Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/91

poets, painters, musicians, sculptors, the writers of talent and genius, the scientists, the inventors, the discoverers? Do you say Labour is exploited? Heavens! if Labour is exploited 5 per cent., talent and genius are exploited 50 and 500. It is brains we want—it is brains which alone can save us, which alone can help us to solve the deadly riddle of the Sphinx. With brains, I say, all things are possible; without them, little or nothing that is of permanent use. Suppose to-morrow every man was paid the just value of his work. Who, do you suppose, would gain? Whose would be the sudden rises of 100 and 1000 per cent.? Why, it is the story of the Morven strike again. Give the masses 7 or 8 per cent. increase of their present wage, and you do them utter and absolute justice. Give the men of talent and genius their increase of 50 and 500 per cent., and humanity is still their debtor. Labour already shows us, wherever it is yet powerful enough to have anything like a free hand, what it really desires; and the civilisation which it rules will be a hell of mediocrity, pullulating into corruption and decadence—at best a China, at worst an easy prey for the first incursion of a more vigorous stock. It will not advance us one step towards the true civilisation, not to say towards the resolution of the great human problem. Already the Labour men