s, and systems of ethics have
been explained and accounted for by reference to material and economic
causes. To understand history the primary requisite is to understand the
processes by which the material means of life have been produced and
distributed.

"The ruling ideas of every age have ever been the ideas of its ruling
class." This applies of ideas of right and wrong--of what is commonly
known as morality--as fully as to ideas of any other kind.

Conduct that has tended to perpetuate the power of the economically
dominant class--since the increase of wealth has divided society into
classes--has ever been accounted moral conduct; conduct that has tended
to weaken or subvert the power of the ruling class has always been
branded as immoral. There you have the key to all the varying codes of
ethics the world has seen. For it must never be forgotten that 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 been able to impose upon the
subject classes just those morals which were best adapted to prolong
their subjection. Even to-day in America the majority of the working
class get their ideas--like their clothes--ready-made.

But there is an ever-growing portion of the working class whom the
ever-increasing severity of the discipline of the machi