which
flow from them, constitutes the sum of human happiness. All conditions
of life which promote right living, ethical culture and moral growth,
nourish and call forth emotions of truth and honesty, pure pleasure,
adoration, worship, hope, affection, love and all the higher and nobler
characteristics, build up life and increase its capacity for happiness.
Through the action of an equally inexorable and unswerving law, the
misery and crime which poverty breeds, with its bitterness of hate,
grief and despair, and all the train of other evil emotions engendered
thereby, are poisonous in their nature; they tear down and destroy life.
Therefore that social and industrial system which affords most
abundantly, and for all of the people, conditions that are
life-promoting and poverty-banishing, is logically the nearest just and
right, because it is the nearest in harmony with natural law, and the
object and purpose of human life.

"Society as a whole, like a chain with defective links, is no stronger
socially, morally, industrially, or politically, than its weakest unit.
Hence it becomes the self interest of every individual member to
endeavor unselfishly to build up and strengthen the weaker units in
every possible way.

"These propositions furnish the only sound basis for a perfect system of
political economy--a system which shall afford the greatest amount of
good or happiness to all the people. In considering the clearness and
startling significance of these truths, we discover the cruel, criminal
wrong of any system of competition, based on the old barbaric law of the
survival of the fittest, which in its application means the pleasure and
happiness of the few at the expense of the toil, pain and misery of the
many. In this connection we note that man, in his evolutionary progress,
has reached a point where, being mentally and spiritually awakened to a
knowledge of the higher purposes of life, he perceives the true effect
of environmental conditions, with their good and evil tendencies. He
also perceives the cause and the cure. Armed with the talisman of this
knowledge, he boldly enters the field of causation and thenceforward
becomes a self-directing factor in his own evolution. At this important
stage, he clearly comprehends, that the injury of one is the concern of
all; that the perfection of all becomes the highest interest of each;
that the unprogressive law of the survival of the fittest, is nullified
and replac