The good Graf speaks well and eloquently, I think, about the need for the state to act positively and decisively in the assurance of public order. I also will not support any effort to abolish the death penalty, though I will avidly support reforms to make it less prejudicial against those without means to afford adequate legal representation. In that spirit, though, for a government which actively intervenes to ensure public order, I would like to offer the following argument...
Oskar Schultheiß adjusted his spectacles as he produced a prepared paper, from which he commenced to read aloud. At the top of the page his immediate neighbours could clearly discern, in a miniscule but neat and unmistakable hand, the words The Conservative Case for a Limited Workday.
Currently up for consideration in the Congress of the Danube is an Act of immense value to the cause of conservatism, particularly for that brand of it which considers itself Christian. It is a bill which will ensure social stability and a right order between the various social classes, which will uphold and bolster the sacred institution of the family, and which will contribute to the organic harmony of our confederation’s member nations.
What is this miracle Act, you ask? Is it aimed at preserving a balance of power between the President and this Congress, or at achieving readiness for defensive war? Does it demand transparency of the members of this Congress, to proclaim their sources of outside income? Does it proclaim the liberty of member nations to organise their own governments as they see fit?
No, my friends and colleagues: this is the Labour Hours Act, which institutes over the next six years a reduction in the maximum hours of the working day from over 14 to a mere 10, and which will guarantee a modest rise in the minimum wage.
I can already sense the recoils of disbelief and derision amongst the sceptical members of my own Party. Please allow me the charity of explaining myself, and permit me to state my case. We who call ourselves ‘conservatives’, in the true sense of wishing to conserve things worthwhile which have been entrusted to us from past generations, for the benefit and enjoyment not only of ourselves but of those who come after us, must by that sense retain a certain character, a certain scepticism about recent modes of thinking. I do not mean to offer any sort of manifesto, only to appeal to certain modes of thinking which I have observed amongst my fellow conservatives.
We have witnessed a rise in ideology over the past years of the existence of this Confederation; that ideology may go by different names – liberalism, radicalism, nationalism – but at its root it is a faith in the march of Progress, at the hands of Business and Industry. This is a faith which is as alien to conservatism as that of the Socialists. Nay, even more alien, for at the very least the Socialists understand institutions, have a basic notion of Christian charity (expressed in however secular terms) and have been known upon occasion to show a glimmer of awareness of original sin (though they usually call it ‘exploitation’). The ideology of Progress knows no such natural limitation or realism, and those who benefit from it know of no loyalty except that of faction and of naked interest.
It is this ideology that this bill seeks to slow. And it appeals the justice of our cause directly to the hearts of the working men, who above all else seek their own stability of livelihood!
We must observe the blunt fact that a 14-hour workday is immensely destructive to family life, which is the very bedrock of our social fabric. Not even the serfs of the Middle Ages, whose servile condition was promptly abolished in the founding of our Confederation, were made to work under such repressive constraints. Men working 14 hours per day have no time to spend caring for their wives and educating their children – who are often also employed for mere pittances, for similar hours under similar conditions. The children, (whose wretched fate in such families can hardly be called an ‘upbringing’, being lacking in natural affection for a father in their life, or often even a mother!), will in their isolation from the natural societies which are their families, grow cynical, antisocial, self-destructive, perverse and violent. Is this truly such a nation as we seek to conserve?
On the other hand, the more time can be allotted to the home life within the family and the more involved a parent can be in the child’s upbringing, the less strain is exerted on the state for the children’s care and eventual majority. To all assertions that this Act results in the loss of ‘productivity’ this argument must be made: would we truly sell the future that we may profit today? Does this abstraction of the national ‘productivity’ reach the great majority of those pious little platoons which actually make up this confederation, or does the sum total of that power merely disappear into the pockets of a rootless business elite loyal only to their own interest and to the ideology of Progress which gives it licence?
I leave it to my fellow Conservatives to follow the dictates of their own consciences, and pray that those consciences are guided to support this Act by a consideration of the natural law and the organic order that law sustains.