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CHRISTIAN CASTOR (_Centre_): The previous speaker is in error when he
asserts that history tells us of no serious attempt to realise the
principle of economic justice. One of the grandest attempts of this kind is
Christianity. Everyone who knows the Gospels must know that Christ and His
apostles condemned the exploitation of man by man. The words of Scripture,
'Woe to him who waxes fat upon the sweat of his brother,' contain _in nuce_
the whole codex of Freeland law and all that we are now striving to
realise. That the official Christianity afterwards allowed its work of
emancipation to drop is true; but individual Fathers of the Church have
again and again, in reliance upon the sacred text, endeavoured to realise
the original purposes of Christ. And that during the Middle Ages, as well
as in modern times, vigorous attempts to realise the Christian ideal--that
is, the ideal of Christ, not that of the Church--have never been wanting is
also well known. This is what I wished to point out. The elucidation of the
question why all these attempts were wrecked I leave to other and better
furnished minds.

VLADIMIR OSSIP (_Left_): Far be it from me to hold the noble Founder of
Christianity responsible for what was afterwards made out of His teaching;
but our friend from the United States goes, in my opinion, too far when he
represents Christ and His successors as _our_ predecessors. We proclaim
prosperity and freedom--Christ preached self-denial and humility; we desire
the wealth, He the poverty, of all; we busy ourselves with the things of
this world--He had the next world before His eyes; we are--to speak
briefly--revolutionaries, though pacific ones--He is the founder of a
religion. Let us leave religion alone; I do not think it will be of any use
for us to call in question the _meum_ and _tuum_ as to Christianity.

LIONEL ACOSTA (_Centre_): I differ entirely in this case from the previous
speaker, and agree with our colleague from North America. The teaching of
Christ, though not explicit as to means and ends, is the purest and noblest
proclamation of social freedom that has yet been heard, and it is this
proclamation of social emancipation, and not any religious novelty, that
forms the substance of the 'Good News.' It was a master-stroke of the
policy of enslavement to represent Christ as a founder of a religion
instead of a social reformer: the latter doctrine had quickly won the
hearts of the oppressed masses because it promised them release from their
sufferings, but the former doctrine was used to lull to sleep their
awakening energy.

Christ did not concern Himself with religion--not a line in the Gospels
shows the slightest trace of His having interfered with one of the ancient
religious precepts of His country. The most orthodox Jew can unhesitatingly
place the Gospels in the hands of his children, certain that they will find
nothing therein to wound their religious sentiment. [A Voice: Then why was
Christ crucified?] I am asked why Christ was crucified if He had done
nothing contrary to the Mosaic law. Do men commit murder from religious
motives _merely_? Christ was hurried to death because He was a _social_,
not because He was a religious, innovator; and it was not the pious but the
powerful among the Jews who demanded His death. Scarcely a word is needed
to set this matter right in the minds of all those who study without
prejudice the momentous events of that saddest, but at the same time most
glorious, of the days of Israel, upon which the noblest of her sons
voluntarily sought and found a martyr's death. In the first place, it is a
well-attested historical fact that in Judaea at that time death for
religious heresy was as little known as in Europe during the last century.
In the second place, the mode of execution--the cross, which was quite
foreign to the Jews--shows that Christ was executed according to Roman, not
Jewish, law. But the Romans, the most tolerant in religious matters of all
peoples, would never have put a man to death for religious innovation; they
would not have allowed the execution to take place, much less have
themselves pronounced sentence and carried out that sentence in their own
method. The cross was among them the punishment for _riotous slaves_ or
their _instigators_. I do not say this for the purpose of shifting the
responsibility for Christ's death from Judaea--it is the sad privilege of
that people to have been the executioner of its noblest sons; and as only
the Athenians killed Socrates, so none but the Jews killed Christ; the
Romans were only the instruments of Jewish hatred--the hatred, that is, of
those wealthy men among the Jews of the time who denounced the 'perverter
of the people' to the Governor because they trembled for their possessions.
Indeed, it is quite credible that the Governor did not show himself willing
to accede to the wishes of the eager denouncers, for he, the Roman, who had
grown up in unshaken faith in the firmly established rights of property,
did not understand the significance and bearing of the social teaching of
Christ. The Gospels leave us little room to doubt--and it would be
difficult to understand how it could be otherwise--that he held Christ to
be a harmless enthusiast, who might have been let off with a little
scourging. Generations had to pass away before the _Roman_ world could
learn what the teaching of Christ really was; and then it fell upon His
followers with a fury without a parallel--crucified them, threw them to the
beasts; in short, did everything that Rome was accustomed to do to the foes
of its system of law and property, but never to the followers of foreign
religions. It was different with the _Jewish_ aristocracy: these at once
understood the meaning and the bearing of the Christian propaganda, for
they had long since learnt the germ of these social demands in the
Pentateuch and in the teaching of the earlier prophets. The year of Jubilee
which required a fresh division of the land after every forty-nine years,
the regulation that all slaves should be emancipated in the seventh
year--what were these but the precursors of the universal equality demanded
by Christ? Whether all these ideas, which are to be found in the Sacred
Scriptures of ancient Judaea, were ever realised in practice is more than
doubtful. But they were currently known to every Jew; and when Christ
attempted to give them a practical form--when, in vigorous and rousing
addresses, He denounced woe to the rich man who fattened upon his brother's
sweat--then the powerful in Jerusalem at once recognised that their
interests were threatened by a danger which was not clearly seen by
non-Jewish property-owners until much later. There is not the slightest
doubt that they made no secret of the true grounds of their anxiety to the
Roman Governor, for Christ was executed, not as a sectary, but as an
inciter to revolt.

But, of course, it could not be told to the people that the death of Christ
was demanded because He wished to put into practice the principle of
equality laid down in the sacred books and so often insisted on by the
prophets. The people had to be satisfied with the fable of the religious
heresy of the Nazarene, which fable, however--except in the case of the
unjudging crowd that collected together at the crucifixion--for a long time
found no credence. Everywhere in Israel did the first Christian communities
pass for good Jews; they were called _Judaei_ by all the Roman authors by
whom they were mentioned. What they really were, in what respects alone
they differed from the other communities of Jews, is sufficiently revealed
in the Acts of the Apostles, notwithstanding the very natural caution of
the writer, and the subsequent equally intelligible corruptions of the
text. They were Socialists, to some extent Communists; absolute economic
equality, community of goods, was practised among them. Later, when the
Christian Church sacrificed its social principle to peace with the State,
and transformed itself from a cruelly persecuted martyr to equality into an
instrument of authority and--perhaps because of this apostasy--of a doubly
zealous persecuting authority, then first did she put forth as her own
teaching the malicious calumny of her former maligners, and took upon
herself the _role_ of a new religion; and since then she has, in fact, been
the propounder of a new religion. And that she has succeeded, for more than
1,500 years, in connecting her new _role_ with the name of Christ, is
mainly the fault of the Jews, who, through the sanguinary persecutions
which have been carried on against them in the name of the meek Sufferer of
Golgotha, have allowed themselves to be betrayed into a blind and foolish
hatred towards this their greatest and noblest son.

But it remains none the less true that Christ suffered death for the idea
of social justice and for this alone--nay, that before His time this idea
was not unknown to Judaism. And it is equally true that notwithstanding all
subsequent obscuration and corruption of this world-redeeming idea, the
propaganda of economic emancipation has never since been completely
suppressed. It was in vain that the Church forbad the laity to read those
books which were alleged to contain no teaching but that of the Church:
again and again did the European peoples, languishing in the deepest
degradation, derive from those forbidden Scriptures courage and inspiration
to attempt their emancipation.

DARJA-SING (_Centre_): I should like to add to what I have just heard that
another people, six centuries before Christ, also conceived the ideas of
freedom and justice--I mean the Indian people. The essence of Buddhism is
the doctrine of the equality of all men and of the sinfulness of oppression
and exploitation. Nay, I venture to assert that the already mentioned ideas
of social freedom to be found in the Pentateuch, and held by the prophets,
and consequently those also held by Christ, are to be referred back to
Indian suggestion. At first sight this appears to be an anachronism, for
Buddha lived six centuries before Christ, while the Jewish legends carry
back the composition of the Pentateuch to the fourteenth century before
Christ. But recent investigations have almost certainly established that
these alleged books of Moses were composed in the sixth century B.C. at the
earliest--at any rate, after the return of the Israelites from the
so-called Babylonish captivity. Now, just at the time when the _elite_ of
the then existing Jews were carried to Babylon, Buddha sent his apostles
through the whole of Asia; and it may safely be assumed that those who
'wept by the waters of Babylon' were specially susceptible to the teaching
of such apostles.

When, therefore, certain eminent German thinkers assert that Christianity
is a drop of foreign blood in the Arian peoples, they are certainly correct
in so far as Christianity actually came to them as Semitism, as having
sprung from Judaism; nevertheless the Arian world can lay claim to the
fundamental conception of Christianity as its own, since it is most highly
probable that the Semitic peoples received the first germ of it from the
Arians. I say this not for the purpose of depreciating the service
performed by the great Semitic martyr to freedom. I cannot, alas! deny that
we Arians were not able to accomplish anything of our own strength with the
divine idea that sprang from our bosom. While it is probable that the
horrors of the Indian system of caste, that most shameful blossom that ever
sprang from the blood-and-tear-bedewed soil of bondage, made India the
scene of the first intellectual reaction against this scourge of mankind,
it is certain, on the other hand, that that very system of caste so
severely strained the energy of our Indian people as to make it impossible
for them to give practical effect to the reaction. Buddhism was
extinguished in India, and outside of India it was soon entirely robbed of
its social characteristic. Those transcendental speculations to which even
in the West it was _attempted_ to limit Christianity have in Eastern Asia
been in reality the only effects of Buddhism. Indeed, the idea of freedom
took different forms in the minds of the founders--taking one form in the
Indian Avatar which, notwithstanding all his sublimity, bore the mark of
his nationality; and taking another form in the Messiah of Judah who saw
the light of the world in the midst of a people fired with a never-subdued
yearning for freedom. Buddha could conceive of freedom only in the form of
that hopeless self-renunciation which was falsely introduced into the
Christian idea of freedom by those who did not wish to have their own
enjoyments interfered with by the claims of others.

In fact, I am convinced that even our more vigorous kinsmen who had
migrated to the West could not have given practical effect to the
conception of freedom and equality if we--the Indian world--had transmitted
to them that conception just as we had conceived it. For even those who
migrated westward carried in their blood to Europe, and retained for a
thousand years, the sentiment of caste. The idea that all men are equal,
really equal here upon earth, would have remained as much beyond the grasp
of the German noble and the German serf as it has remained beyond the grasp
of the Indian Pariah or Sudra and the Brahman or Kshatriya. This conception
had first to be condensed and permanently fixed by the genius of the
strongly democratic little Semitic race on the banks of the Jordan, and
then to be subjected to a severe--and, for a time, adverse--analytical
criticism by the independent and logical spirit of research of Rome and
Greece, before it could be transplanted and bear fruit in purely Arian
races. It is very evident that the converted German kings adopted
Christianity because they held it to be a convenient instrument of power.
It was for the time being immaterial to them what the new doctrine had to
say to the serfs; for the serf who looked up to the 'offspring of the
gods,' his master, with awful reverence, seemed to be for ever harmless,
and the only persons against whom it was necessary for the masters to arm
were their fellow lords, the great and the noble, who differed from the
kings in nothing but in the amount of their power. The right to rule came,
according to the Arian view, from God: very well, but the right of the
least of the nobles sprang, like that of the king, from the gods. Now, the
kings found in Christ the _one_ supreme Lord who had conferred power upon
them, and upon them alone. They alone now possessed a divine source of
authority; and therefore history shows us everywhere that it was the kings
who introduced Christianity against the--often determined--opposition of
the great, and never that the great were converted without, or against the
will of, the kings. The masses of the people, the serfs, where were these
ever asked? They have to do and believe what their masters think well; and
without exception they do it, making no resistance whatever--allowing
themselves to be driven to baptism in flocks like sheep, and believing, as
they are commanded to do, that all power comes from _one_ God, who bestows
it upon _one_ lord. For the Arian serf is a mere chattel without a will,
and will not think for himself until he is educated to do so. This work of
education has been a long time in progress; but, as the previous speaker
rightly said, the idea of freedom has never slept.

ERICH HOLM (_Right_): I do not think that any valid objection can be made
to the statement that the general idea of economic justice is thousands of
years old and has never been completely lost sight of. But it is a question
whether this general idea of equality of rights and of freedom has much in
common with that which _we_ are now about to put into practice, or whether
in many respects it does not differ from that ancient idea. And, further,
it is a question whether that idea, which we have heard is already
twenty-five centuries old, has ever been or can be realised.

With reference to the first question, I must admit that Christ, in contrast
to Buddha, entertained not a transcendental and metaphysical, but a very
material and literal idea of equality. It is true that He pronounced the
poor in spirit blessed; but the rich, who according to Him would find it
harder to get into heaven than it is for a rope of camel's hair to go
through a needle's eye, were not the rich in spirit, but the rich in
earthly riches. It is also true that he said, 'My kingdom is not of this
world' and 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's'; yet everyone
who reads these passages in connection with their context must see that He
is simply waiving all interference whatever with political affairs--that in
wishing to gain the victory for social justice he is influenced not by
political, but by transcendental aims for the sake of eternal blessedness.
Whether Rome or Israel rules is immaterial to Him, if only justice be
exercised; yet only pious narrow-mindedness can deny that He wished to see
justice exercised here below, and not merely in the next world. But is that
which Christ understands by justice really identical with what we mean by
it? It is true that the 'Love thy neighbour as thyself,' which He preached
in common with other Jewish teachers, would be a senseless phrase if it did
not imply economic equality of rights. The man who exploits man loves man
as he does his domestic animal, but not as himself: to require true
'Christian neighbourly love' in an exploiting society would be simply
absurd, and what would come of it we have in times past sufficiently
experienced. Indeed, the apostle removes all doubt from this point, for he
expressly condemns the getting rich upon another's sweat.

So far, then, we are completely at one with Christ. But He just as
emphatically condemns wealth and praises poverty, whilst we would make
wealth the common possession of all, and therefore would place all our
fellow-men in a condition in which--to speak with Christ--it would be
harder to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a rope to go through a
needle's eye. Here is a contradiction which it seems to me can scarcely be
reconciled. We hold misery, Christ held wealth, to be the source of vice,
of sin: our equality is that of wealth, His that of poverty. This is my
first point.

In the second place, Christ did _not_ succeed, modest as His aims were. Is
not, then, an appeal to this noblest of all minds calculated to discourage
rather than to encourage us in the pursuit of our aims?

EMILIO LERMA (_Freeland_): The previous speaker has brought the poverty
which Christ praised and required into a false relation with
the--alleged--miscarriage of His work of emancipation. Christ's work
miscarried not in spite of, but _because_ of, the fact that He attempted to
base equality upon poverty. The equality of poverty cannot be established,
for it would be synonymous with the stagnation of civilisation. However, it
is not only possible, but necessary, to bring about the equality of wealth,
as soon as the necessary conditions exist, because this is synonymous with
the progress of civilisation. You will say that certainly this is so
according to our view; but according to the view of Christ wealth is an
evil. Very true. But when we examine the matter without prejudice, it is
impossible not to see _that Christ rejected wealth only because it had its
source in exploitation_. There is nothing in the life of Christ to suggest
that He was such a gloomy ascetic as He must have been if He had held
wealth, as such, to be sinful: numberless passages in the Gospels afford
unequivocal evidence of the contrary. Christ's daily needs were very
simple, but He was always ready to enjoy whatever His adherents offered
him, and never saw any harm in getting as much pleasure from living as was
consistent with justice. This view of His was not affected even by the
hatred with which the rich of Jerusalem persecuted Him, and the
often-quoted condemnation of the rich has in it something contrary to the
spirit of the Gospels, if we tear it away from its connection with the
words, 'Woe unto him who waxeth fat upon the sweat of his brother.' In
condemning wealth, Christ condemned merely its source; the kingdom of
heaven was closed to wealth because, and only because, wealth could not be
acquired except by exploiting the sweat of men. There can be no doubt that
Christ, like ourselves, would have become reconciled to wealth if then, as
in our days, wealth were possible without exploitation--nay, really
possible only without it. We shall have further occasion to discuss why
this was impossible in Christ's day and for many centuries afterwards; at
present it is enough to know that it _was_ impossible, that the only choice
lay between poverty and wealth with exploitation.

Christ rendered the immortal service of having recognised this alternative
more clearly than anyone before Him, and of having attacked exploitation
with soul-stirring fervour. It was inevitable that He should be crucified
for what He did, for in the antagonism between justice and the claims of
civilisation the first always succumbs. It was inevitable that He should
die, because He unrolled the banner of true human love, freedom, and
equality--in short, of all the noblest sentiments of the human
heart--nearly two thousand years too soon; too soon, that is, for Him, not
for us: for dull-witted humanity needed those two thousand years in order
fully to understand what its martyr meant. For humanity Christ died not a
day too soon. There is, then, no contradiction between the Christian ideas
and what we are striving for; the difference between the two lies simply
herein: that the first announcement of the idea of equality was made in an
age when the material conditions necessary for the practical realisation of
this divine idea did not yet exist, whilst our endeavours signify the
'Incarnation of the Word,' the fruit of the seed then cast into the mind of
mankind. It cannot, therefore, be said that the Christian work of
emancipation has really 'miscarried': there merely lie two thousand years
between the beginning and the completion of the work undertaken by Christ.

On account of the lateness of the hour the President here closed the
sitting, the debate standing adjourned until the next day.

CHAPTER XXIV

SECOND DAY

(_Adjourned Discussion upon the first point on the Agenda_)

LEOPOLD STOCKAU (_Centre_) re-opened the debate: I think that the
preliminary question, whether our present endeavours after economic justice
really are without any historical precedent, was exhaustively discussed
yesterday and was answered in the negative. At least, I am authorised by
yesterday's speakers of the opposite party to declare that they are fully
convinced that the teaching of Christ differs in no essential point from
that which is practically carried out in Freeland, and which we wish to
make the common property of the whole world. We now come to the main
subject of the first question for discussion--namely, to the inquiry why
the former attempts to base human industry upon justice and freedom have
been unsuccessful.

The answer to this question has already been suggested by the last speaker
of yesterday. Former attempts miscarried because they aimed at establishing
the equality of poverty: ours will succeed because it implies the equality
of wealth. The equality of poverty would have produced stagnation in
civilisation. Art and science, the two vehicles of progress, assume
abundance and leisure; they cannot exist, much less can they develop, if
there are no persons who possess more than is sufficient to satisfy their
merely animal wants. In former epochs of human culture it was impossible to
create abundance and leisure for all--it was impossible because the means
of production would not suffice to create abundance for all even if all
without exception laboured with all their physical power; and therefore
much less would they have sufficed if the workers had indulged in the
leisure which is as necessary to the development of the higher intellectual
powers as abundance is to the maturing of the higher intellectual needs.
And since it was not possible to guarantee to all the means of living a
life worthy of human beings, it remained a sad, but not less inexorable,
necessity of civilisation that the majority of men should be stinted even
in the little that fell to their share, and that the booty snatched from
the masses should be used to endow a minority who might thus attain to
abundance and leisure. Servitude was a necessity of civilisation, because
that alone made possible the development of the tastes and capacities of
civilisation in at least a few individuals, while without it barbarism
would have been the lot of all.

It is, moreover, a mistake to suppose that servitude is as old as the human
race: it is only as old as civilisation. There was a time when servitude
was unknown, when there were neither masters nor servants, and no one could
exploit the labour of his fellow-men; that was not the Golden, but the
Barbaric, Age of our race. While man had not yet learnt the art of
_producing_ what he needed, but was obliged to be satisfied with gathering
or capturing the voluntary gifts of nature, and every competitor was
therefore regarded as an enemy who strove to get the same goods which each
individual looked upon as his own special prey, so long did the struggle
for existence among men necessarily issue in reciprocal destruction instead
of subjection and exploitation. It did not then profit the stronger or the
more cunning to force the weaker into his service--the competitor had to be
killed; and as the struggle was accompanied by hatred and superstition, it
soon began to be the practice to eat the slain. A war of extermination
waged by all against all, followed generally by cannibalism, was therefore
the primitive condition of our race.