ideas of right and wrong are not absolute, but relative; not fixed, but fluid, changing with the changes in our modes of producing food, clothes and shelter. Morality varies not only with time, but with social altitude. What was accounted a virtue in a bold baron of the feudal days was a crime in that same baron's serf. The pipe-line hand who regulates his daily life by the same moral ideas which have made John D. Rockefeller a shining example of piety will find himself behind prison bars.
Ethics simply register the decrees by which the ruling class stamps with approval or brands with censure human conduct solely with reference to the effect of that conduct upon the welfare of their class. This does not mean that any ruling class has ever had the wit to devise ab initio a code of ethics perfectly adapted to further their interests. Far from it. The process has seldom, if ever, been a conscious one. By a process akin to natural selection in the organic world, the ruling class learns by experience what conduct is helpful and what hurtful to it, and blesses in the one case and damns in the other. And as the ruling class has always controlled all the avenues by which ideas reach the so-called lower classes, they have heretofore
