THE U.S.S.R. CONSTITUTION AND•
CHRISTIANITY
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—I should like to suggest to the Rev. Frank Stone that Soviet Russia has not only been the first State to apply the Christian principle—" he who will not work; neither shall he eat "—as regards the idle rich, but also as regards the poor by offering employment to all who desire it, a thing that none of the professedly Christian States are able to do. In Russia only students, invalids and the aged are supported without doing useful work, and they receive maintenance as a natural right, not as a niggardly dole.
The Rev. Frank Stone admits that the problem of the "idle rich" is a serious one, but he appears to think that their evil effect is confined to their appearance in the illustrated papers. He shows no realisation of the fact that excessive wealth in the few is responsible for excessive poverty in the many, and therefore is also responsible for most of vice and crime, a large part of ill-health due to under-nourishment, and the main part of material misery. Mr. Stone also seems to suggest that the means by which the rich make their wealth constitutes work. What Christ thought of such work is shown by His treatment of the money-changers in the Temple.
Soviet Russia can give employment to all because she has realised that the people can only be fully occupied in producing useful commodities for their fellows in the quantities that modern methods have made possible. In all capitalist countries the poor are allowed only a minimum of the material good things of life, and so when the wants of the rich are satisfied, the workers have to go unemployed.
As regards his last paragraph, the Rev. Frank Stone and myself are in complete agreement. —Yours faithfully,
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