Functional socialism

24 FUNCTIONAL SOCIALISM

tence. On the other hand, there may be men who do not care for the good, the true and the beautiful. We all know cases of men or human societies who could if they wished, or if they were forced, devote themselves to increasing or preserving the amount of goodness or truth or beauty there is in the world: but who devote themselves exclusively to augmenting their power or their wealth or their pleasures. And experience of the factory system during the nineteenth century has proved that some human societies may devote themselves to increasing wealth at the expense of the lives of their members.” Finally, he denounces capitalism because it places the economic value, which belongs to the third category, above the second, which is the value of man. “But I repeat that the fundamental reason of my scale is that when it proclaims as supreme values the good, the true and the beautiful it does include and protect man and his economic values, although it may limit in man the free expansion of what is bad in human nature—tust and pride.”

Let us now see whether, in the light of the functional principle, we cannot draw nearer to the heart of our troubles. We witness subjective rights withering away before the stern necessities of functional life. The thing that must be donefunction—must not be stayed, impeded or frustrated by personal interests, by ignorance nor by the traditional Liberalism of the last century. But it also follows that function must be co-ordinated, must be given organized power, must have free-