Editorial September 4, 1920 Issue

True Unionism

Frederick Dixon

The world is particularly concerned to-day over the question of unions. It is perfectly true that the subject is not a new one, and it is equally true that it has not been a new one for some decades, nevertheless at no time since the matter became one of primary political importance has it loomed so large in the calculations of statesmen as to-day. Yet the truth of the matter is that unionism is probably, from one point of view, at its zenith. The decline, it is true, may not show for years. All the same the very success of the union is tending to the passing of the union, for the simple reason that that which began as the organ of a party, is fulfilling its destiny in becoming the organ of mankind.

All of which, expressed a little more plainly, comes to this: that the union, which was originally started to protect the interests of Labor against the interests of Capital, has so widened its limits that it is threatening to represent nations instead of a class, and so to reach the point where its original sectional intent is lost in a clearer perception of the interests of humanity. Now if the idea of unionism were ever practically to be accepted by the world, the very change which has taken place was bound to take place, for the strength of the idea lies in two things, rightness and numbers, with the result that as the first of these was maintained and the second increased, the antithesis of Goldsmith's famous epigram upon Burke was sure to be manifested, the epigram, already referred to, that he "for party gave up what was meant for mankind."

The truth of the matter is that, in spite of all the supposedly terrifying signs of the times, mankind is steadily working to a clearer sense of Truth. This approach to Truth is, naturally, heralded by what Mrs. Eddy terms "a moral chemicalization," when writing on page 540 of Science and Health she says: "The muddy river-bed must be stirred in order to purify the stream. In moral chemicalization, when the symptoms of evil, illusion, are aggravated, we may think in our ignorance that the Lord hath wrought an evil; but we ought to know that God's law uncovers so-called sin and its effects, only that Truth may annihilate all sense of evil and all power to sin." It is obvious that it is just such a chemicalization which is taking place in the world to-day; and chemicalization Mrs. Eddy defines on page 168 of Science and Health as follows: "Here let a word be noticed which will be better understood hereafter,—chemicalization. By chemicalization I mean the process which mortal mind and body undergo in the change of belief from a material to a spiritual basis." The great war has stirred the human mind as it has probably not been stirred since the Renaissance and the Reformation produced the Thirty Years' War, and what is happening is what always happens on such occasions; namely, that as Mrs. Eddy says, the muddy river bed is being stirred, and the waters are thick and poisonous, whilst the evil of mankind is being attenuated by the descending torrents of Principle.