e, Adam Smith, Bentham and the Manchester School, generally, and the
evolutionary theories of the exponents of Darwinism, and abetted by an
endless series of statutes, the idea of the exemption of property
holders from any responsibility to society for the use of their
property, became a fixed part of the mental equipment of modernism.
Precisely the same thing happened politically and socially. Rights were
personal and implied no necessary obligation to society as a whole; they
were personal attributes and as such to be defended at all costs.

Now the result of this profound error as to the existence, nature and
limitation of these personal rights has meant simply the destruction of
a righteous and unified society which works by cooeperation and
fellowship, and the substitution of individuals and corporate bodies who
work by competition, strife and mutual aggression towards the attainment
of all they can get under the impulse of what was once praised as
"enlightened self interest." In other words--war. The conflict that
began in 1914 was not a war hurled into the midst of a white peace, it
was only a military war arising in the centre of a far greater social
war, for there is no other word that is descriptive. Rights that are not
contingent on the due discharge of duties and obligations are but
hateful privilege; privilege has issue in selfishness and egotism, which
in turn work themselves out in warfare and in the hatred that both
precedes and follows conflict.

The net result of a century and a half of industrialism is avarice,
warfare and hate. Society can continue even when avariciousness is
rampant--for a time--and warfare of one sort or another seems
inseparable from humanity, at all events it has always been so, but
hatred is another matter, for it is the negation of social life and is
its solvent. Anger passes; it is sometimes even righteous, but hatred is
synonymous with death in that it dissolves every unit, reducing it to
its component parts and subjecting each of these to dissolution in its
turn. Righteous anger roused the nations into the war that hate had
engendered, but hate has followed after and for the moment is
victorious. Russia seethes with hatred and is perishing of its poison,
while there is not another country in Europe, of those that were
involved in the war, where the same is not true in varying degrees;
hatred of race for race, of nation for nation, of class for class, of
one social or indust