THE MACCABAEAN
A Social Commonwealth in Zion
THE following article was scheduled for reading at the Pittsburg Zionist Convention, but owing to the overcrowding of the program, was not announced. The essay was written in connection with certain studies undertaken by the author for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Columbia University. It presents a point of view with regard to the general problems of Zionism that may provoke discussion.
A Social Commonwealth is an organization of a social group in which each individual citizen is assured of sufficient satisfaction of the physical needs of existence and an economic surplus that makes possible the attainment of higher ideals. The leaders in modern thought have come to realize that there are certain physical conditions indispensable to true liberty. Just in so far as a dweller of a city slum has been deprived of opportunities which he might have had under a better social system, he is not free—he is the slave of the Social system of his day. The frugal and industrious employee in the sweat shop who must run his machine or face his starving family, is not legally a slave. That has been abolished by the civil war, But he is in fact a slave chained to his environment, a serf to his machine.
The negro slaves half a century ago worked in healthful fields, received rations, and rude huts for shelter. The white slaves of our city slums to-day (probably exceeding in number the negroes before the Civil War) should be thankful for the immunities which they enjoy and of which the down-trodden negro was deprived. But the "submerged tenth" are no less slaves because for the fields of cotton have been substituted unhealthful factories, and for the rations and the hut of the negro a pittance of wages. Such men are not free, unless freedom be compatible with slavery. They lack the essential in-
gredients of liberty, opportunity and the power to change their position. Dependent on others for mere physical existence, how can they be free in the higher things of life?
A scholastic philosopher of the Mediceval Church might have made some important deductions from certain acts of Jehovah as recorded in the Old Testament. When the Children of Israel went forth from Egypt, they wandered for forty years in the Desert, supported directly from the bounty of the Lord. The All-Wise understood that a nation of slaves can be converted into freeman only after they had become independent of the tyranny of physical want. In His beneficient wisdom, He sent them manna from the Heavens to satisfy the craving for food, so that the Chosen People might have the leisure and the inclination of pursue higher things. God knew that the Exodus, in itself, did not convert slaves into freemen; that Liberty means more than emancipation, than the mere negative process of breaking old chains. True liberty is a positive concept, and only after the brethren of Moses had been freed from the inexorable physical needs were they really free to follow the laws of the Almighty. Therefore, the church philosopher might have justly concluded, we mortals should profit by the deeds of the Eternal. The supreme function of government as revealed to us through the works of the Lord, should be to endeavor continually and