Life — December 4, 1919 — page 38: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“While there ts Publ LIFE PUBLIS' Awpeew Mittex, President and Treasurer -LIFE:-YXX Life there’sHope”* ished by ING COMPANY James S, Mercatre, Secretary No. 1936 17 West Thirty-first Street, New York London Offices, Rolls House, HRIST- MAS this year ap- proaches a world. still considerably in the hole. The _ millen- nium is back- ward about coming forward. The war is over, but the authorities, especially some of those in Washington, are very coy about proclaiming it. The lion will not lie down with the lamb, the Celes- tials are languid after extraordinary exertions in the cause of future peace, and the Carnals are having a little passing enjoyment. There is some peace on earth and some good will among men, but neither is epidemic yet. We all look on somewhat rue- fully and wish things were more com- pletely fixed up; but they lag. Of course they do. It was to be ex- pected. Convalescence usually extends over a period proportionate to the sick- ness it succeeds. The world is now convalescent after an exceedingly bad and protracted attack of fits, and though it is getting better, it isn’t rush- ing back to health. We do not want it restored to the kind of health it had before the war. We have had cnough of that. We think it breeds disease. We want new-style world-health, but we haven't got the new style worked out yet, and of course that makes delay. And the delay develops a good deal of scrappiness. There is Labor! Labor wants something; wants it very much ; but doesn’t quite know what it is. Of course it wants more money and shorter working days, and the right to fire the foreman, and things of . Breams Bldgs., London. E. C. that sort, and the excessive cost of things warrants much of its money- hunger. But that’s not all; it wants something else; some sort of a new -deal that will make life more satis- factory; some sort of new relation with the other human beings that will seem more lucrative, more just and pleasanter than the present relation. Labor thinks about this a great deal, and listens to various peonle—Bolshe- viks among others—and takes advice, a good deal of it bad, and at times strikes. It’s all quite painful, and not a little disturbing. APITAL also thinks—that is, em- ployers do. It's not quite certain that Capital can think, though we know that money talks. But employers think a good deal. They have to. They don’t all want to, but thought is forced upon them. They are quite as keen to have a more satisfactory relation with labor as labor is to have such a relation with society. They like business and its various ‘products, and strikes are bad for business, and muss it up, so they dislike strikes very much, and feel— some of them do—that the next worse thing to losing one is to win it And meanwhile the production of commodities lags just when an im- poverished world needs a lot of them, and house-building lags, and is very, very costly, while lots of people are homeless, and coal production falls off in the face of a winter in which lots of people are going to be cold, and undeniably the situation is troublesome T will work out, of course. Every- thing has to work out, just as all rivers have to reach the sea, except a few that run into sands and evaporate, as we hope the big Bolshevist river will. But the best hope that it will work out into anything better than has been and is, lies in the presence in the world of that sentiment and disposi- tion that we call the Christmas Spirit. In the war we had a great deal of it There was a big job to do, and every- one that was any good put himself into the doing of it. They put aside selfishness; they forgot money, except as a means to help; they thought of life itself as something secondary in im- portance to the saving of civilization from a great peril. People got almost declassified. They suspended polite life, and the polite people threw them- selves into all sorts of homely tasks and drudgeries to make life go better for the men who were in the war. It was a great time and a wonderful con- secration, and it did people lots of good. But now we all seem to be drifting back into everyone-for-himself, and yet that seems to be more the fault of habit and fixed methods than of any wide defect of disposition. People would like to go on with that great co-operation of hand and heart that raised five million soldiers and sent two million to France, but they don't know how. A great many try to keep it up, but the vitalizing motive is gone, and most people fall back—they have to—on that old and compelling interest, the making of a living. But even that cannot yet be as en- grossing as it once was. People have to make a living, but millions of them have tasted something better and have not forgotten it. Labor, ‘Capital, the Church and Society all worked for che war, and worked together. Together again they will have to work to remake the world, and presently they will dis- cover it, and take hold. And when they do, that will mean the triumph of the Christmas Spirit. For the only thing that can bring the world right, or ever could, is religion. and the Christmas Spirit is applied re- ligion. Rightly applied it puts spiritual things first, and material things in the secondary relation, where they belong. In so far as the world learns hew to do that, it will be happy, and mean- while individual people who can learn to do it can be happy and useful with- out waiting for laggers to discover that for men and nations runs the same law of conduct and of peace: “As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.” E. S. Martin. comicbooks.comyp