Since at present things must be privately owned, it
is better that they should be owned by people consciously working for
social development and willing to use them to that end.
We have to live in the present system and under the conditions of the
present system, while we work with all our power to change that system
for a better one.
The case of Cadburys the cocoa and chocolate makers, and the practical
slavery under the Portuguese of the East African negroes who grow the
raw material for Messrs. Cadbury, is an illuminating one in this
connection. The Cadburys, like the Rowntrees, are well known as an
energetic and public-spirited family, their social and industrial
experiments at Bournville and their general social and political
activities are broad and constructive in the best sense. But they find
themselves in the peculiar dilemma that they must either abandon an
important and profitable portion of their great manufacture or continue
to buy produce grown under cruel and even horrible conditions. Their
retirement from the branch of the cocoa and chocolate trade concerned
would, under these circumstances, mean no diminution of the manufacture
or of the horrors of this particular slavery; it would merely mean that
less humanitarian manufacturers would step in to take up the abandoned
trade.
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