secure the most
forceful progress of economic life. A true change can come only from
within. The superficial, unpsychological theories of human happiness,
which have been hammered into the working population of our age, have
made true happiness more and more difficult to attain. There is small
chance that this inner conversion will come in our day through
religion, however much religion may help toward it. There is still
smaller chance that philosophy can do it and that the average man will
take the attitude of Antisthenes who claimed that it is divine not to
need anything and that he who needs least is nearest to the ideal. But
there is every chance that mankind will remember again more vividly
the deeper lasting values of humanity. Society must be sobered after
the frenzy of this present-day rush for external goods. The shallow
disappointment is felt too widely already. The world is beginning to
discover once more that this scramble for pearls and palaces and motor
cars among the rich, and for their showy imitations among the middle
class, and the envy of material profits and the chase for amusements
even among the poorest, leave life meaningless and cold and silly. As
soon as the industrial community turns to a new set of ideas and
becomes inspired by the belief in the ideal value of the work as work
and as a necessary contribution to the progress of mankind, the social
question will be solved, as all the differences which socialism wants
to eliminate then appear trivial and insignificant.

But on the other hand, this belief cannot grow, and cannot spread its
roots deep in the soil of the industrial mind unless, as a necessary
counterpart, the ideas of duties and obligations spread and enlarge
among those who profit from the rights of capital. The capitalistic
society must organize itself so that the sinking below the starvation
line through illness, old age, or unemployment will be reduced to a
minimum, so that the greatest possible participation in all which
gives higher value to life will be secured for the worker and his
family, and above all, so that the industrial control will be exerted
by the best and the wisest. Nowhere is reform of ideals more needed.
The brutality of capital is never felt more strongly than when the
workingman suspects that those at the top are not selected on account
of their stronger capacities. Only when capital is conscious of its
duties can the belief in the ideal meaning of the worki