompatible with the continued 
life of that cultural situation which has brought them to pass. The dead 
civilisations of history, particularly the greater ones, seem commonly to have 
died of some such malady. If Christian morality and pecuniary competition are 
the outgrowth of the same or similar lines of habituation, there should 
presumably be no incompatibility or discrepancy between them; otherwise it is an 
open question.
Leaving on one side, then, all question of its divine or supernatural origin, 
force, and warrant, as well as of its truth and its intrinsic merit or demerit, 
it may be feasible to trace the human line of derivation of this spirit of 
Christianity, considered as a spiritual attitude habitual to civilised mankind. 
The details and mutations of the many variants of the cult and creed might 
likewise be traced back, by shrewd analysis, to their origins in the habits 
enforced by past civilised life, and might on this ground be appraised in 
respect of their fitness to survive under the changing conditions of later 
culture; but such a work of detailed inquiry is neither practicable nor 
necessary here. The variants are many and diverse, but for all the diversity and 
discord among them, they have certain large features in common, by which they 
are identified as Christian and are contrasted with the ethnic cults and creeds. 
There is a certain Christian animus which pervades most of them, and marks them 
off against the non-Christian spiritual world. This is, perhaps, more 
particularly true of the moral principles of Christianity than of the general 
fabric of its many creeds and cults. Certain elemental features of this 
Christian animus stand forth obtrusively in its beginnings, and have, with 
varying fortunes of dominance and decay, persisted or survived unbroken, on the 
whole, to the present day. These are non-resistance (humility) and brotherly 
love. Something further might be added, perhaps, but this much is common, in 
some degree, to the several variants of Christianity, late or early; and the 
inclusion of other common principles besides these would be debatable and 
precarious, except in case of such moral principles as are also common to 
certain of the ethnic cults as well as to Christianity. Even with respect to the 
two principles named, there might be some debate as to their belonging 
peculiarly and characteristically to the Christian spirit, exclusive of all 
other spiritual habits of mind. But it is at least a tenable position that these 
principles are intrinsic to the Christian spirit, and that they habitually serve 
as competent marks of identification. With the exclusion or final obsolescence 
of either of these, the cult would no longer be Christian, in the current 
acceptation of the term; though much else, chiefly not of an ethical character, 
would have to be added to make up a passably complete characterisation of the 
Christian system, as, e.g., monotheism, sin and atonement, eschatological 
retribution, and the like. But the two principles named bear immediately on the 
morals of Christianity; they are, indeed, the spiritual capital with which the 
Christian movement started out, and they are still the characteristics by force 
of which it survives.
It is commonly held that these principles are not inherent traits of human 
nature as such, congenital and hereditary traits of the species which assert 
themselves instinctively, impulsively, by force of the mere absence of 
repression. Such, at least, in effect, is the teaching of the Christian creeds, 
in that they hold these spiritual qualities to be a gift of divine grace, not a 
heritage of sinful human nature. Such an account of their origin and their 
acquirement by the successive generations of men does not fit these two main 
supports of Christian morality in the same degree. It may fairly be questioned 
as regards the principle of brotherly love, or the impulse to mutual service. 
While this seems to be a characteristic trait of Christian morals and may serve 
as a specific mark by which to distinguish this morality from the greater non-
Christian cults, it is apparently a trait which Christendom shares with many of 
the obscurer cultures, and which does not in any higher degree characterise 
Christendom than it does these other, lower cultures. In the lower, non-
Christian cultures, particularly among the more peaceable communities of 
savages, something of the kind appears to prevail by mere force of hereditary 
propensity; at least it appears, in some degree, to belong in these lower 
civilisations without being traceable to special teaching or to a visible 
interposition of divine grace. And in an obscure and dubious fashion, perhaps 
sporadically, it recurs throughout the life of human society with such an air of 
ubiquity as would argue that it is an elemental trait of the species, rather 
than a cultural product of Christendom. It may not be an overstatement to say 
that this principle is, in its elements, in some sort an atavistic trait, and 
that Christendom comes by it through a cultural reversion to the animus of the 
lower (peaceable) savage culture. But even if such an account be admitted as 
substantially sound, it does not account for that cultural reversion to which 
Christendom owes its peculiar partiality for this principle; nor is its 
association with its fellow principle, non-resistance, thereby accounted for. 
The two come into play together in the beginnings of Christianity, and are 
thenceforward associated together, more or less inseparably, throughout the 
later vicissitudes of the cult and its moral code.
The second-named principle, of non-resistance and renunciation, is placed first 
in order of importance in the earlier formulations of Christian conduct. This is 
not similarly to be traced back as a culturally atavistic trait, as the 
outgrowth of such an archaic cultural situation as if offered by the lower 
savagery. Non-resistance has no such air of ubiquity and spontaneous 
recrudescence, and does not show itself, even sporadically, as a matter of 
course in cultures that are otherwise apparently unrelated; particularly not in 
the lower cultures, where the hereditary traits of the species should presumably 
assert themselves, on occasion, in a less sophisticated expression than on the 
more highly conventionalised levels of civilisation. On the contrary, it belongs 
almost wholly to the more highly developed, more coercively organised 
civilisations, that are possessed of a consistent monotheistic religion and a 
somewhat arbitrary secular authority; and it is not always, indeed not commonly, 
present in these.
Christianity at its inception did not take over this moral principle, ready-
made, from any of the older cults or cultures from which the Christian movement 
was in a position to draw. It is not found, at least not in appreciable force, 
in the received Judaism; nor can it be derived from the classical (Graeco-Roman) 
cultures, which had none of it; nor is it to be found among the pagan 
antiquities of these barbarians whose descendants make up the great body of 
Christendom today. Yet Christianity sets out with the principle of non-
resistance full-blown, in the days of its early diffusion, and finds assent and 
acceptance for it with such readiness as seems to argue that mankind was 
prepared beforehand for just such a principle of conduct. Mankind, particularly 
the populace, within the confines of that Roman dominion within which the early 
diffusion of Christianity took place, was apparently in a frame of mind to 
accept such a principle of morality, or such a maxim of conduct; and the same is 
progressively true for the outlying populations to which Christianity spread in 
the next four centuries.
To any modern student of human culture, this ready acceptance of such a 
principle (habit of thought) gives evidence that the section of mankind which 
had thus shifted its moral footing to a new and revolutionary moral principle 
must have been trained, by recently past experience, by the discipline of daily 
life in the immediate past, into such a frame of mind as predisposed them for 
its acceptance; that is to say, they must have been disciplined into a spiritual 
attitude to which such a new principle of conduct would commend itself as 
reasonable, if not as a matter of course. And in due process, as this suitable 
attitude was enforced upon the other, outlying populations by suitable 
disciplinary means, Christianity with its gospel of renunciation tended to 
spread and supplant the outworn cults that no longer fitted the altered cultural 
situation. But in its later diffusion, among peoples not securely under Roman 
rule and not reduced to such a frame of mind by a protracted experience of Roman 
discipline, Christianity makes less capital of the morality of non-resistance.
It was among the peoples subject to the Roman rule that Christianity first arose 
and spread; among the lower orders of the populace especially, who had been 
beaten to a pulp by the hard-handed, systematic, inexorable power of the 
imperial city; who had no rights which the Roman master was bound to respect; 
who were aliens and practically outlaws under the sway of the Caesars; and who 
had acquired, under high pressure, the conviction that non-resistance was the 
chief of virtues if not the whole duty of man. They had learned to render unto 
Caesar that which is Caesar's, and were in a frame of mind to render unto God 
that which is God's.
It is a notable fact also that, as a general rule, in its subsequent diffusion 
to regions and peoples not benefited by the Roman discipline, Christianity 
spread in proportion to the more or less protracted experience of defeat and 
helpless submission undergone by these peoples; and that it was the subject 
populace rather than the master classes that took kindly to the doctrine of non-
resistance. In the outlying comers of the western world, such as the 
Scandinavian and British countries, where subjection to arbitrary rule in 
temporal matters had been less consistently and less enduringly enforced, the 
principle of non-resistance took less firm root. And in the days when the 
peoples of Christendom were sharply differentiated into ruling and subject 
classes, non-resistance was accepted by the lower rather than by the upper 
classes.
Much the same, indeed, is true of the companion principle of mutual succor. On 
the whole, it is not too bold a generalisation to say that these elements of the 
moral code which distinguish Christianity from the ethnic cults are elements of 
the morals of low life, of the subject populace. There is, in point of practical 
morality, not much to choose, e.g., between the upper-class mediaeval 
Christianity and the contemporary Mohammedan morality. It is only in later 
times, after the western culture had lost its aristocratic-feudalistic character 
and had become, in its typical form, though not in all its ramifications, a kind 
of universalised low-life culture - it is only at this later period that these 
principles of low-life morality also became in some degree universalised 
principles of Christian duty; and it still remains true that these principles 
are most at home in the more vulgar divisions of the Christian cult. The higher-
class variants of Christianity still differ little in the substance of their 
morality from Judaism or Islam. The morality of the upper class is in a less 
degree the morality of non-resistance and brotherly love, and is in a greater 
degree the morality of coercive control and kindly tutelage, which are in no 
degree distinctive traits of Christianity, as contrasted with the other great 
religious systems.
In their experience of Roman devastation and punishment-at-large, which 
predisposed the populace for this principle of non-resistance, the subject 
peoples commonly also lost such class distinctions and differential rights and 
privileges as they had previously enjoyed. They were leveled down to a passably 
homogeneous state of subjection, in which one class or individual had little to 
gain at the cost of another, and in which, also, each and all palpably needed 
the succor of all the rest. The institutional fabric had crumbled, very much as 
it does in an earthquake. The conventional differentiations, handed down out of 
the past, had proved vain and meaningless in the face of the current situation. 
The pride of caste and all the principles of differential dignity and honor fell 
away, and left mankind naked and unashamed and free to follow the promptings of 
hereditary savage human nature which make for fellowship and Christian charity.
Barring repressive conventionalities, reversion to the spiritual state of 
savagery is always easy; for human nature is still substantially savage. The 
discipline of savage life, selective and adaptive, has been by far the most 
protracted and probably the most exacting of any phase of culture in all the 
life-history of the race; so that by heredity human nature still is, and must 
indefinitely continue to be, savage human nature. This savage spiritual heritage 
that "springs eternal" when the pressure of conventionality is removed or 
relieved, seems highly conducive to the two main traits of Christian morality, 
though more so to the principle of brotherly love than to that of renunciation. 
And this may well be the chief circumstance that has contributed to the 
persistence of these principles of conduct even in later times, when the 
external conditions have not visibly favored or called for their continued 
exercise.

The principles of conduct underlying pecuniary competition are the principles of 
Natural Rights, and as such date from the eighteenth century. In respect of 
their acceptance into the body of commonplace morality and practice and the 
constraining force which they exercise, they are apparently an outgrowth of 
modern civilisation-whatever older antiquity may be assigned them in respect of 
their documentary pedigree. comparatively speaking, they are absent from the 
scheme of life and from the common-sense apprehension of rights and duties in 
mediaeval times. They derive their warrant as moral principles from the 
discipline of life under the cultural situation of early modern times. They are 
accordingly of relatively recent date as prevalent habits of thought, at least 
in their fuller and freer development; even though the underlying traits of 
human nature which have lent themselves to the formation of these habits of 
thought may be as ancient as any other. The period of their growth coincides 
somewhat closely with that of the philosophy of egoism, self-interest, or 
"individualism," as it is less aptly called. This egoistic outlook gradually 
assumes a dominant place in the occidental scheme of thought during and after 
the transition from mediaeval to modern times; it appears to be a result of the 
habituation to those new conditions of life which characterise the modern, as 
contrasted with the mediaeval, situation. Assuming, as is now commonly done, 
that the fundamental and controlling changes which shape and guide the 
transition from the institutional situation of the mediaeval to that of the 
modern world are economic changes, one may with fair confidence trace a 
connection between these economic changes and the concomitant growth of modern 
business principles. The vulgar element, held cheap, kept under, hut massive, in 
the mediaeval order of society, comes gradually into the foreground and into the 
controlling position in economic life; so that the aristocratic or chivalric 
standards and ideals are gradually supplanted or displaced by the vulgar 
apprehension of what is right and best in the conduct of life. The chivalric 
canons of destructive exploit and of status give place to the more sordid canons 
of workmanlike efficiency and pecuniary strength. The economic changes which 
thus gave a new and hitherto impotent element of society the primacy in the 
social order and in the common-sense apprehensions of what is worth while, are, 
in the main and characteristically, the growth of handicraft and petty trade; 
giving rise to the industrial towns, to the growth of markets, to a pecuniary 
field of individual enterprise and initiative, and to a valuation of men, 
things, and events in pecuniary terms.
It is impossible here to go narrowly into the traits of culture and of human 
nature which were evolved in the rise and progress of handicraft and the petty 
trade, and brought about the decay of mediaevalism and the rise of the modern 
cultural scheme. But so much seems plain on the face of things: there is at work 
in all this growth of the new, pecuniary culture, a large element of emulation, 
both in the acquisition of goods and in their conspicuous consumption. Pecuniary 
exploit in a degree supplies the place of chivalric exploit. But emulation is 
not the whole of the motive force of the new order, nor does it supply all the 
canons of conduct and standards of merit under the new order. In its earlier 
stages, while dominated by the exigencies of handicraft and the petty trade, the 
modern culture is fully as much shaped and guided by considerations of 
livelihood, as by the ideals of differential gain.
The material conditions of the new economic situation would not tolerate the 
institutional conditions of the old situation. There was being enforced upon the 
community, primarily upon that workday element into whose hands the new 
industrial exigencies were shifting the directive force, a new range of habitual 
notions as to what was needful and what was right. In both of the 
characteristically modern lines of occupation-handicraft and the petty trade-the 
individual, the workman or trader, is the central and efficient factor, on whose 
initiative, force, diligence, and discretion his own economic fortunes and those 
of the community visibly turn. It is an economic situation in which, 
necessarily, individual deals with individual on a footing of pecuniary 
efficiency; where the ties of group solidarity, which control the individual's 
economic (and social) relations, are themselves of a pecuniary character, and 
are made or broken more or less at the individual's discretion and in pecuniary 
terms; and it is, moreover, a cultural situation in which the social and civil 
relations binding the individual are prevailingly and increasingly formed for 
pecuniary ends, 'and enforced by pecuniary sanctions. The individualism of the 
modern era sets out with industrial aims and makes its way by force of 
industrial efficiency. And since the individual relations under this system take 
the pecuniary form, the individualism thus worked out and incorporated in the 
modern institutional fabric is a pecuniary individualism, and is therefore also 
typically egoistic.
The principles governing right conduct according to the habits of thought native 
to this individualistic era are the egoistic principles of natural rights and 
natural liberty. These rights and this liberty are egoistic rights and liberty 
of the individual. They are to be summed up as freedom and security of person 
and of pecuniary transactions. It is a curious fact, significant of the extreme 
preponderance of the vulgar element in this cultural revolution, that among 
these natural rights there are included no remnants of those prerogatives and 
disabilities of birth, office, or station, which seemed matters of course and of 
common-sense to the earlier generations of men who had grown up under the 
influence of the mediaeval social order. Nor, curiously, are there remnants of 
the more ancient rights and duties of the bond of kinship, the blood feud, or 
clan allegiance, such as were once also matters of course and of common-sense in 
the cultural eras and areas in which the social order of the kinship group or 
the clan organisation had prevailed. On the other hand, while these 
institutional elements have (in theory) lost all standing, the analogous 
institution of property has become an element of the natural order of things. 
The system of natural rights is natural in the sense of being consonant with the 
nature of handicraft and petty trade.
Meanwhile, times have changed since the eighteenth century, when this system of 
pecuniary egoism reached its mature development. That is to say, the material 
circumstances, the economic exigencies, have changed, and the discipline of 
habit resulting from the changed situation has, as a consequence, tended to a 
somewhat different effect - as is evidenced by the fact that the sanctity and 
sole efficacy of the principles of natural rights are beginning to be called in 
question. The excellence and sufficiency of an enlightened pecuniary egoism are 
no longer a matter of course and of common-sense to the mind of this generation, 
which has experienced the current era of machine industry, credit, delegated 
corporation management, and distant markets. What fortune may overtake these 
business principles, these habits of thought native to the handicraft era, in 
the further sequence of economic changes can, of course, not be foretold; but it 
is at least certain that they cannot remain standing and effective, in the long 
run, unless the modern community should return to an economic régime equivalent 
to the era of handicraft and petty trade. For the business principles in 
question are of the nature of habits of thought, and habits of thought are made 
by habits of life; and the habits of life necessary to maintain these principles 
and to give them their effective sanction in the common-sense convictions of the 
community are the habits of life enforced by the system of handicraft and petty 
trade.

It appears, then, that these two codes of conduct, Christian morals and business 
principles, are the institutional by-products of two different cultural 
situations. The former, in so far as they are typically Christian, arose out of 
the abjectly and precariously servile relations in which the populace stood to 
their masters in late Roman times, as also, in a great, though perhaps less, 
degree, during the "Dark" and the Middle Ages. The latter, the morals of 
pecuniary competition, on the other hand, are habits of thought induced by the 
exigencies of vulgar life under the rule of handicraft and petty trade, out of 
which has come the peculiar system of rights and duties characteristic of modern 
Christendom. Yet there is something in common between the two. The Christian 
principles inculcate brotherly love, mutual succor: Love thy neighbor as 
thyself; Mutuum date, nihil inde sperantes. This principle seems, in its 
elements at least, to be a culturally atavistic trait, belonging to the ancient, 
not to say primordial, peaceable culture of the lower savagery. The natural-
rights analogue of this principle of solidarity and mutual succor is the 
principle of fair play, which appears to be the nearest approach to the golden 
rule that the pecuniary civilisation will admit. There is no reach of ingenuity 
or of ingenuousness by which the one of these may be converted into the other; 
nor does the régime of fair play - essentially a régime of emulation - conduce 
to the reinforcement of the golden rule. Yet throughout all the vicissitudes of 
cultural change, the golden rule of the peaceable savage has never lost the 
respect of occidental mankind, and its hold on men's convictions is, perhaps, 
stronger now than at any earlier period of the modern time. It seems 
incompatible with business principles, but appreciably less so than with the 
principles of conduct that ruled the western world in the days before the Grace 
of God was supplanted by the Rights of Man. The distaste for the spectacle of 
contemporary life seldom rises to the pitch of renunciation of the world" under 
the new dispensation. While one half of the Christian moral code, that pious 
principle which inculcates humility, submission to irresponsible authority, 
found easier lodgment in the mediaeval culture, the more humane moral element of 
mutual succor seems less alien to the modern culture of pecuniary self-help.
The presumptive degree of compatibility between the two codes of morality may be 
shown by a comparison of the cultural setting, out of which each has arisen and 
in which each should be at home. In the most general outline, and neglecting 
details as far as may be, we may describe the upshot of this growth of 
occidental principles as follows: The ancient Christian principle of humility, 
renunciation, abnegation, or non-resistance has been virtually eliminated from 
the moral scheme of Christendom; nothing better than a sophisticated affectation 
of it has any extensive currency in modern life. The conditions to which it owes 
its rise - bare-handed despotism and servile helplessness - are, for the 
immediate present and the recent past, no longer effectual elements in the 
cultural situation; and it is, of course, in the recent past that the conditions 
must be sought which have shaped the habits of thought of the immediate present. 
Its companion principle, brotherly love or mutual service, appears, in its 
elements at least, to be a very deep rooted and ancient cultural trait, due to 
an extremely protracted experience of the race in the early stages of human 
culture, reinforced and defined by the social conditions prevalent in the early 
days of Christianity. In the naive and particular formulation given it by the 
early Christians, this habit of thought has also lost much of its force, or has 
fallen somewhat into abeyance; being currently represented by a thrifty charity, 
and, perhaps, by the negative principle of fair play, neither of which can 
fairly be rated as a competent expression of the Christian spirit. Yet this 
principle is forever reasserting itself in economic matters, in the impulsive 
approval of whatever conduct is serviceable to the common good and in the 
disapproval of disserviceable conduct even within the limits of legality and 
natural right. It seems, indeed, to be nothing else than a somewhat specialised 
manifestation of the instinct of workmanship, and as such it has the 
indefeasible vitality that belongs to the hereditary traits of human nature.
The pecuniary scheme of right conduct is of recent growth, but it is an outcome 
of a recently past phase of modern culture rather than of the immediate present. 
This system of natural rights, including the right of ownership and the 
principles of pecuniary good and evil that go with it, no longer has the 
consistent support of current events. Under the conditions prevalent in the era 
of handicraft, the rights of ownership made for equality rather than the 
reverse, so that their exercise was in effect not notably inconsistent with the 
ancient bias in favor of mutual aid and human brotherhood. This is more 
particularly apparent if the particular form of organisation and the spirit of 
the regulations then ruling in vulgar life be kept in mind. The technology of 
handicraft, as well as the market relations of the system of petty trade, pushed 
the individual workman into the foreground and led men to think of economic 
interests in terms of this workman and his work; the situation emphasised his 
creative relation to his product, as well as his responsibility for this product 
and for its serviceability to the common welfare. It was a situation in which 
the acquisition of property depended, in the main, on the workmanlike 
serviceability of the man who acquired it, and in which, on the whole, honesty 
was the best policy. Under such conditions the principles of fair play and the 
inviolability of ownership would be somewhat closely in touch with the ancient 
human instinct of workmanship, which approves mutual aid and serviceability to 
the common good. On the other hand, the current experience of men in the 
communities of Christendom, now no longer acts to reinforce these habits of 
thought embodied in the system of natural rights; and it is scarcely conceivable 
that a conviction of the goodness, sufficiency, and inviolability of the rights 
of ownership could arise out of such a condition of things, technological and 
pecuniary, as now prevails.
Hence there are indications in current events that these principles - habits of 
thought - are in process of disintegration rather than otherwise. With the 
revolutionary changes that have supervened in technology and in pecuniary 
relations, there is no longer such a close and visible touch between the workman 
and his product as would persuade men that the product belongs to him by force 
of an extension of his personality; nor is there a visible relation between 
serviceability and acquisition; nor between the discretionary use of wealth and 
the common welfare. The principles of fair play and pecuniary discretion have, 
in great measure, lost the sanction once afforded them by the human propensity 
for serviceability to the common good, neutral as that sanction has been at its 
best. Particularly is this true since business has taken on the character of an 
impersonal, dispassionate, not to say graceless, investment for profit. There is 
little in the current situation to keep the natural right of pecuniary 
discretion in touch with the impulsive bias of brotherly love, and there is in 
the spiritual discipline of this situation much that makes for an effectual 
discrepancy between the two. Except for a possible reversion to a cultural 
situation strongly characterised by ideals of emulation and status, the ancient 
racial bias embodied in the Christian principle of brotherhood should logically 
continue to gain ground at the expense of the pecuniary morals of competitive 
business.
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