THE LAST UTOPIA | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 17, 1881

THE LAST UTOPIA.

Under this head the Oakland Daily Times had, not long since, a very interesting editorial on the schemes of political economists, with especial reference to the questions of labor and land-holding. The following is the conclusion of the article, well worth reading for its pointed suggestions:—

There are two opposed theories of the destiny of man; the Scripture theory which declares in unsparing terms that he is a desperate, and in this world, incurable sinner; but that the meek shall inherit the earth. The other theory is the outgrowth of Darwinianism which says that man is evolving to a higher state and plane of being, by a survival of the fittest, that is to say, that the man of the most dynamic force, the biggest, most self-pushing, unfeeling man is the one who is going to go up and live, and the helpless, and the meek, ask-permission man is going to find his inheritance by mixing his ashes with the dust.

The new plan of arranging the division of land so as all may have farms and gardens without paying rent, ignores both the Bible and Darwin, which two books are opposed anyhow, whatever they may say.

Things, just now, look quite Darwinistic. They are the men of corporal strength and plucky push that are inheriting the earth—or the land—as Mr. George would say; the future must be reserving a universal, and miraculous transformation, if the tables are to be turned, and the last become first. It is very certain that the present nature of man is not going to render anything but foolish the realization of common land holding. Who is going to bring about this Elysian condition of things? Say a revolution by the sword. Well, when the carnage is over and the smoke is cleared away what then? Have the ambitious, the avaricious, the fraudulent, the keen, the tyrannical, all been killed? Or, perhaps this new adjustment will come through legislation! Legislation! Legislators will change then. They will have no more personal interests, be no more venal, and pass and maintain laws to suit the most approved philosophy. Of course! This is all reasonable and nice. Then when every pater familias gets on a piece of ground he will work to make it bring forth, yielding himself submissively to the punishment of earning bread by the sweat of his face! The reason labor is a punishment is that man hates it. The large majority prefer to get the profits of others' labor, and are not going to work their own allotments of ground if they can find another way to live. The happy ideal state of this world is not a piece of ground to work on, but to own a piece of ground and have somebody else do the work. How are our political economists going to manage the innate aversion to honest manual toil in humanity?

If you were to leave every man to work out his own salvation on a piece of ground, there would be a thousand tramps where there is one now. Weeds instead of corn would thrive, and instead of the rose would come up the briar. If man is to be provided for by making him individually responsible for his own success, that has been tried

thousands of years and the plan has failed—simply because of the deficiencies of man himself. A political economy that overlooks the factor of evil in men, must come to a wrong conclusion. The question of the human heart hangs ahead of all philosophy. The world has always been divided into two classes, the oppressors and the oppressed; nor did land troubles lie at the source of human misery and poverty. All creation groaneth and travaileth together in pain until now, and age after age, revolution after revolution, from whatever cause and whatever purpose, have bequeathed to man the identical troubles he began with. Philosophy has not removed them, nor legislation, nor science. As desirable as a millennium for Ireland may be she has never yet reached it, though having struggled a thousand years. Men are the same in Ireland as in England, and it is only by the accident of history that their conditions are not reversed. There is many a would-be despot in a hovel, many an aristocrat at heart in beggar's shoes. The very man who killed the Czar, had circumstances been different, might have been killed by Alexander for his tyrannies. As much patent oppression as there is in the world is far exceeded by the reserved cruelties that only lack the means and opportunity to exhibit themselves.

The world may receive with avidity utopian schemes of prosperity and happiness, for it is natural to indulge in delusion, especially when we are in trouble; but be assured that fortune will always discriminate in favor of the few against the many, for the internal spring of the moral realm is out of order.