Conservative's Consolations
prefer work with wages to wages without work. A cartoon in "Punch" representing the Minister of Labour blandly and insinuatingly presenting a housemaid's uniform to an outraged "exmunitionette," who is the Government's contented pensioner, suggests some rift in this harmonious understanding. Progressives have branded temperamental conservatism as distrust of the unknown,—a mental attitude which is the antithesis of love of adventure. But distrust of the unknown is a thin and fleeting emotion compared with distrust of human nature, which is perfectly well known. To know it is not necessarily to quarrel with it. It is merely to take it into account.
Economics and ethics have little in common. They meet in amity, only to part in coldness. Our preference for our own interests is essentially and vitally un-Christian. The competitive system is not a Christian system. But it lies at the
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