Christianity gives the world a new and characteristic standard of values.  It diminishes greatly the values which can accrue from competition, and enhances immeasurably the non-competitive values.  ’A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.’  ’Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?’ ’The Kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.’  Passages like these are found in every part of the New Testament.  This Christian idealism has a direct bearing on the doctrine of ‘human costs.’  Work is irksome, not only when it is excessive or ill-paid, but when the worker is lazy, selfish, envious or discontented.  There is one thing which can make almost any work welcome.  If it is done from love or unselfish affection, the human cost is almost nil, because it is not counted or consciously felt.  This is no exaggeration when it is applied to the devoted labour of the mother and the nurse, or to that of the evangelist conscious of a divine vocation.  But in all useful work the keen desire to render social service, or to do God’s will, diminishes to an incalculable extent the ‘human cost’ of labour.  This principle introduces a deep cleavage between the Christian remedy and that of political socialism, which fosters discontent and indignation as a lever for social amelioration.  Men are made unhappy in order that they may be urged to claim a larger share of the world’s wealth.  Christianity considers that, measured by human costs, the remedy is worse than the disease.  The adoption of a truer standard of value would tear up the lust of accumulation by the roots, and would thus effect a real cure.  It would also stop the grudging and deliberately bad work which at present seriously diminishes the national wealth.

The Christian cure is the only real cure.  It is the fashion to assume that militarism and cupidity are vices of the privileged classes, and that democracies may be trusted neither to plunder the minority at home nor to seek foreign adventures by unjust wars.  There is not the slightest reason to accept either of these views.  Political power is always abused; an unrepresented class is always plundered.  Nor are democracies pacific, except by accident.  At present they do not wish to see the capital which they regard as their prospective prey dissipated in war; and for this reason their influence in our time will probably be on the side of peace.  But, as soon as the competition of cheap Asiatic labour becomes acute, we may expect to see the democracies bellicose and the employing class pacific.  This is not guess-work; we already see how the democracies of California and Australia behave towards immigrants from Asia.  Readers of Anatole France will remember his description of the economic wars decreed by the Senate of the great republic, at the end of ‘L’Ile des Pingouins.’  It would, indeed, be difficult to prove that the expansion of the United States has differed much, in methods and morals, from that of the European monarchies; and the methods of trade-unions are the methods of pitiless belligerency.  Democracy and socialism are broken reeds for the lover of peace to lean upon.