Let us suppose that we meet on one day with two beggars. One of them is a man who has borne a good character throughout his life, and has lost his work through no fault of his own; the works on which he was employed were closed, and he is now tramping in search of more work. All of us of course will say—"He deserves help and we will help him." Yes; and it is quite easy to help him. We have only to set him up again, and all will be well. It is not his own fault and we can rely upon him to make use of another opportunity. The other beggar is a man who has lost this place, as he has lost many before, through indulgence in some vice, such as drink. There are very many people who will say, "Well, it is his own fault, and now he must suffer for it." If God had taken that line with us, where would our redemption be?—"It is his own fault, now he must suffer for it." To say that is to repudiate the Gospel in its entirety. It is to call the Cross absurd and scandalous. "God commendeth His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died."
No; the Christian will say, "This man needs help more than the other." It will not be the same kind of help. It is no use merely to give him money. That may merely help him to go wrong quicker than he would otherwise. He needs something that will cost us, probably, more than money; he needs our time—time to make friends; time to remove his suspicions; time to enter into real sympathy with him, and to detect what elements of strength there are in his character, that we may build them up again. But he needs help more than the other, and the Christian will be bound to give it, and he will say—"It was his own fault; he cannot help himself; it depends entirely on us; we will render to him according to his need."
And all of this would lead to another formula for describing the justice which we shall desire to practise in the State, and in all our secular life of which the State is the highest organisation—The recognition of personality.
I do not know at all what forms your labour unrest in takes in this continent, but I claim to have considerable opportunities of knowing what is the root of that unrest in England, at least among the better type of working people; for I am concerned with an organisation which is at work among working folk all over England, having an enormous membership, and which aims at claiming for them, and supplying them with, further facilities for education. Those with whom I thus come in contact are picked men, no doubt, because those who join an educational association are thereby marked off at once as intellectually at least more alert than those who do not join; but as I go about them, I find no room whatever for doubting that the root of the labour unrest in England is a sense that the whole organisation of our life constitutes a standing insult to the personality of the poor man. Why, for example, he feels, should it be possible for a well-to-do man to secure for himself, or for his wife, or for his child, the medical attendance that may be needed, while he in very many parts of our country depends upon institutions maintained by voluntary contributions? It is quite compatible with gratitude to those whose generosity maintains these institutions to feel that for such service he should not be dependent upon anybody’s charity at all—whether the solution is to be that the State maintain such institutions or that every man who is doing his fair share of the country’s work receive for himself the wage that will enable him to deal with such emergencies as they arise.