Sunday at Home

Southern Cross, Volume 1, Issue 47, 17 February 1894, Page 3

Sunday at Home

CAPITAL Y. LABOUR. The Rev. N. F. Norton, preaching recently at Christ Church, Hampstead, on Capital and Labour, said that in each industrial question that arose Jesus Christ had a definite opinion, and it was the dut}' of Christian men and Christian teachers humbly to find out what that opinion was, and then to express it without fear or favour and give it practical effect. The whole question of Capital and Labour had to be brought to His judgment bar, for from Him and His spirit alone could come the settlement of these jarring contentions. It might seem difficult to discuss in a dispassionate frame of mind a problem like the miners’ lock-out, when our ears were filled with the cry of the starving and our hearts were bleeding for the poor victims of this coal struggle. But that national woe, arousing as it did all oui 1 tenderest sympathies, was one way God had of turning our attention to the relations of Capital and Labour, of getting us to think upon them, and seek the truth as it would seem to our Lord,

Production demanded three things —land, human labour, and capital. Capital was the fund from which Labour was supported in the work of production. It was itself the work of saving and abstinence. Capital and Labour ought never to be in opposition. Their interests were complimentary one to the other ; but unfortunately there was a collision. Two of the three agents of production —land and capital —had drifted into the hands of a comparative few. Legislation had largely favoured this accumulation. The holders and owners of land and capital held the labourers in their hands. Their power, as many a dismal chapter in industrial history proved, unchecked as it had been by morality or religion, might become the most pitiless and cruel tyranny, exacting the longest hours of work, and paying the lowest wages, until the life of the toiler became intolerable.

Some people, continued the rev. gentleman, thought that the State was able to protect itself against the clangers of this accumulation. Eventually, perhaps, it might. At present the Legislature itself was under the control of the owners of land and capital. Sanguine folk saw a Utopia coming down out of Heaven, in which land and capital would he the property of the State. But it was well to remember that, according to Karl Marx himself, this would be the result of a social evolution, slow though certain ; nothing we could do would greatly accelerate or hinder it. The most to be expected was that discussion and teaching would make the transition easier. The immediate need of the movement was to produce a more profound conviction about social duties, to bring out the authority of spiritual power, and bring society to Christ. Our Saviour, by word and example, showed that covetousness was the great enemy of the .Kingdom of God. Whilst man was covetous—each for himself and the devil take the hindmost — whilst they dealt with one another without love and sympathy —human life in some one or the other of its aspects must be hell. Christ, however, had something to say to the workmen as well. The standing difficulty, which weighed like an incubus on labour, was the enormous increase of population. As food became cheaper the workmen married earlier and families increased. That mattered little where parents were capable, and whilst emigration gave an opening for our race. But it was to be noticed that the least capable people, with weakly and even diseased bodies and without adequate means of subsistence, married and brought into the world troops of comparatively helpless and useless lives. ‘ The best and strongest of these competed for labour, and brought down wages ; the worst did not labour at all, hut weighed on the earnings of the industrious, de-

manding a vast and demoralising outlay of the poor law, and perpetuating a terrible entail of vices in generation after generation.