Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/25

and a deadening poverty. Every seventh year Jewish slaves are liberated; clothes taken in pawn must be restored at the end of the day; every seventh year is a fallow year for the fields when they become common property; the rights of the people to the soil are protected by legal and religious penalties. The code, it has been frequently argued, partook of some of the qualities of some modern legislation and was more complete on paper than in practice. But be that as it may, here it is, an expression of the sense of justice and an indication of the economic ideals of the religious leaders of the people. As the nation increases in prosperity economic circumstances arise to create a wealthy and luxurious class on the one hand, a poverty-stricken class on the other. The revolt against that is embodied in the writings of the prophets, and they flare with a glow of indignation against the economic disruption of the ancient religious government; they denounce the rich, the man who is adding field to field, the usurers, in language which sounds harsh and wild to us now when it is used to describe our own conditions. The community of Israel with its adjustments of social and individual right and its moral restraints imposed upon economic processes, went down before a capitalist civilisation, just as the Indian village community is decaying to-day before the advance of Western economic civilisation. From this it has been argued that a society organised as Israel was can never survive the assault of a people like