The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice

MP3 Audio CD. The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice

I.--The Troubled Outlook of the Present Hour


THESE are troubled times. As the echoes of the war die away the sound of
a new conflict rises on our ears. All the world is filled with
industrial unrest. Strike follows upon strike. A world that has known
five years of fighting has lost its taste for the honest drudgery of
work. Cincinnatus will not back to his plow, or, at the best, stands
sullenly between his plow-handles arguing for a higher wage.

The wheels of industry are threatening to stop. The laborer will not
work because the pay is too low and the hours are too long. The producer
cannot employ him because the wage is too high, and the hours are too
short. If the high wage is paid and the short hours are granted, then
the price of the thing made, so it seems, rises higher still. Even the
high wages will not buy it. The process apparently moves in a circle
with no cessation to it. The increased wages seem only to aggravate the
increasing prices. Wages and prices, rising together, call perpetually
for more money, or at least more tokens and symbols, more paper credit
in the form of checks and deposits, with a value that is no longer based
on the rock-bottom of redemption into hard coin, but that floats upon
the mere atmosphere of expectation.

But the sheer quantity of the inflated currency and false money forces
prices higher still. The familiar landmarks of wages, salaries and
prices are being obliterated. The "scrap of paper" with which the war
began stays with us as its legacy. It lies upon the industrial landscape
like snow, covering up, as best it may, the bare poverty of a world
desolated by war.