It is only as the consequence of a misunderstanding that some seek for a detailed social policy in the encyclicals of the Popes. One must not expect to find in them a pronouncement in favour of protection or free trade, a discussion of various monetary systems with a decision in favour of one of them, or even an exhortation to introduce the Eight Hours working day. As Leo XIII and Pius XI have repeatedly said, their intervention in the field of social reconstruction is based entirely on their official duty to safeguard and promote religion and morality, both of which are necessarily involved in the organization of society. The Popes make no claim to be economists or financiers, still less to be engineers or agriculturists; but they do most emphatically claim the right to lay down the moral principles which must be respected by all classes of mankind, and to point out the forms assumed by those principles in relation to the political, economic, financial and technical organization of society. Those who complain that such encyclicals as Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum or Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno do not enter into greater detail would do better to reflect on this illustration of the Church’s desire to leave as much liberty to individuals and States as she can without failing in her duty as guardian of the moral law. Given several alternative policies, any one of which may be pursued without any violation of morality, the Church is quite content to leave the choice between them to those who are entrusted with the care of national interests, or who have a part to play in the social mechanism by virtue of their economic functions.

The economic causes of any political movement or system are related to certain fundamental needs or wants of man's nature and upon the measure in which that system claims to be, and is actually, able to fulfil those wants. In the purely physical sphere these requirements of our nature are easy enough to define. But nhen we come to consider the mental and spiritual requirements of man's nature we must at the outset make a distinction between what a man needs and what he wants, far there is great diversity here. It is true that in different ages different needs and wants will predominate, and that in one century the emphasis will be laid where afterwards it is bur lightly stressed. Yet because the human body has within historical memory developed far less rhan the human mind we may say thar essential wants of the human body are constant. The want of food, for instance or the want of warmth for the body. Without these wants being satisfied the body could not survive. Now it is especially to these wants—to the complex of living conditions—that I refer when I say that the economic causes of any political system are related to certain wants of man's nature.

Which is the true heir of Karl Marx, Communism, Social Democracy, Bolshevism, or Menshevism? This is a much vexed question. The answer to it depends on the angle from which Marxism is viewed. If we stress the sociological determinism of Marx, then the Social Democrats must be recognized as more consistent Marxists than the Communists; but if we stress fidelity to the revolutionary spirit, then the Communists show more sign of it than do the Social Democrats who have lost it. The Communists alone, imbued with the messianic idea of the proletariat, are really consumed with a crusading ardour for the destruction of the old world and the building up of a new. And it is because Communism, as distinct from Social Democracy, thus assumes a religious character that it is hostile to and persecutes all other forms of belief.

But what are we to think of sociological determinism, which gives Marxism the character of a scientific socialism and distinguishes it from utopian socialism?

Machinery runs according to the laws of mechanics and not according to the moral law. This is not to say that the laws of mechanics are immoral, but simply that they are non-moral. Now the main principle of mechanical invention is the elimination of waste energy. Of two machines doing the same work, that is the better which costs less to run. This is the same as saying that the better machine is better designed for its purpose; for the purpose of machinery is to reduce the costs of production. The chief cost of production is human labour. Even the cost of materials is chiefly made up of the cost of human labour. Stone would be as cheap as dirt if it could be dug as easily. Petrol would be as cheap as water if it came down as rain. It is always labour which costs money. I leave out of consideration here the question of bank interest and interest on money borrowed. If interest is not in some way payment for effort it is usury, and as such an unjust charge, something for nothing, a thing to be abolished as a thing ruinous to society. It is labour which costs money and it is to Save the cost of labour that machinery has been invented and its use spread throughout the world. Tools are not machines in the common sense of the word. A thing is a tool when it helps. A hammer helps a man to get a nail into a wall. A chisel helps a man to cut stone or wood.

It must not be thought, because the Christian Church condemns Marxist Communism, that she thereby identifies herself with those who attack it because it seeks to uproot the ‘existing order.’ The Christian's case against Communism is not that it is revolutionary but that it is counter-revolutionary; that it is, in theory and practice, diametrically opposed to the principles of the Christian Revolution, to the Christian conception of Society, to the Christian conception of human personality and destiny. The Christian Church has a long memory, and she cannot fail to recognize in salient features of the Hegelian-Marxist philosophy a resuscitation of the pre-Christian and pagan conceptions from which the Christian Revolution delivered civilization. This reactionary re-paganization of society is by no means a peculiar or distinctive Eeature of Communism, but it is in Communism that it finds at present its most explicit, logical and ruthless expression. A sincere and authentic Christianity will not oppose ‘Marxism by joining forces with liberalism, individualist-capitalism, bourgeoisism and suchlike representatives of the ‘existing order’ (which it finds hardly less abhorrent), but by reasserting the principles of the Christian Revolution and by revitalizing its forces. In these pages we shall attempt, so far as space permits, to sketch the basic conceptions of this Christian Revolution, as a concrete and dynamic historical reality, with a view to suggesting how it may again become a real, positive and dominant factor in social reconstruction.

A strange anomaly confronts us to-day. We turn from a State inordinately preoccupied with the affairs of the individual to the anarchical interests of Capital hardly conceding to the vast majority of individuals the right to live. Twin Apollyons straddle right across the way with the forces of the world arrayed severally behind them; they have enlisted, between them, every influence, cultural and to a great extent religious; whether or not it be argued that the latter is detached from its true fons et origo. Recurrent contacts between the two, here hostile, there sympathetic, are evidently too many and too involved for anything less than an economic atlas of the world to review. And Catholics in England do not lack their prophets to foretell the destiny of every straw in the wind. At present we must be content with little more than the acknowledgement of certain chilly spasms of apprehension that stir us as the westerly breath that suggests the stormgib. For all we are very much at sea there may be precautions to suit any manner of emergency.

Or, to revert to Bunyan’s metaphor, we will enquire what armament poor Christian can call exclusively his own.

To the muddled vision of this world Catholicism presents a stream of contradictions. The Church, for instance, who is the friend of sinners, is the relentless enemy of Sin. Unmollified by respectability, by the appeal of polygamy to the Law (or of marital onanism to the economy of hygiene) it is She nevertheless who flings wide her doors to the too-unclean for Mammon’s Temples, that prostitute and outcast may enter with the blest. It is a matter of some scandal to our contemporary the progressive protestant.’