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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of New Worlds For Old, by Herbert George Wells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: New Worlds For Old
+       A Plain Account of Modern Socialism
+
+Author: Herbert George Wells
+
+Release Date: November 24, 2009 [EBook #30538]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NEW WORLDS FOR OLD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Barbara Tozier and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
+
+A PLAIN ACCOUNT OF MODERN SOCIALISM
+
+
+
+
+_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
+
+_SHORT STORIES_
+
+  The Plattner Story and others
+  Tales of Space and Time
+  The Stolen Bacillus and other Stories
+  Twelve Stories and a Dream
+
+_ROMANCES_
+
+  The Time Machine
+  The Island of Dr. Moreau
+  The War of the Worlds
+  The Wonderful Visit
+  The Invisible Man
+  The First Men in the Moon
+  The Food of the Gods
+  The Sea Lady
+  When the Sleeper Wakes
+  In the Days of the Comet
+
+_NOVELS_
+
+  Love and Mr. Lewisham
+  Kipps
+
+_SOCIOLOGICAL AND SOCIALIST ESSAYS_
+
+  Anticipations
+  Mankind in the Making
+  A Modern Utopia
+  The Future in America
+
+
+
+
+NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
+
+A PLAIN ACCOUNT OF MODERN SOCIALISM
+
+
+BY
+
+
+
+H. G. WELLS
+
+
+
+LONDON
+CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD.
+1912
+
+
+
+
+_Published March 1908.
+Popular Edition Revised
+June 1909. Reprinted
+July 1909, Sept. 1922_
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
+
+
+"Undiluted Atheism, theft and immorality.... I know of no language
+sufficiently potent to express fully my absolute detestation of what I
+believe to be the most poisonous doctrine ever put forward, namely
+Socialism."
+
+                                    HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF RUTLAND.
+
+
+"Let all parties then unite to defeat this insidious Socialism which
+is threatening the country, and take immediate steps to expose and
+bring it to light. The country may truly be said to be sleeping over a
+veritable volcano which the next general election may precipitate,
+unless steps are taken at once to bring this nightmare into the light
+of day and force it out of its creeping nocturnal habits."
+
+               MR. DUDLEY S. A. COSBY in the _Westminster Review_.
+
+
+"Many people think that it is possible to conduct a victorious
+campaign with the single watchword 'Down with Socialism.' Well, I am
+not fond of mere negatives. I do not like fighting an abstract noun.
+My objection to Anti-Socialism as a platform is that Socialism means
+so many different things. On this point I agree with Mr. Asquith. I
+will wait before I denounce Socialism till I see what form it takes...
+Socialism is not necessarily synonymous with robbery. Correctly used,
+the word only signifies a particular view of the proper relation of
+the State to its citizens, a tendency to substitute public for private
+ownership, or to restrict the freedom of individual enterprise in the
+interests of the public. But there are some forms of property which we
+all admit should be public and not private, and the freedom of
+individual enterprise is already limited by a hundred laws. Socialism
+and Individualism,--I am not fond of these abstract phrases. There are
+opposing principles which enter in various proportions into the
+constitution of every civilized society. It is merely a question of
+degree. One community is more Socialistic than another. The same
+community is more Socialistic at one time than at another. This
+country is far more Socialistic than it was fifty years ago, and for
+most of the changes in that direction the Unionist or Tory Party is
+responsible."
+
+                                                      LORD MILNER.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAP.
+
+     I. THE GOOD WILL IN MAN
+    II. THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEA OF SOCIALISM
+   III. THE FIRST MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM
+    IV. THE SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM
+     V. THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND THE SPIRIT OF SERVICE
+    VI. WOULD SOCIALISM DESTROY THE HOME?
+   VII. WOULD MODERN SOCIALISM ABOLISH ALL PROPERTY?
+  VIII. THE MIDDLE-CLASS MAN, THE BUSINESS MAN, AND SOCIALISM
+    IX. SOME COMMON OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM
+     X. SOCIALISM A DEVELOPING DOCTRINE
+    XI. REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM
+   XII. ADMINISTRATIVE SOCIALISM
+  XIII. CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM
+   XIV. SOME ARGUMENTS _AD HOMINEM_
+    XV. THE ADVANCEMENT OF SOCIALISM.
+
+
+
+
+NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE GOOD WILL IN MAN
+
+
+§ 1.
+
+The present writer has long been deeply interested in the Socialist
+movement in Great Britain and America, and in all those complicated
+issues one lumps together as "social questions." In the last few years
+he has gone into it personally and studied the Socialist movement
+closely and intimately at first hand; he has made the acquaintance of
+many of its leaders upon both sides of the Atlantic, joined numerous
+organizations, attended and held meetings, experimented in Socialist
+politics. From these inquiries he has emerged with certain very
+definite conclusions as to the trend and needs of social development,
+and these he is now rendering in this book. He calls himself a
+Socialist, but he is by no means a fanatical or uncritical adherent.
+To him Socialism presents itself as a very noble but a very human and
+fallible system of ideas and motives, a system that grows and
+develops. He regards its spirit, its intimate substance as the most
+hopeful thing in human affairs at the present time, but he does also
+find it shares with all mundane concerns the qualities of inadequacy
+and error. It suffers from the common penalty of noble propositions;
+it is hampered by the insufficiency of its supporters and advocates,
+and by the superficial tarnish that necessarily falls in our
+atmosphere of greed and conflict darkest upon the brightest things. In
+spite of these admissions of failure and unworthiness in himself and
+those about him, he remains a Socialist.
+
+In discussing Socialism with very various sorts of people he has
+necessarily had, time after time, to encounter and frame a reply to a
+very simple seeming and a really very difficult question: "What is
+Socialism?" It is almost like asking "What is Christianity?" or
+demanding to be shown the atmosphere. It is not to be answered fully
+by a formula or an epigram. Again and again the writer has been asked
+for some book which would set out in untechnical language, frankly and
+straightforwardly, what Socialism is and what it is not, and always he
+has hesitated in his reply. Many good books there are upon this
+subject, clear and well written, but none that seem to tell the whole
+story as he knows it; no book that gives not only the outline but the
+spirit, answers the main objections, clears up the chief ambiguities,
+covers all the ground; no book that one can put into the hands of
+inquiring youth and say: "There! that will tell you precisely the
+broad facts you want to know." Some day, no doubt, such a book will
+come. In the meanwhile he has ventured to put forth this temporary
+substitute, his own account of the faith that is in him.[1]
+
+    [1] As I pass these proofs I am reminded that Mr. J. R.
+        MacDonald has in the press _Socialism_ (Jacks, Edinburgh)--a
+        general account of the movement. From Mr. Kirkup's _An
+        Enquiry into Socialism_ and from _Fabian Essays_ (the Fabian
+        Society, London) a good idea of the general Socialist
+        position may also be obtained.
+
+
+Socialism, then, as he understands it, is a great intellectual
+process, a development of desires and ideas that takes the form of a
+project--a project for the reshaping of human society upon new and
+better lines. That in the ampler proposition is what Socialism claims
+to be. This book seeks to expand and establish that proposition, and
+to define the principles upon which the Socialist believes this
+reconstruction of society should go. The particulars and justification
+of this project and this claim, it will be the business of this book
+to discuss just as plainly as the writer can.
+
+
+§ 2.
+
+Now, because the Socialist seeks the reshaping of human society, it
+does not follow that he denies it to be even now a very wonderful and
+admirable spectacle. Nor does he deny that for many people life is
+even now a very good thing....
+
+For his own part, though the writer is neither a very strong nor a
+very healthy nor a very successful person, though he finds much
+unattainable and much to regret, yet life presents itself to him more
+and more with every year as a spectacle of inexhaustible interest, of
+unfolding and intensifying beauty, and as a splendid field for high
+attempts and stimulating desires. Yet none the less is it a spectacle
+shot strangely with pain, with mysterious insufficiencies and
+cruelties, with pitfalls into anger and regret, with aspects
+unaccountably sad. Its most exalted moments are most fraught for him
+with the appeal for endeavour, with the urgency of unsatisfied wants.
+These shadows and pains and instabilities do not, to his sense at
+least, darken the whole prospect; it may be indeed that they intensify
+its splendours to his perceptions; yet all these evil and ugly aspects
+of life come to him with an effect of challenge, as something not to
+be ignored but passionately disputed, as an imperative call for
+whatever effort and courage lurks in his composition. Life and the
+world are fine, but not as an abiding place; as an arena--yes, an
+arena gorgeously curtained with sea and sky, mountains and broad
+prospects, decorated with all the delicate magnificence of leaf
+tracery and flower petal and feather, soft fur and the shining wonder
+of living skin, musical with thunder and the singing of birds; but an
+arena nevertheless, an arena which offers no seats for idle
+spectators, in which one must will and do, decide, strike and strike
+back--and presently pass away.
+
+And it needs but a cursory view of history to realize--though all
+knowledge of history confirms the generalization--that this arena is
+not a confused and aimless conflict of individuals. Looked at too
+closely it may seem to be that--a formless web of individual hates and
+loves; but detach oneself but a little, and the broader forms appear.
+One perceives something that goes on, that is constantly working to
+make order out of casualty, beauty out of confusion; justice,
+kindliness, mercy out of cruelty and inconsiderate pressure. For our
+present purpose it will be sufficient to speak of this force that
+struggles and tends to make and do, as Good Will. More and more
+evident is it, as one reviews the ages, that there is this as well as
+lust, hunger, avarice, vanity and more or less intelligent fear to be
+counted among the motives of mankind. This Good Will of our race,
+however arising, however trivial, however subordinated to individual
+ends, however comically inadequate a thing it may be in this
+individual case or that, is in the aggregate an operating will. In
+spite of all the confusions and thwartings of life, the halts and
+resiliencies and the counter strokes of fate, it is manifest that in
+the long run human life becomes broader than it was, gentler than it
+was, finer and deeper. On the whole--and now-a-days almost
+steadily--things _get better_. There is a secular amelioration of
+life, and it is brought about by Good Will working through the efforts
+of men.
+
+Now this proposition lies quite open to dispute. There are people who
+will dispute it and make a very passable case. One may deny the
+amelioration, or one may deny that it is the result of any Good Will
+or of anything but quite mechanical forces. The former is the commoner
+argument. The appeal is usually to what has been finest in the past,
+and to all that is bad and base in the present. At once the unsoundest
+and the most attractive argument is to be found in the deliberate
+idealization of particular ages, the thirteenth century in England,
+for example, or the age of the Antonines. The former is presented with
+the brightness of a missal, the latter with all the dignity of a Roman
+inscription. One is asked to compare these ages so delightfully
+conceived, with a patent medicine vendor's advertisement or a
+Lancashire factory town, quite ignoring the iniquity of mediĉval law
+or the slums and hunger and cruelty of Imperial Rome.
+
+But quite apart from such unsound comparisons, it is, we may admit,
+possible to make a very excellent case against our general assertion
+of progress. One can instance a great number of things, big and
+little, that have been better in past times than they are now; for
+example, they dressed more sumptuously and delightfully in mediĉval
+Venice and Florence than we do--all, that is, who could afford it;
+they made quite unapproachably beautiful marble figures in Athens in
+the time of Pericles; there is no comparison between the brickwork of
+Verona in the twelfth century and that of London when Cannon Street
+Station was erected; the art of cookery declined after the splendid
+period of Roman history for more than a thousand years; the Gothic
+architecture of France and England exceeds in nobility and quality and
+aggregated beauty, every subsequent type of structure. This much, one
+agrees, is true, and beyond disputing. The philosophical thought of
+Athens again, to come to greater things, was at its climax, more free,
+more finely expressed than that of any epoch since. And the English of
+Elizabeth's time was, we are told by competent judges, a more gracious
+and powerful instrument of speech than in the days of Queen Anne or of
+Queen Victoria.
+
+So one might go on in regard to a vast number of things, petty and
+large alike; the list would seem overwhelming until the countervailing
+considerations came into play. But, as a matter of fact, there is
+hardly an age or a race that does not show us something better done
+than ever it was before or since, because at no time has human effort
+ceased and absolutely failed. Isolated eminence is no proof of general
+elevation. Always in this field or that, whether it was in the binding
+of books or the enamelling of metal, the refinement of language or the
+assertion of liberty, particular men have, by a sort of necessity,
+grasped at occasion, "found themselves," as the saying goes, and done
+the best that was in them. So always while man endures, whatever else
+betide, one may feel assured at this or that special thing some men
+will find a way to do and get to the crown of endeavour. Such
+considerations of decline in particular things from the standard of
+the past do not really affect the general assertion of a continuous
+accumulating betterment in the lot of men, do not invalidate the hopes
+of those who believe in the power of men to end for ever many of the
+evils that now darken the world, who look to the reservoirs of human
+possibility as a supply as yet scarcely touched, who make of all the
+splendour and superiorities of the past no more than a bright promise
+and suggestion for the unborn future our every act builds up, into
+which, whether we care or no, all our achievements pour.
+
+Many evils have been overcome, much order and beauty and scope for
+living has been evolved since man was a hairy savage holding scarcely
+more than a brute's intercourse with his fellows; but even in the
+comparatively short perspective of history, one can scarcely deny a
+steady process of overcoming evil. One may sneer at contemporary
+things; it is a fashion with that unhappily trained type of mind which
+cannot appreciate without invidious comparison, so poor in praise that
+it cannot admit worth without venting a compensatory envy; but of one
+permanent result of progress surely every one is assured. In the
+matter of thoughtless and instinctive cruelty--and that is a very
+fundamental matter--mankind mends steadily. I wonder and doubt if in
+the whole world at any time before this an aged, ill-clad woman, or a
+palpable cripple could have moved among a crowd of low-class children
+as free from combined or even isolated insult as such a one would be
+to-day, if caught in the rush from a London Council school. Then, for
+all our sins, I am sure the sense of justice is quicker and more
+nearly universal than ever before. Certain grave social evils, too,
+that once seemed innate in humanity, have gone, gone so effectually
+that we cannot now imagine ourselves subjected to them; the cruelties
+and insecurities of private war, the duel, overt slavery, for example,
+have altogether ceased; and in all Western Europe and America chronic
+local famines and great pestilences come no more. No doubt it is still
+an unsatisfactory world that mars the roadside with tawdry
+advertisements of drugs and food; but less than two centuries ago,
+remember, the place of these boards was taken by gibbets and
+crow-pecked, tattered corpses swinging in the wind, and the heads of
+dead gentlemen (drawn and quartered, and their bowels burnt before
+their eyes) rotted in the rain on Temple Bar.
+
+The world is now a better place for a common man than ever it was
+before, the spectacle wider and richer and deeper, and more charged
+with hope and promise. Think of the universal things it is so easy to
+ignore; of the great and growing multitude, for example, of those who
+may travel freely about the world, who may read freely, think freely,
+speak freely! Think of the quite unprecedented numbers of well-ordered
+homes and cared-for, wholesome, questioning children! And it is not
+only that we have this increasing sea of mediocre well-being in which
+the realities of the future are engendering, but in the matter of
+sheer achievement I believe in my own time. It has been the cry of the
+irresponsive man since criticism began, that his own generation
+produced nothing; it is a cry that I hate and deny. When the dross has
+been cleared away and comparison becomes possible, I am convinced it
+will be admitted that in the aggregate, in philosophy and significant
+literature, in architecture, painting and scientific research, in
+engineering and industrial invention, in statecraft, humanity and
+valiant deeds, the last thirty years of man's endeavours will bear
+comparison with any other period of thirty years whatever in his
+history.
+
+And this is the result of effort; things get better because men mean
+them to get better and try to bring betterment about; this progress
+goes on because man, in spite of evil temper, blundering and vanity,
+in spite of indolence and base desire, does also respond to Good Will
+and display Good Will. You may declare that all the good things in
+life are the result of causes over which man has no control, that in
+pursuit of an "enlightened self-interest" he makes things better
+inadvertently. But think of any good thing you know! Was it thus it
+came?
+
+
+§ 3.
+
+And yet, let us not disguise it from ourselves, for all the progress
+one can claim, life remains very evil; about the feet of all these
+glories of our time lurk darknesses.
+
+Let me take but one group of facts that cry out to all of us--and will
+not cry in vain. I mean the lives of little children that are going on
+now--as the reader sits with this book in his hand. Think, for
+instance, of the little children who have been pursued and tormented
+and butchered in the Congo Free State during the last year or so,
+hands and feet chopped off, little bodies torn and thrown aside that
+rubber might be cheap, the tyres of our cars run smoothly, and that
+detestable product of political expediency, the King of the Belgians,
+have his pleasures. Think too of the fear and violence, the dirt and
+stress of the lives of the children who grow up amidst the lawless
+internal strife of the Russian political chaos. Think of the emigrant
+ships even now rolling upon the high seas, their dark, evil-smelling
+holds crammed with humanity, and the huddled sick children in
+them--fleeing from certain to uncertain wretchedness. Think of the
+dreadful tale of childish misery and suffering that goes on wherever
+there are not sane factory laws; how even in so civilized a part of
+the world as the United States of America (as Spargo's _Bitter Cry of
+the Children_ tells in detail) thousands of little white children of
+six and seven, ill fed and often cruelly handled, toil without hope.
+
+And in all agricultural lands too, where there is no sense of
+education, think of the children dragging weary feet from the filthy
+hovels that still house peasants the whole world over, to work in the
+mire and the pitiless winds, scaring birds, bending down to plant and
+weed. Even in London again, think just a little of the real
+significance of some facts I have happened upon in the Report of the
+Education Committee of the London County Council for the year 1905.
+
+The headmaster of one casually selected school makes a special return
+upon the quality of the clothing of his 405 children. He tells of 7.4
+per cent. of his boys whose clothing was "the scantiest
+possible--_e.g._ one ragged coat buttoned up and practically nothing
+found beneath it; and boots either absent or represented by a mass of
+rags tied upon the feet"; of 34.8 per cent. whose "clothing was
+insufficient to retain animal heat and needed urgent remedy"; of 45.9
+per cent, whose clothing was "poor but passable; an old and perhaps
+ragged suit, with some attempt at proper underclothing--usually of
+flannelette"; thus leaving only 12.8 per cent. who could, in the
+broadest sense, be termed "well clad."
+
+Taking want of personal cleanliness as the next indication of neglect
+at home, 11 per cent. of the boys are reported as "very dirty and
+verminous"; 34.7 per cent. whose "clothes and body were dirty but not
+verminous"; 42.5 per cent, were "passably clean, for boys," and only
+"12 per cent. clean above the average."
+
+Eleven per cent. verminous; think what it means! Think what the homes
+must be like from which these poor little wretches come! Better,
+perhaps, than the country cottage where the cesspool drains into the
+water supply and the hen-house vermin invades the home, but surely
+intolerable beside our comforts! Give but a moment again to the
+significance of the figures I have italicized in the table that
+follows, a summarized return for the year 1906 of the "Ringworm"
+Nurses who visit the London Elementary Schools and inspect the
+children for various forms of dirt disease.
+
+  ----------------------------------------------------------------
+  |              | Number of |          |           |            |
+  | Departments. | children  |  Clean.  | Partially | Verminous. |
+  |              | examined. |          | cleansed. |            |
+  |--------------|-----------|-----------------------------------|
+  | Boys       . |   34,345  |  32,726  |     847   |    1,139   |
+  | Girls      . |   36,445  |  22,476  |   4,426   |   12,003   |
+  | Infants    . |   42,140  |   6,675  |   2,661   |  _29,675_  |
+  | Mixed      . |    5,855  |   4,886  |     298   |      897   |
+  | Special    . |      977  |     624  |     133   |      296   |
+  |--------------|-----------|----------|-----------|------------|
+  |    Total   . |  119,762  |  67,387  |   8,365   |   44,010   |
+  ----------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Does not this speak of dirt and disorder we cannot suffer to continue,
+of women ill trained for motherhood and worked beyond care for
+cleanliness, of a vast amount of preventable suffering? And these
+figures of filth and bad clothing are paralleled by others at least
+equally impressive, displaying emaciation, under-nutrition, anĉmia and
+every other painful and wretched consequence of neglect and
+insufficiency. These underfed, under-clothed, undersized children are
+also the backward children; they grow up through a darkened, joyless
+childhood into a grey, perplexing, hopeless world that beats them down
+at last, after servility, after toil, after crime it may be and
+despair, to death.
+
+And while you grasp the offence of these facts, do not be carried away
+into supposing that this age is therefore unprecedentedly evil. Such
+dirt, toil, cruelty have always been, have been in larger measure.
+Don't idealize the primitive cave, the British hut, the peasant's
+cottage, damp and windowless, the filth-strewn, plague-stricken,
+mediĉval town. In spite of all these crushed, mangled, starved,
+neglected little ones about the feet of this fine time, in spite of a
+thousand other disorders and miseries almost as cruel, the fact
+remains that this age has not only more but a larger percentage of
+healthy, happy, kindly-treated children than any age since the world
+began; that to look back into the domestic history of other times is
+to see greater squalor and more suffering.
+
+Why! read the tombstones and monuments in any old English church,
+those, I mean, that date from earlier than 1800, and you will see the
+history of every family, of even the prosperous county families,
+_laced_ with the deaths of infants and children. Nearly half of them
+died. Think, too, how stern was the upbringing. And always before
+these days it seemed natural to make all but the children of the very
+wealthy and very refined, fear and work from their earliest years.
+There comes to us too, from these days, beautiful furniture, fine
+literature, paintings; but there comes too, much evidence of harsh
+whippings, dark imprisonments and hardly a children's book, hardly the
+broken vestige of a toy. Bad as things are, they are better--rest
+assured--and yet they are still urgently bad. The greater evil of the
+past is no reason for contentment with the present. But it is an
+earnest for hoping that our efforts, and that Good Will of which they
+are a part and outcome, may still go on bearing fruit in perpetually
+dwindling misery.
+
+
+§ 4.
+
+It seems to me that the whole spirit and quality of both the evil and
+the good of our time, and of the attitude not simply of the Socialist
+but of every sane reformer towards these questions, was summarized in
+a walk I had a little while ago with a friend along the Thames
+Embankment, from Blackfriars Bridge to Westminster. We had dined
+together and we went there because we thought that with a fitful moon
+and clouds adrift, on a night when the air was a crystal air that
+gladdened and brightened, that crescent of great buildings and steely,
+soft-hurrying water must needs be altogether beautiful. And indeed it
+was beautiful; the mysteries and mounting masses of the buildings to
+the right of us, the blurs of this coloured light or that, blue-white,
+green-white, amber or warmer orange, the rich black archings of
+Waterloo Bridge, the rippled lights upon the silent-flowing river, the
+lattice of girders and the shifting trains of Charing Cross
+Bridge--their funnels pouring a sort of hot-edged moonlight by way of
+smoke--and then the sweeping line of lamps, the accelerated run and
+diminuendo of the Embankment lamps as one came into sight of
+Westminster. The big hotels were very fine, huge swelling shapes of
+dun dark-grey and brown, huge shapes seamed and bursting and
+fenestrated with illumination, tattered at a thousand windows with
+light and the indistinct, glowing suggestions of feasting and
+pleasure. And dim and faint above it all and very remote was the
+moon's dead wan face veiled and then displayed.
+
+But we were dashed by an unanticipated refrain to this succession of
+magnificent things, and we did not cry, as we had meant to cry, how
+good it was to be alive! We found something else, something we had
+forgotten.
+
+Along the Embankment, you see, there are iron seats at regular
+intervals, seats you cannot lie upon because iron arm-rests prevent
+that, and each seat, one saw by the lamplight, was filled with
+crouching and drooping figures. Not a vacant place remained, not one
+vacant place. These were the homeless, and they had come to sleep
+here. Now one noted a poor old woman with a shameful battered straw
+hat awry over her drowsing face, now a young clerk staring before him
+at despair; now a filthy tramp, and now a bearded, frock-coated,
+collarless respectability; I remember particularly one ghastly long
+white neck and white face that lopped backward, choked in some
+nightmare, awakened, clutched with a bony hand at the bony throat, and
+sat up and stared angrily as we passed. The wind had a keen edge that
+night even for us who had dined and were well clad. One crumpled
+figure coughed and went on coughing--damnably.
+
+"It's fine," said I, trying to keep hold of the effects to which this
+line of poor wretches was but the selvage; "it's fine! But I can't
+stand _this_."
+
+"It changes all that we expected," admitted my friend, after a
+silence.
+
+"Must we go on--past them all?"
+
+"Yes. I think we ought to do that. It's a lesson, perhaps--for trying
+to get too much beauty out of life as it is--and forgetting. Don't
+shirk it!"
+
+"Great God!" cried I. "But must life always be like this? I could
+die--indeed, I would willingly jump into this cold and muddy river
+now, if by so doing I could stick a stiff dead hand through all these
+things--into the future; a dead commanding hand insisting with a
+silent irresistible gesture that this waste and failure of life should
+cease, and cease for ever."
+
+"But it does cease! Each year its proportion is a little less."
+
+I walked in silence, and my companion talked by my side.
+
+"We go on. Here is a good thing done, and there is a good thing done.
+The Good Will in man----"
+
+"Not fast enough. It goes so slowly--and in a little while we too must
+die----"
+
+"It can be done," said my companion.
+
+"It could be avoided," said I.
+
+"It shall be in the days to come. There is food enough for all,
+shelter for all, wealth enough for all. Men need only know it and will
+it. And yet we have this!"
+
+"And so much like this!" said I....
+
+So we talked and were tormented.
+
+And I remember how later we found ourselves on Westminster Bridge,
+looking back upon the long sweep of wrinkled black water that
+reflected lights and palaces and the flitting glow of steamboats, and
+by that time we had talked ourselves past our despair. We perceived
+that what was splendid remained splendid, that what was mysterious
+remained insoluble for all our pain and impatience. But it was clear
+to us the thing for us two to go upon was not the good of the present
+nor the evil, but the effort and the dream of the finer order, the
+fuller life, the banishment of suffering, to come.
+
+"We want all the beauty that is here," said my friend, "and more also.
+And none of these distresses. We are here--we know not whence nor
+why--to want that and to struggle to get it, you and I and ten
+thousand others, thinly hidden from us by these luminous darknesses.
+We work, we pass--whither I know not, but out of our knowing. But we
+work--we are spurred to work. That yonder--those people are the
+spur--for us who cannot answer to any finer appeal. Each in our
+measure must do. And our reward? Our reward is our faith. Here is my
+creed to-night. I believe--out of me and the Good Will in me and my
+kind there comes a regenerate world--cleansed of suffering and sorrow.
+That is our purpose here--to forward that. It gives us work for all
+our lives. Why should we ask to know more? Our errors--our
+sins--to-night they seem to matter very little. If we stumble and roll
+in the mud, if we blunder against each other and hurt one another----"
+
+"We have to go on," said my friend, after a pause.
+
+We stood for a time in silence.
+
+One's own personal problems came and went like a ripple on the water.
+Even that whisky dealer's advertisement upon the southern bank became
+through some fantastic transformation a promise, an enigmatical
+promise flashed up the river reach in letters of fire. London was
+indeed very beautiful that night. Without hope she would have seemed
+not only as beautiful but as terrible as a black panther crouching on
+her prey. Our hope redeemed her. Beyond her dark and meretricious
+splendours, beyond her throned presence jewelled with links and points
+and cressets of fire, crowned with stars, robed in the night, hiding
+cruelties, I caught a moment's vision of the coming City of Mankind,
+of a city more wonderful than all my dreaming, full of life, full of
+youth, full of the spirit of creation....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEA OF SOCIALISM
+
+
+The fundamental idea upon which Socialism rests is the same
+fundamental idea as that upon which all real scientific work is
+carried on. It is the denial that chance impulse and individual will
+and happening constitute the only possible methods by which things may
+be done in the world. It is an assertion that things are in their
+nature orderly, that things may be computed, may be calculated upon
+and foreseen. In the spirit of this belief Science aims at a
+systematic knowledge of material things. "Knowledge is power,"
+knowledge that is frankly and truly exchanged--that is the primary
+assumption of the _New Atlantis_ which created the Royal Society and
+the organization of research. The Socialist has just that same faith
+in the order, the knowableness of things and the power of men in
+co-operation to overcome chance; but to him, dealing as he does with
+the social affairs of men, it takes the form not of schemes for
+collective research but for collective action and the creation of a
+comprehensive design for all the social activities of man. While
+Science gathers knowledge, Socialism in an entirely harmonious spirit
+criticizes and develops a general plan of social life. Each seeks to
+replace disorder by order.
+
+Each of these systems of ideas has, of course, its limits; we know in
+matters of material science that no calculated quantity is ever exact,
+no outline without a fogging at the edge, no angle without a curve at
+the apex; and in social affairs also, there must needs always be
+individuality and the unexpected and incalculable. But these things do
+not vitiate the case for a general order, any more than the different
+sizes and widths and needs of the human beings who travel prevent our
+having our railway carriages and seats and doors of a generally
+convenient size, nor our sending everybody over the same gauge of
+rail.
+
+Now Science has not only this in common with Socialism that it has
+grown out of men's courageous confidence in the superiority of order
+to muddle, but these two great processes of human thought are further
+in sympathy in the demand they make upon men to become less
+egotistical and isolated. The main difference of modern scientific
+research from that of the middle ages, the secret of its immense
+successes, lies in its collective character, in the fact that every
+fruitful experiment is published, every new discovery of relationships
+explained. In a sense scientific research is a triumph over natural
+instinct, over that mean instinct that makes men secretive, that makes
+a man keep knowledge to himself and use it slyly to his own advantage.
+The training of a scientific man is a training in what an illiterate
+lout would despise as a weakness; it is a training in blabbing, in
+blurting things out, in telling just as plainly as possible and as
+soon as possible what it is he has found. To "keep shut" and
+bright-eyed and to score advantages, that is the wisdom of the common
+stuff of humanity still. To science it is a crime. The noble practice
+of that noble profession medicine, for example, is to condemn as a
+quack and a rascal every man who uses secret remedies. And it is one
+of the most encouraging things for all who speculate upon human
+possibility to consider the multitude of men in the last three
+centuries who have been content to live laborious, unprofitable, and
+for the most part quite undistinguished lives in the service of
+knowledge that has transformed the world. Some names indeed stand out
+by virtue of gigantic or significant achievement, such names as Bacon,
+Newton, Volta, Darwin, Faraday, Joule; but these are but the
+culminating peaks of a nearly limitless Oberland of devoted toiling
+men, men one could list by the thousand. The rest have had the
+smallest meed of fame, small reward, much toil, much abandonment, of
+pleasure for their lot. One thing ennobles them all in common--their
+conquest over the meanness of concealment, their systematic
+application of energy to other than personal ends!
+
+And that, too, Socialism pre-eminently demands. It applies to social
+and economic relationships the same high rule of frankness and
+veracity, the same subordination of purely personal considerations to
+a common end that Science demands in the field of thought and
+knowledge. Just as Science aims at a common organized body of
+knowledge to which all its servants contribute and in which they
+share, so Socialism insists upon its ideal of an organized social
+order which every man serves and by which every man benefits. Their
+common enemy is the secret-thinking, self-seeking man. Secrecy,
+subterfuge and the private gain; these are the enemies of Socialism
+and the adversaries of Science. At times, I will admit, both Socialist
+and scientific man forget this essential sympathy. You will find
+specialized scientific investigators who do not realize they are, in
+effect, Socialists, and Socialists so dull to the quality of their own
+professions, that they gird against Science, and are secretive in
+policy. But such purblind servants of the light cannot alter the
+essential correlation of the two systems of ideas.
+
+Now the Socialist, inspired by this conception of a possible frank and
+comprehensive social order to which mean and narrow ends must be
+sacrificed, attacks and criticizes the existing order of things at a
+great number of points and in a great variety of phraseology. At all
+points, however, you will find upon analysis that his criticism
+amounts to a declaration that there is wanting a sufficiency of
+CONSTRUCTIVE DESIGN. That in the last resort is what he always comes
+to.
+
+He wants a complete organization for all those human affairs that are
+of collective importance. He says, to take instances almost haphazard,
+that our ways of manufacturing a great multitude of necessary things,
+of getting and distributing food, of conducting all sorts of business,
+of begetting and rearing children, of permitting diseases to engender
+and spread are chaotic and undisciplined, so badly done that here is
+enormous hardship, and there enormous waste, here excess and
+degeneration, and there privation and death. He declares that for
+these collective purposes, in the satisfaction of these universal
+needs, mankind presents the appearance and follows the methods of a
+mob when it ought to follow the method of an army. In place of
+disorderly individual effort, each man doing what he pleases, the
+Socialist wants organized effort and a plan. And while the scientific
+man seeks to make an orderly map of the half-explored wilderness of
+fact, the Socialist seeks to make an orderly plan for the
+half-conceived wilderness of human effort.
+
+That and no other is the essential Socialist idea.
+
+But do not let this image mislead you. When the Socialist speaks of a
+plan, he knows clearly that it is impossible to make a plan as an
+architect makes a plan, because while the architect deals with dead
+stone and timber, the statesman and Socialist deal with living and
+striving things. But he seeks to make a plan as one designs and lays
+out a garden, so that sweet and seemly things may grow, wide and
+beautiful vistas open and weeds and foulness disappear. Always a
+garden plan develops and renews itself and discovers new
+possibilities, but what makes all its graciousness and beauty possible
+is the scheme and the persistent intention, the watching and the
+waiting, the digging and burning, the weeder clips and the hoe. That
+is the sort of plan, a living plan for things that live and grow, that
+the Socialist seeks for social and national life.
+
+To make all this distincter I will show the planlessness of certain
+contemporary things, of two main sets of human interests in fact, and
+explain what inferences a Socialist draws in these matters. You will
+then see exactly what is meant when we deny that this present state of
+affairs has any constructive plan, and you will appreciate in the most
+generalized form the nature of the constructive plan which Socialists
+are making and offering the world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE FIRST MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM
+
+
+§ 1.
+
+The first--the chief aspect of social life in relation to which the
+Socialist finds the world now planless and drifting, and for which he
+earnestly propounds the scheme of a better order, is that whole side
+of existence which is turned towards children, their begetting and
+upbringing, their care and education. Perpetually the world begins
+anew, perpetually death wipes out failure, disease, unteachableness
+and all that has served life and accomplished itself; and to many
+Socialists, if not to all, this is the supreme fact in the social
+scheme. The whole measure of progress in a generation is the measure
+in which the children improve in physical and mental quality, in
+social co-ordination, in opportunity, upon their parents. Nothing else
+matters in the way of success if in that way the Good Will fails.
+
+Let us now consider how such matters stand in our world at the present
+time, and let us examine them in the light of the Socialist spirit. I
+have already quoted certain facts from the London Education
+Committee's Report, by which you have seen that by taking a school
+haphazard--dipping a ladle, as it were, into the welter of the London
+population--we find more than eighty in the hundred of the London
+children insufficiently clad, more than half unwholesomely
+dirty--eleven per cent. verminous--and more than half the infants
+infested with vermin! The nutrition of these children is equally bad.
+The same report shows clearly that differences in clothing and
+cleanliness are paralleled with differences in nutrition that are
+equally striking.
+
+    "The 30 boys of the lowest class showed considerable failure
+    to reach the average weight for their age of the school; the
+    average shortage per boy for his age being as much as .7
+    kilogram. The effect upon weight was more striking than upon
+    height, as the average failure in height was one centimetre.
+    The 141 boys of the next class worked out at exactly the
+    average. The 49 well-clad boys showed an average excess per
+    age-weight of .54 kilogram and age-height of 1.8 centimetres."
+
+And who can doubt the amount of mental and moral dwarfing that is
+going on side by side with this physical shortage?
+
+Now, it may be argued that this is not a fair sample of our general
+population, that these facts have been culled from a special section
+of the population, that here we are dealing with the congestion of
+London slums and altogether exceptional conditions. This is not so.
+The school examined was not from a specially bad district. And it
+happens that the entire working-class population of one typical
+English town, York, has been exhaustively studied by Mr. B. S.
+Rowntree, and here are some facts from his result that quite confirm
+the impression given by the London figures.
+
+    "It was quite impossible to make a thorough examination of the
+    physical condition of all the children, but as they came up to
+    be weighed and measured, they were classified under the four
+    headings, 'Very Good,' 'Good,' 'Fair,' or 'Bad,' by an
+    investigator whose training and previous experience in similar
+    work enabled her to make a reliable, even if rough,
+    classification....
+
+    "'Bad' implies that the child bore physical traces of
+    underfeeding and neglect.
+
+    "The numbers classified under the various heads were as
+    follows:--
+
+    BOYS.
+    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
+                        | Very Good, |    Good,   |    Fair,   |    Bad,
+                        |  per cent. |  per cent. |  per cent. |  per cent.
+    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
+    Section 1 (poorest) |     2.8    |    14.6    |    31.     |    51.6
+    Section 2 (middle)  |     7.4    |    20.1    |    53.7    |    18.8
+    Section 3 (highest) |    27.4    |    33.8    |    27.4    |    11.4
+
+    GIRLS.
+
+    Section 1 (poorest) |     2.1    |    14.6    |    31.     |    52.3
+    Section 2 (middle)  |     7.5    |    21.2    |    50.4    |    20.9
+    Section 3 (highest) |    27.2    |    38.     |    23.1    |    11.7
+    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+    "It will be seen that the proportion of children classed as
+    'very good' in Section 3 is about ten times as large as in the
+    poorest section, and that _more than half of the children in
+    the poorest section are classed as 'bad.'_
+
+    "These 'bad' children presented a pathetic spectacle, all bore
+    some mark of the hard conditions against which they were
+    struggling. Puny and feeble bodies, dirty and often sadly
+    insufficient clothing, sore eyes, in many cases acutely
+    inflamed through continued want of attention, filthy heads,
+    cases of hip disease, swollen glands--all these and other
+    signs told the same tale of privation and neglect. It will be
+    noticed that the condition of the children in Section 2
+    (middle-class labour) comes about half-way between Sections 1
+    and 3. In considering the above table it must of course be
+    remembered that there was no absolute standard by which each
+    child could be judged, but the broad comparison between the
+    different classes is unimpeachable. The table affords further
+    evidence of serious physical deterioration amongst the poorest
+    section of the community."
+
+And if York and London will not satisfy, let the reader take
+Edinburgh, whose Charity Organization Society has produced an
+admirable but infinitely distressing report of the physical conditions
+of the school children there. It gives a summary account of the homes
+of fourteen hundred children in one of the Edinburgh Elementary
+Schools, selected because it represented a fair mixture of prosperous
+and unprosperous people. I take the first ten entries of this list
+just as they come, representing thirty-eight children, and they are a
+fair sample of the whole list. No amount of writing could make these
+little thumbnail sketches of the reality of domestic life among our
+population to-day more impressive than they are, thus barrenly given.
+
+    "1. A bad home. Woman twice married; second husband deserted
+    her six or seven years ago and she now keeps a bad house in
+    which much drinking and rioting goes on. Daughter on stage
+    sends 10/- a week, son is out of work. A son is in an
+    institution. All as filthy as is the house. The food is
+    irregular. Two children have had free dinners from school this
+    and last winter, clothes were also given for one each time.
+    The boy attends regularly. The woman is a hard drinker, and
+    gets money in undesirable ways. The eldest child has glands,
+    neck; hair not good but clean; fleabitten. The second child,
+    adenoids and tonsils. Housing: five in one room. Evidence from
+    Police, School Charity, Headmistress, School Officers and
+    Doctors.
+
+    "2. The drinking capacity of this family cannot be too much
+    emphasized. The parents can't agree, and live apart, the man
+    allowing 7/6 a week when girl is with mother, and 5/- when she
+    comes to him. She is verminous and very badly kept. Mother
+    can't get charing, as she lives in so bad a neighbourhood, so
+    means to move; at present she keeps other women's babies at
+    6_d._ a day each. Elder boy out of work, a tidy lad, reads in
+    Free Library. One child has died. Housing: three in one room.
+    House not so very untidy. Evidence from Police, Church and
+    Officer.
+
+    "3. A miserable family and in very wretched circumstances.
+    Father deserts home at intervals, but last time seemed 'sent
+    back by providence,' as the works in the town he was in were
+    burnt down. Children starving in his absence; one had
+    pneumonia, and died since of the effects. The eldest child has
+    adenoids; the second, urticaria; lice, bad; clothes full of
+    pediculi. Housing: six in two rooms. Mother hard-working, does
+    her best, but has chronic bronchitis; does not keep house over
+    tidy. The two elder boys are very idle, tiresome fellows, and
+    worry the father a great deal. They improved and found work
+    during the year following the visit, in which time the father
+    got into decent work in the City. The S. P. C. C. branch had
+    to interfere on behalf of small children. Three dead since
+    marriage, when parents were at ages 23 and 20. Food good when
+    there is any. School gave free dinners and clothes to two.
+    Evidence from Police, S. P. C. C. branch, School Charity,
+    Parish Sister, Employer, Headmistress, School Officer and
+    Doctors.
+
+    "4. The father a complete wreck through intemperate and fast
+    living; speculation first brought him down. Was later moved to
+    hospital, where he died. Had worked on railway a little time.
+    Mother hard-working, works out, home untidy owing to her being
+    out so much. She pays rent regularly, and does her best. An
+    elder boy groom, fed and clad by his master, sends home what
+    he can. Eldest boy does odd jobs, but seems a wastrel. Parish
+    gave 7/6 after father ill, and feeds four children now. Winter
+    of visit school dined five free daily, and clothed three, and
+    previous winter three had free dinners and two had clothes. A
+    school-boy earns. The twins are delicate. There are two
+    lodgers. The eldest child very dirty; the second, glands; the
+    third, knock-kneed, pigeon chest; very feeble, enlarged
+    radices. Three children have died. Housing: nine in three
+    rooms. Evidence from Police, Poor Law Officer, Parish Sister,
+    School Charity, Army Charity, Children's Employment, School
+    Officer, Factor, Pawnbroker and Doctors.
+
+    "5. The mother, a nice, clean, tidy woman, doing pretty well
+    by the children. They kept a little shop for a time, and she
+    used to do a day's charing now and then, but has too many
+    babies now. Parents married at 21 and 18 respectively; two
+    children dead and another expected. He reads papers a good
+    deal, gets them out of trains. This is his first spell of
+    regular work. Two boys sell papers, and a Mission gives cheap
+    meal. Food none too plentiful. One child gets free dinners.
+    The eldest child has glands; impetigo; thin and badly
+    nourished. The second, glands, hair lice and nits bad. The
+    third, boils on neck, glands, thin. The fourth, glands.
+    Housing: eight in two rooms. They are in two thrift societies.
+    Evidence from School-master, Police, Parish Sister, Club, Army
+    Charity, Charity School, Pawnbroker and Doctors.
+
+    "6. Father works in a shop in daytime, and in a public-house
+    at night. Rather soft; but wife industrious and energetic and
+    does her best. Children well fed and regular at school. Two
+    children have enlarged tonsils. They get no help, and belong
+    to two thrift societies. One of six children dead in ten years
+    of married life. Housing: seven in two rooms. Evidence from
+    Police, Doctors, Society, Church, Mission, Club, Headmistress,
+    Charity School and Pawnbrokers.
+
+    "7. A family where parents are much given to drink; father
+    invalided and being helped by a Sick Society, 3/- a week, and
+    Parish 5/- a week. Housing: five in two rooms. They are in a
+    burying club. Children fleabitten. Two have died. Food is
+    rather scanty. Wife _very_ quarrelsome and drunken. The boys
+    play truant often. Two were given free food and clothes two
+    winters ago, and this winter one has free dinners and clothes
+    given. A Mission has given cheap clothes. Evidence from
+    School-master, Police, Poor Law Officer, C.O.S. branch,
+    Church, School Charity, Sick Society, Children's Employment,
+    Factor, School Officer, Charity School, Pawnbroker and
+    Doctors.
+
+    "8. Fairly decent family; mother washes out, and man has very
+    early work. He drinks, and his employment is somewhat
+    irregular. A son in the country on a farm, and two dead. They
+    were married at 21 and 18. The food is erratic, the children
+    getting 'pieces' at dinner-time, or free school dinners; or
+    when mother comes home, soup with her. The children are rather
+    neglected, and the police give the parents an indifferent
+    character. The eldest child has Eustacian catarrh and
+    nasopharyngitis; glands. The second, enlarged uvula. Housing:
+    four in two very small rooms. Evidence from School-master,
+    Police, Parish Sister, Church, Factor and Doctors.
+
+    "9. Father an old soldier without a pension, who reads novels.
+    All the small children were found eating a large meal of ham
+    and eggs and strong tea after 8 p.m., he in bed at the time.
+    They have lapsed from thrift society membership. They are
+    extremely filthy and the man drinks. A Mission sells them meal
+    cheap. Wife 18 at marriage and one child died. They feed
+    pretty largely but unhealthily, and eat 'pieces' at
+    lunch-time. At time of visit, though very dirty, they were
+    tidier than ever found before. The eldest child has chronic
+    suppuration and large perforation of ear. Housing: five in two
+    rooms. Evidence from Police, Parish Sister, Factor, Soldiers'
+    Society, Charity School and Doctors.
+
+    "10. The man a carter, who drank to a certain extent, and died
+    some months after visit, when a Charity gave her help. She had
+    an illegitimate child and two others. He was careless, and
+    both neglected church-going. No medical evidence. Housing:
+    five in two rooms. Evidence from Police, two Churches, Parish
+    Sister, Employer and Charity School."
+
+
+§ 2.
+
+Now to the Socialist, as to any one who has caught any tinge of the
+modern scientific spirit, these facts present themselves simply as an
+atrocious failure of statesmanship. Indeed, a social system in which
+the mass of the population is growing up under these conditions, he
+scarcely recognizes as a State, rather it seems to him a mere
+preliminary higgledy-piggledy aggregation of human beings, out of
+which a State has to be made. It seems to him that this wretched
+confusion of affairs which repeats itself throughout the country
+wherever population has gathered, must be due to more than individual
+inadequacy; it must be due to some general and essential failure, some
+unsoundness in the broad principles upon which the whole organization
+is conducted.
+
+What is this general principle of failure beneath all these particular
+cases?
+
+In any given instance this or that reason for the failure of a child
+may be given. In one case it may be the father or mother drinks, in
+another that the child is an orphan, neglected by aunt or stepmother,
+in another that the mother is an invalid or a sweated worker too
+overwrought to do much for him, or, though a good-hearted soul, she is
+careless and dirty or ignorant, or that she is immoral and reckless,
+and so on and so on. Our haphazard sample of ten Scotch cases gives
+instances of nearly all these alternatives. And from these proximate
+causes one might work back to more general ones, to the necessity of
+controlling the drink traffic, of abolishing sweating, of shortening
+women's hours of labour, of suppressing vice. But for the present
+argument it is not necessary to follow up these special causes. We can
+make a wider generalization. For our present analysis it is sufficient
+to say that one more general maladjustment covers every case of
+neglected or ill-brought-up children in the world, and that is this,
+that with or without a decent excuse, the parent has not been equal to
+the task of rearing a civilized citizen. We have demanded too much
+from the parent, materially and morally, and the ten cases we have
+quoted are just ten out of ten millions of the replies to that demand.
+Of fifty-two children born, fourteen are dead; and of the remainder we
+can hardly regard more than thirteen as being tolerably reared.
+
+Is it not obvious then that, unless we are content that things should
+remain as they are, we must put the relations of parent to child on
+some securer and more wholesome footing than they are at the present
+time? We demand too much from the parent, and this being recognized,
+clearly there are only two courses open to us. The first is to relieve
+the parents by lowering the standard of our demand; the second is to
+relieve them by supplementing their efforts.
+
+The first course, the Socialist holds, is not only cruel and unjust to
+the innocent child, but an entirely barbaric and retrogressive thing
+to do. It is a frank abandonment of all ideas of progress and world
+betterment. He puts it aside, therefore, and turns to the alternative.
+In doing that he comes at once into harmony with all the developmental
+tendencies of the last hundred years. For a hundred years there has
+been going on a process of supplementing and controlling parental
+effort.
+
+A hundred years or so ago, the parent was the supreme authority in a
+child's destiny--short only of direct murder. Parents were held
+responsible for their children's rearing to God alone; should they
+fail, individual good-hearted people might, if they thought proper,
+step in, give food, give help--provided the parents consented, that
+is, but it was not admitted that the community as a whole was
+concerned in the matter. Parents (and guardians in the absence of
+parents) were allowed to starve their children, leave them naked, prey
+upon their children by making them work in factories or as
+chimney-sweeps and the like; the law was silent, the State acquiesced.
+Good-hearted parents, on the other hand, who were unsuccessful in the
+world's affairs, had the torment of seeing their children go short of
+food and garments, grow up ignorant and feeble, their only hope of
+help the chancy kindliness of their more prosperous neighbours and the
+ill-organized charities left by the benevolent dead.
+
+Through all the nineteenth century the irresistible logic of necessity
+has been forcing people out of the belief in that state of affairs,
+has been making them see the impossibility of leaving things so
+absolutely to parental discretion and conscience, has been forcing
+them towards a constructive and organizing, that is to say towards a
+Socialist attitude. Essentially the Socialist attitude is this, an
+insistence that parentage can no longer be regarded as an isolated
+private matter; that the welfare of the children is of universal
+importance, and must, therefore, be finally a matter of collective
+concern. The State, which a hundred years ago was utterly careless of
+children, is now every year becoming more and more their Guardian,
+their Over-Parent.
+
+To-day the power of the parents is limited in ways that would have
+seemed incredible a hundred years ago. In the first place they must no
+longer unrestrictedly use their very young children to earn money for
+them in toil and suffering. A great mass of labour legislation forbids
+them. In the next place their right to inflict punishment or to hurt
+wantonly has been limited in many ways. The private enterprises of
+charitable organizations for the prevention of cruelty and neglect has
+led to a growing system of law in this direction also. Nor may a
+parent now prevent a child getting some rudiments of an education.
+
+Between the parent and Heaven now, in addition to the more or less
+legalized voluntary interference of well-disposed private people,
+there do appear certain rare functionaries who--while they interfere
+not at all between good and competent parents and their children, do,
+in certain instances, save a parental default from its complete
+fruition. There are the school attendance officer and the sanitary
+inspector. Then there are--in the London County Council area--the
+"Ringworm" nurses, who examine the children systematically and by
+means of certain white and red cards of remonstrance and warning
+intimidate the parent into good behaviour or pave the way for a
+prosecution. Everywhere there is the factory inspector--and in certain
+cases the police. All these functionaries and "accessory consciences"
+have been thrust in between the supremacy of the parent and the child
+within the century.
+
+So much the Socialist regards as all to the good, as all in the
+direction of that great constructive plan of organized human welfare
+at which he aims. And they all amount to a destruction, so much with
+this and so much with that, of the independence of the family, an
+invasion of the old moral isolation of parent and child.
+
+But while a number of people (who haven't read the Edinburgh Charity
+Organization Society's Report) are content to regard these
+interventions as "going far enough," the Socialist considers these
+things as only the beginning of the organization of the welfare of the
+nation's children. You will notice that all these laws and regulations
+at which we have glanced are in the nature of prohibitions or
+compulsions; few have any element of aid. By virtue of them we have
+diminished the power of the inferior sort of parents to do evil by
+their child, but we have done little or nothing to increase and
+stimulate their powers to do good. We may prevent them doing some
+sorts of evil things to the child; they may not give it poisonous
+things, or let it live in morally or physically contagious places, but
+we do not insure that they shall give it wholesome things--better than
+they had themselves. We must, if our work is ever to reach effectual
+fruition, go on to the logical completion of that process of
+supplementing the parent that the nineteenth century began.
+
+Consider, for instance, the circumstances of parentage among the large
+section of the working classes whose girls and women engage in factory
+labour. In many cases the earnings of the woman are vitally necessary
+to the solvency of the family budget, the father's wages do not nearly
+cover the common expenditure. In some cases the women are unmarried,
+or the man is an invalid or out of work. Consider such a woman on the
+verge of motherhood. Either she must work in a factory right up to the
+birth of her child--and so damage its health through her strain and
+fatigue,[2] or she must give up her work, lose money and go short of
+food and necessities and _so_ damage the coming citizen. Moreover,
+after the child is born, either she must feed it artificially and
+return to work (and prosperity) soon, with a very great risk indeed
+that the child will die, or she must stay at home to nourish and tend
+it--until her landlord sells her furniture and turns her out!
+
+    [2] The facts of the case are put very clearly, and quite
+        invincibly, by Miss Margaret Macmillan in _Infant
+        Mortality_. See also _The Babies' Tribute to the Modern
+        Moloch_, by F. Victor Fisher. (Twentieth Century Press,
+        1_d._) These are small polemical tracts. The case is treated
+        fully, authoritatively and without bias in _Infant
+        Mortality_ by Dr. G. Newman.
+
+Now it does not need that you should be a Socialist to see how cruel
+and ridiculous it is to have mothers in such a dilemma. But while
+people who are not Socialists have no remedy to suggest, or only
+immediate and partial remedies, such, for example, as the forbidding
+of factory work to women who are about to be or have recently been
+mothers--an expedient which is bound to produce a plentiful crop of
+"concealment of birth" and infanticide convictions--the Socialist does
+proffer a general principle to guide the community in dealing not only
+with this particular hardship, but with all the kindred hardships
+which form a system with it. He declares that we are here in the
+presence of an unsound and harmful way of regarding parentage; that we
+treat it as a _private affair_, that we are still disposed to assume
+that people's children are almost as much their private concern as
+their cats, and as little entitled to public protection and
+assistance. The right view, he maintains, is altogether opposed to
+this; parentage is a public service and a public duty; a good mother
+is the most precious type of common individual a community can have,
+and to let a woman on the one hand earn a living as we do, by sewing
+tennis-balls or making cardboard boxes or calico, and on the other,
+not simply not to pay her, but to impoverish her because she bears and
+makes sacrifices to rear children, is the most irrational aspect of
+all the evolved and chancy ideas and institutions that make up the
+modern State. It is as if we believed our civilization existed to make
+cheap cotton and tennis-balls instead of fine human lives.
+
+The Socialist takes all that the nineteenth century has done in
+remedial legislation as a mere earnest of all that it has still to do.
+He works for a consistent application of the principle that England,
+for example, tacitly admitted when she opened her public elementary
+schools and compelled the children to come in; the principle that the
+Community as a whole is the general Over-Parent of all its children;
+that the parents must be made answerable to the community for the
+welfare of their children, for their clear minds and clean bodies,
+their eyesight and weight and training; and that, on the other hand,
+the parents who do their duty well are as much entitled to collective
+provision for their needs and economic security as a soldier, a judge
+or any other sort of public servant.
+
+
+§ 3.
+
+Now do not imagine the case for the State being regarded as the
+Over-Parent, and for the financial support of parents is based simply
+upon the consideration of neglected, underfed, undereducated and
+poverty-blighted children. No doubt in every one of the great
+civilized countries of the world at the present time such children are
+to be counted by the hundred thousand--by the million; but there is a
+much stronger case to be stated in regard to that possibly greater
+multitude of parents who are not in default, those common people, the
+mass of our huge populations, the wives of the moderately skilled
+workers or the reasonably comfortable employees, of the middling sort
+of people, the two, three and four hundred pounds a year families who
+toil and deny themselves for love of their children, and do contrive
+to rear them cleanly, passably well grown, decent minded, taught and
+intelligent to serve the future. Consider the enormous unfairness with
+which we treat them, the way in which the modern State, such as it is,
+trades upon their instincts, their affections, their sense of duty and
+self-respect, to get from them for nothing the greatest social service
+in the world.
+
+For while the least fortunate sort of children have at any rate the
+protection of the police and school inspectors, and the baser sort of
+parent has all sorts of public and quasi-public helps and doles, the
+families that make the middle mass of our population are still in the
+position of the families of a hundred years ago, and have no help
+under heaven against the world. It matters not how well the home of
+the skilled artisan's wife or the small business man's wife has been
+managed--she may have educated her children marvellously, they may be
+clean, strong, courteous, intelligent--if the husband gets out of work
+or suffers from business ill-luck or trade depression, or chances to
+be killed uninsured, down they all go to want. Such insurance as they
+are able to make, and it needs a tremendously heavy premium to secure
+an insurance that will not mean a heavy fall of income with the
+bread-winner's death--must needs be in a private insurance office, and
+there is no effectual guarantee for either honesty or solvency in
+that. In most of the petty insurance business the thrifty poor are
+enormously overcharged and overreached. Rumour has been busy, and I
+fear only too justly, with the financial outlook of some of the
+Friendly Societies upon which the scanty security of so many
+working-class families depends. Such investments as the lower and
+middle-class father makes of surplus profits and savings must be made
+in ignorance of the manoeuvres of the big and often quite ruthless
+financiers who control the world of prices. If he builds or trades, he
+does so as a small investor, at the highest cost and lowest profit.
+Half the big businesses in the world have been made out of the lost
+savings of the small investor; a point to which I shall return later.
+People talk as though Socialism proposed to rob the thrifty
+industrious man of his savings. He could not be more systematically
+robbed of his savings than he is at the present time. Nowhere beyond
+the limit of the Post Office Savings' Bank is there security--not even
+in the gilt-edged respectability of Consols, which in the last ten
+years have fallen from 114 to under 82. Consider the adventure of the
+thrifty well-meaning citizen who used his savings-bank hoard to buy
+Consols at the former price, and now finds himself the poorer for not
+having buried his savings in his garden. The middling sort of man
+saves for the sake of wife and child; our State not only fails to
+protect him from the adventures of the manipulating financier, but it
+deliberately avoids competition with banker, insurance agent and
+promoter. In no way can the middle-class or artisan parent escape the
+financier's power and get real security for his home or his children's
+upbringing.
+
+Not only is every parent of any but the richest classes worried and
+discouraged by the universal insecurity of outlook in this private
+adventure world, but at every turn his efforts to do his best for his
+children are discouraged. If he has no children, he will have all his
+income to spend on his own pleasures; he need only live in a little
+house, he pays nothing for school, less for doctor, less for all the
+needs of life, and he is taxed less; his income tax is the same, no
+bigger; his rent, his rates, his household bills are all less....
+
+The State will not even help him to a tolerable home, to wholesome
+food, to needed fuel for the new citizens he is training for it. The
+State now-a-days in its slow awakening does show a certain concern in
+the housing of the lowest classes, a concern alike stimulated and
+supplemented by such fine charities as Peabody's for example, but no
+one stands between the two-hundred-a-year man and his landlord in the
+pitiless struggle to get. For every need of his children whom he toils
+to make into good men and women, he must pay a toll of owner's
+profits, he must trust to the anything but intelligent greed of
+private enterprise.
+
+The State will not even insist that a sufficiency of comfortable,
+sanitary homes shall be built for his class; if he wants the
+elementary convenience of a bathroom, he must pay extra toll to the
+water shareholder; his gas is as cheap in quality and dear in price as
+it can be; his bread and milk, under the laws of supply and demand,
+are at the legal minimum of wholesomeness; the coal trade cheerfully
+raises his coal in mid-winter to ruinous prices. He buys clothes of
+shoddy and boots of brown paper. To get any other is nearly impossible
+for a man with three hundred pounds a year. His newspapers, which are
+supported by advertisers and financiers, in order to hide the obvious
+injustice of this one-man-fight against the allied forces of property,
+din in his ears that his one grievance is local taxation, his one
+remedy "to keep down the rates"--the "rates" which do at least repair
+his roadway, police his streets, give him open spaces for his babies
+and help to educate his children, and which, moreover, constitute a
+burthen he might by a little intelligent political action shift quite
+easily from his own shoulders to the broad support of capital and
+land.
+
+If the children of the decent skilled artisan and middle-class suffer
+less obviously than the poorer sort of children, assuredly the parents
+in wearing anxiety, in toil and limitation and disappointment, suffer
+more. And in less intense and dramatic, but perhaps even more
+melancholy ways, the children of this class do suffer. They do not die
+so abundantly in infancy, but they grow up, too many of them, to
+shabby and limited lives; in Britain they are still, as a class,
+extraordinarily ill educated--many of them still go to incompetent,
+understaffed and ill-equipped private adventure schools--they are sent
+into business prematurely, often at fourteen or fifteen, they become
+mechanical "respectable" drudges in processes they do not understand.
+They may escape want and squalor for a while, perhaps, but they cannot
+escape narrowness and limitation and a cramped and anxious life. If
+they get to anything better than that, it is chiefly through almost
+heroic parental effort and sacrifice.
+
+The plain fact is that the better middle-class parents serve the State
+in this matter of child-rearing, the less is their reward, the less is
+their security, the greater their toil and anxiety. Is it any wonder
+then that throughout this more comfortable but more refined and
+exacting class, the skilled artisan and middle-class, there goes on
+something even more disastrous, from the point of view of the State,
+than the squalor, despair and neglect of the lower levels, and that is
+a very evident strike against parentage? While the very poor continue
+to have many children who die or grow up undersized, crippled or
+half-civilized, the middle mass, which _can_ contrive with a struggle
+and sacrifice to rear fairly well-grown and well-equipped offspring,
+which has a conscience for the well-being and happiness of the young,
+manifests a diminishing spirit for parentage, its families fall to
+four, to three, to two--and in an increasing number of instances there
+are no children at all.
+
+With regard to the struggling middle-class and skilled artisan class
+parent, even more than to the lower poor, does the Socialist insist
+upon the plain need, if only that our State and nation should
+continue, of endowment and help. He deems it not simply unreasonable
+but ridiculous that in a world of limitless resources, of vast
+expenditure, of unparalleled luxury, in which two-million-pound
+battleships and multi-millionaires are common objects, the supremely
+important business of rearing the bulk of the next generation of the
+middling sort of people should be left almost entirely to the unaided,
+unguided efforts of impoverished and struggling women and men. It
+seems to him almost beyond sanity to suppose that so things must or
+can continue.
+
+
+§ 4.
+
+And what I have said of the middle-class parent is true with certain
+modifications of all the classes above it, except that in a monarchy
+you reach at last one State-subsidized family--in the case of Britain
+a very healthy and active group, the Royal family--which is not only
+State supported, but also beyond the requirements of any modern
+Socialist, State bred. There are enormous handicaps at every other
+social level upon efficient parentage, and upon the training of
+children for any public and generous end. Parentage is treated as a
+private foible, and those who undertake its solemn responsibilities
+are put at every sort of disadvantage against those who lead sterile
+lives, who give all their strength and resources to vanity and
+socially harmful personal indulgence. These latter, with an ampler
+leisure and ampler means, determine the forms of pleasure and social
+usage, they "set the fashion" and bar pride, distinction or relaxation
+to the devoted parent. The typical British aristocrat is not parent
+bred, but class bred, a person with a lively sense of social
+influences and no social ideas. The one class that is economically
+capable of making all that can be made of its children is demoralized
+by the very irresponsibility of the wealth that creates this
+opportunity. This is still more apparent in the American plutocracy,
+where perhaps half the women appear to be artificially sterilized
+spenders of money upon frivolous things.
+
+No doubt there is in the richer strata of the community a certain
+proportion of families with a real tradition of upbringing and
+service; such English families as the Cecils, Balfours and Trevelyans,
+for example, produce, generation after generation, public-spirited and
+highly competent men. But the family tradition in these cases is an
+excess of virtue rather than any necessary consequence of a social
+advantage; it is a defiance rather than a necessity of our economic
+system. It is natural that such men as Lord Hugh and Lord Robert
+Cecil, highly trained, highly capable, but without that gift of
+sympathetic imagination which releases a man from the subtle mental
+habituations of his upbringing, should idealize every family in the
+world to the likeness of their own--and find the Socialist's
+Over-Parent of the State not simply a needless but a mischievous and
+wicked innovation. They think--they will, I fear, continue to
+think--of England as a world of happy Hatfields, cottage Hatfields,
+villa Hatfields, Hatfields over the shop, and Hatfields behind the
+farmyard--wickedly and wantonly assailed and interfered with by a band
+of weirdly discontented men. It is a dream that the reader must not
+share. Even in the case of the rich and really prosperous it is an
+illusion. In no class at the present time is there a real inducement
+to the effectual rearing of trained and educated citizens; in every
+class are difficulties and discouragements.
+
+This state of affairs, says the Socialist, is chaotic or indifferent
+to a sea of wretchedness and failure, in health, vigour, order and
+beauty. Such pleasure as it permits is a gaudy indulgence filched from
+children and duty; such beauty--a hectic beauty stained with
+injustice; such happiness--a happiness that can only continue so long
+as it remains blind or indifferent to a sea of wretchedness and
+failure. Our present system of isolated and unsupported families keeps
+the mass of the world beyond all necessity painful, ugly and squalid.
+It stands condemned, and it must end.
+
+
+§ 5.
+
+Let me summarize what has been said in this chapter in a compact
+proposition, and so complete the statement of the First Main
+Generalization of Socialism.
+
+_The ideas of the private individual rights of the parent and of his
+isolated responsibility for his children are harmfully exaggerated in
+the contemporary world. We do not sufficiently protect children from
+negligent, incompetent, selfish or wicked parents, and we do not
+sufficiently aid and encourage good parents; parentage is too much a
+matter of private adventure, and the individual family is too
+irresponsible. As a consequence there is a huge amount of avoidable
+privation, suffering and sorrow, and a large proportion of the
+generation that grows up, grows up stunted, limited, badly educated
+and incompetent in comparison with the strength, training and beauty
+with which a better social organization could endow it._
+
+_The Socialist holds that the community as a whole should be
+responsible, and every individual in the community, married or single,
+parent or childless, should be responsible for the welfare and
+upbringing of every child born into that community. This
+responsibility may be entrusted in whole or in part to parent, teacher
+or other guardian--but it is not simply the right but the duty of the
+State--that is to say of the organized power and intelligence of the
+community--to direct, to inquire, and to intervene in any default for
+the child's welfare._
+
+_Parentage rightly undertaken is a service as well as a duty to the
+world, carrying with it not only obligations but a claim, the
+strongest of claims, upon the whole community. It must be provided for
+like any other public service; in any completely civilized State it
+must be sustained, rewarded and controlled. And this is to be done not
+to supersede the love, pride and conscience of the parent, but to
+supplement, encourage and maintain it._
+
+
+§ 6.
+
+This is the first of the twin generalizations upon which the whole
+edifice of modern Socialism rests. Its fellow generalization we must
+consider in the chapter immediately to follow.
+
+But at this point the reader unaccustomed to social questions will
+experience a difficulty. He will naturally think of this much of
+change we have broached, as if it was to happen in a world that
+otherwise was to remain just as the world is now, with merchants,
+landowners, rich and poor and all the rest of it. You are proposing,
+he may say, what is no doubt a highly desirable but which is also a
+quite impossible thing. You propose practically to educate all the
+young of the country and to pay at least sufficient to support them
+and their mothers in decency--out of what? Where will you get the
+money?
+
+That is a perfectly legitimate question and one that must be answered
+fully if our whole project is not to fall to the ground.
+
+So we come to the discussion of material means, of the wherewithal,
+that is to say to the "Economics" of Socialism. The reader will see
+very speedily that this great social revolution we propose necessarily
+involves a revolution in business and industry that will be equally
+far reaching. The two revolutions are indeed inseparable, two sides of
+one wheel, and it is scarcely possible that one could happen without
+the other.
+
+Of course the community supports all its children now--the only point
+is that it does not support them in its collective character as a
+State "as a whole." All the children in the world are supported by all
+the people in the world, but very unfairly and irregularly, through
+the intervention of that great multitude of small private proprietors,
+the parents. When the parents fail, Charity and the Parish step in. If
+the reader will refer to those ten cases from Edinburgh I have already
+quoted in Chapter III., § 1, he will note that in eight out of the ten
+there comes in the eleemosynary element; in the seventh case
+especially he will get an inkling of its waste. A change in the system
+that diminished (though it by no means abolished) this separate
+dependence of children upon parents, each child depending upon those
+"pieces" from its particular parental feast, need not necessarily
+diminish the amount of wheat, or leather, or milk in the world; the
+children would still get the bread and milk and boots, but through
+different channels and in a different spirit. They might even get
+more. The method of making and distribution will evidently have to be
+a different one and run counter to currently accepted notions; that is
+all. Not only is it true that a change of system need not diminish the
+amount of food in the world; it might even increase it. The Socialist
+declares that his system would increase it. He proposes a method of
+making and distribution, a change in industrial conditions and in the
+conventions of property, that he declares will not only not diminish
+but greatly increase the production of the world, and changes in the
+administration that he is equally convinced will insure a far juster
+and better use of all that is produced.
+
+This side of his proposals we will proceed to consider in our next
+chapter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM
+
+
+§ 1.
+
+We have considered the Socialist criticism of the present state of
+affairs in relation to the most important of all public questions, the
+question of the welfare and upbringing of the next generation. We have
+stated the general principle of social reconstruction that emerges
+from that criticism. We have now to enter upon the question of ways
+and means, the economic question. We have to ask whether the vision we
+have conjured up of a whole population well fed, well clad, well
+educated--in a word, well brought-up--is, after all, only an amiable
+dream. Is it true that humanity is producing all that it can produce
+at the present time, and managing everything about as well as it can
+be managed; that, as a matter of fact, there isn't enough of food and
+care to go round, and hence the unavoidable anxiety in the life of
+every one (except in the case of a small minority of exceptionally
+secure people), and the absolute wretchedness of vast myriads of the
+poorer sort?
+
+The Socialist says, No! He asserts that our economic system is as
+chaotic and wasteful as our system of rearing children--is only
+another aspect of the same planlessness--that it does its work with a
+needless excess of friction, that it might be far simpler and almost
+infinitely more productive than it is.
+
+Let us detach ourselves a little from our everyday habits of thinking
+in these matters; let us cease to take customary things for granted,
+and let us try and consider how our economic arrangements would strike
+a disinterested intelligence that looked at them freshly for the first
+time. Let us take some matter of primary economic importance, such as
+the housing of the population, and do our best to criticize it in this
+spirit of personal aloofness.
+
+In order to do that, let us try to detach ourselves a little from our
+own personal interest in these affairs. Imagine a mind ignorant of our
+history and traditions, coming from some other sphere, from some world
+more civilized, from some other planet perhaps, to this earth. Would
+our system of housing strike it as the very wisest and most practical
+possible, would it really seem to be the attainable maximum of outcome
+for human exertion, or would it seem confused, disorderly, wasteful
+and bad? The Socialist holds that the latter would certainly be the
+verdict of such an impartial examination.
+
+What would our visitor find in such a country as England, for example?
+He would find a few thousand people housed with conspicuous comfort
+and sumptuousness, in large, airy and often extremely beautiful homes
+equipped with every convenience--except such as economize labour--and
+waited on by many thousands of attendants. He would find next, several
+hundreds of thousands in houses reasonably well built, but for the
+most part ill designed and unpleasant to the eye, houses passably
+sanitary and convenient, fitted with bathrooms, with properly equipped
+kitchens, usually with a certain space of air and garden about them.
+And the rest of our millions he would find crowded into houses
+evidently too small for a decent life, and often dreadfully dirty and
+insanitary, without proper space or appliances to cook properly, wash
+properly or indeed perform any of the fundamental operations of a
+civilized life tolerably well--without, indeed, even the privacy
+needed for common decency. In the towns he would find most of the
+houses occupied by people for whose needs they were obviously not
+designed, and in many cases extraordinarily crowded, ramshackle and
+unclean; in the country he would be amazed to find still denser
+congestion, sometimes a dozen people in one miserable, tumble-down,
+outwardly picturesque and inwardly abominable two-roomed cottage,
+people living up against pigsties and drawing water from wells they
+could not help but contaminate. Think of how the intimate glimpses
+from the railway train one gets into people's homes upon the outskirts
+of any of our large towns would impress him. And being, as we assume,
+clear minded and able to trace cause and effect, he would see all this
+disorder working out in mortality, disease, misery and intellectual
+and moral failure.
+
+All this would strike our visitor as a very remarkable state of
+affairs for reasonable creatures to endure, and probably he would not
+understand at first that millions of people were content to regard all
+this disorder as the permanent lot of humanity. He would assume that
+this must be a temporary state of affairs due to some causes unknown
+to him, some great migration, for example. He would suppose we were
+all busy putting things right. He would see on the one hand unemployed
+labour and unemployed material; on the other, great areas of suitable
+land and the crying need for more and better homes than the people
+had, and it would seem the most natural thing in the world that the
+directing intelligence of the community should set the unemployed
+people to work with the unemployed material upon the land to house the
+whole population fairly and well. There exists all that is needed to
+house the whole population admirably, the building material, the room,
+the unoccupied hands. Why is it not being done?
+
+Our answer would be, of course, that he did not understand our
+difficulties; the land was not ours to do as we liked with, it did not
+belong to the community but to certain persons, the Owners, who either
+refused to let us build upon it or buy it or have anything to do with
+it, or demanded money we could not produce for it; that equally the
+material was not ours, but belonged to certain other Owners, and that,
+thirdly, the community had insufficient money or credit to pay the
+wages and maintenance and equipment of the workers who starved and
+degenerated in our streets--for that money, too, was privately owned.
+
+This would puzzle our visitor considerably.
+
+"Why do you have Owners?" he would ask.
+
+We might find that difficult to answer.
+
+"But why do you let the land be owned?" he would go on. "You don't let
+people own the air. And these bricks and timber you mustn't touch, the
+mortar you need and the gold you need--they all came out of the
+ground--they all belonged to everybody or nobody a little while ago!"
+
+You would say something indistinct about Property.
+
+"But why?"
+
+"Somebody must own the things."
+
+"Well, let the State own the things and use them for the common good.
+It owns the roads, it owns the foreshores and the territorial
+seas--nobody owns the air!"
+
+If you entered upon historical explanations with him, you would soon
+be in difficulties. You would find that so recently as the Feudal
+System--which was still living, so to speak, yesterday--the King, who
+stood for the State, held the land as the Realm, and the predecessors
+of the present owners held under him merely as the administrative
+officials who performed all sorts of public services and had all sorts
+of privileges thereby. They have dropped the services and stuck to the
+land and the privileges; that is all.
+
+"I begin to perceive," our visitor would say as this became clear;
+"your world is under the spell of an exaggerated idea, this
+preposterous idea there must be an individual Owner for everything in
+the world. Obviously you can't get on while you are under the spell of
+that! So long as you have this private ownership in everything,
+there's no help for you. You cut up your land and material in parcels
+of all sorts and sizes among this multitude of irresponsible little
+monarchs; you let all the material you need get distributed among
+another small swarm of Owners, and clearly you can only get them to
+work for public ends in the most roundabout, tedious and wasteful way.
+Why should they? They're very well satisfied as they are! But if the
+community as a whole insisted that this idea of private Ownership you
+have in regard to land and natural things was all nonsense--and it is
+all nonsense!--just think what you might not do with it now that you
+have all the new powers and lights that Science has given you. You
+might turn all your towns into garden cities, put an end to
+overcrowding, abolish smoky skies----"
+
+"Hush!" I should have to interrupt; "if you talk of the things that
+are clearly possible in the world to-day, they will say you are an
+Utopian dreamer!"
+
+But at least one thing would have become clear, the little swarm of
+Owners and their claims standing in the way of any bold collective
+dealing with housing or any such public concern. The real work to be
+done here is to change an idea, that idea of ownership, to so modify
+it that it will cease to obstruct the rational development of life;
+and that is what the Socialist seeks to do.
+
+
+§ 2.
+
+Now the argument that the civilized housing of the masses of our
+population now is impossible because if you set out to do it you come
+up against the veto of the private owner at every stage, can be
+applied to almost every general public service. Some little while ago
+I wrote a tract for the Fabian Society about Boots;[3] and I will not
+apologize for repeating here a passage from that. To begin with, this
+tract pointed out the badness, unhealthiness and discomfort of
+people's footwear as one saw it in every poor quarter, and asked why
+it was that things were in so disagreeable a state. There was plenty
+of leather in the world, plenty of labour.
+
+    [3] _This Misery of Boots._ It is intended as an
+        introductory tract explaining the central idea of Socialism
+        for propaganda purposes, and it is published by the Fabian
+        Society, of 3 Clement's Inn, London, at 3_d._ That, together
+        with my tract _Socialism and the Family_ (A. C. Fifield, 44
+        Fleet Street, London, 6_d._), gives the whole broad outline
+        of the Socialist attitude.
+
+    "Here on the one hand--you can see for yourself in any
+    unfashionable part of Great Britain--are people badly,
+    uncomfortably, painfully shod in old boots, rotten boots, sham
+    boots; and on the other great stretches of land in the world,
+    with unlimited possibilities of cattle and leather and great
+    numbers of people who, either through wealth or trade
+    disorder, are doing no work. And our question is: 'Why cannot
+    the latter set to work and make and distribute boots?'
+
+    "Imagine yourself trying to organize something of this kind of
+    Free Booting expedition and consider the difficulties you
+    would meet with. You would begin by looking for a lot of
+    leather. Imagine yourself setting off to South America, for
+    example, to get leather; beginning at the very beginning by
+    setting to work to kill and flay a herd of cattle. You find at
+    once you are interrupted. Along comes your first obstacle in
+    the shape of a man who tells you the cattle and the leather
+    belong to him. You explain that the leather is wanted for
+    people who have no decent boots in England. He says he does
+    not care a rap what you want it for; before you may take it
+    from him you have to buy him off; it is his private property,
+    this leather, and the herd and the land over which the herd
+    ranges. You ask him how much he wants for his leather, and he
+    tells you frankly, just as much as he can induce you to give.
+
+    "If he chanced to be a person of exceptional sweetness of
+    disposition, you might perhaps argue with him. You might point
+    out to him that this project of giving people splendid boots
+    was a fine one that would put an end to much human misery. He
+    might even sympathize with your generous enthusiasm, but you
+    would, I think, find him adamantine in his resolve to get just
+    as much out of you for his leather as you could with the
+    utmost effort pay.
+
+    "Suppose, now, you said to him: 'But how did you come by this
+    land and these herds so that you can stand between them and
+    the people who have need of them, exacting this profit?' He
+    would probably either embark upon a long rigmarole, or, what
+    is much more probable, lose his temper and decline to argue.
+    Pursuing your doubt as to the rightfulness of his property in
+    these things, you might admit he deserved a certain reasonable
+    fee for the rough care he had taken of the land and herds. But
+    cattle breeders are a rude violent race, and it is doubtful if
+    you would get far beyond your proposition of a reasonable fee.
+    You would, in fact, have to buy off this owner of the leather
+    at a good thumping price--he exacting just as much as he could
+    get from you--if you wanted to go on with your project.
+
+    "Well, then you would have to get your leather here, and to do
+    that you would have to bring it by railway and ship to this
+    country. And here again you would find people without any
+    desire or intention of helping your project, standing in your
+    course resolved to make every possible penny out of you on
+    your way to provide sound boots for every one. You would find
+    the railway was private property and had an owner or owners;
+    you would find the ship was private property with an owner or
+    owners, and that none of these would be satisfied for a moment
+    with a mere fee adequate to their services. They too would be
+    resolved to make every penny of profit out of you. If you made
+    inquiries about the matter, you would probably find the real
+    owners of railway and ship were companies of shareholders, and
+    the profit squeezed out of your poor people's boots at this
+    stage went to fill the pockets of old ladies, at Torquay,
+    spendthrifts in Paris, well-booted gentlemen in London clubs,
+    all sorts of glossy people....
+
+    "Well, you get the leather to England at last; and now you
+    want to make it into boots. You take it to a centre of
+    population, invite workers to come to you, erect sheds and
+    machinery upon a vacant piece of ground, and start off in a
+    sort of fury of generous industry, boot-making.... Do you?
+    There comes along an owner for that vacant piece of ground,
+    declares it is his property, demands an enormous sum for rent.
+    And your workers all round you, you find, cannot get house
+    room until they too have paid rent--every inch of the country
+    is somebody's property, and a man may not shut his eyes for an
+    hour without the consent of some owner or other. And the food
+    your shoe-makers eat, the clothes they wear, have all paid
+    tribute and profit to land-owners, cart-owners, house-owners,
+    endless tribute over and above the fair pay for work that has
+    been done upon them....
+
+    "So one might go on. But you begin to see now one set of
+    reasons at least why every one has not good comfortable boots.
+    There could be plenty of leather; and there is certainly
+    plenty of labour and quite enough intelligence in the world to
+    manage that and a thousand other desirable things. But this
+    institution of Private Property in land and naturally produced
+    things, these obstructive claims that prevent you using
+    ground, or moving material, and that have to be bought out at
+    exorbitant prices, stand in the way. All these owners hang
+    like parasites upon your enterprise at its every stage; and by
+    the time you get your sound boots well made in England, you
+    will find them costing about a pound a pair--high out of reach
+    of the general mass of people. And you will perhaps not think
+    me fanciful and extravagant when I confess that when I realize
+    this and look at poor people's boots in the street, and see
+    them cracked and misshapen and altogether nasty, I seem to see
+    also a lot of little phantom land-owners, cattle-owners,
+    house-owners, owners of all sorts, swarming over their pinched
+    and weary feet like leeches, taking much and giving nothing
+    and being the real cause of all such miseries."
+
+
+§ 3.
+
+Our visitor would not only be struck by the clogging of our social
+activities through this system of leaving everything to private
+enterprise; he would also be struck by the immense wastefulness.
+Everywhere he would see things in duplicate and triplicate; down the
+High Street of any small town he would find three or four
+butchers--mostly selling New Zealand mutton and Argentine beef as
+English--five or six grocers, three or four milk shops, one or two big
+drapers and three or four small haberdashers, milliners, and "fancy
+shops," two or three fishmongers, all very poor, all rather bad, most
+of them in debt and with their assistants all insecure and underpaid.
+He would find in spite of this wealth of competition that every one
+who could contrive it, all the really prosperous people in fact,
+bought most of their food and drapery from big London firms.
+
+But why should I go on writing fresh arguments when we have Elihu's
+classic tract[4] to quote.
+
+    [4] Elihu's tracts are published by the Independent Labour
+        Party at one penny each. The best are: _Whose Dog Art Thou?_
+        _A Nation of Slaves_; _Milk and Postage Stamps_; _A Corner
+        in Flesh and Blood_; and _Simple Division_.
+
+    "Observe how private enterprise supplies the streets with
+    milk. At 7.30 a milk cart comes lumbering along and delivers
+    milk at one house and away again. Half-an-hour later another
+    milk cart arrives and delivers milk, first on this side of the
+    street and then on that, until seven houses have been
+    supplied, and then he departs. During the next three or four
+    hours four other milk carts put in an appearance at varying
+    intervals, supplying a house here and another there, until
+    finally, as it draws towards noon, their task is accomplished
+    and the street supplied with milk.
+
+    "The time actually occupied by one and another of these
+    distributors of milk makes in all about an hour and forty
+    minutes, six men and six horses and carts being required for
+    the purpose, and these equipages rattle along one after the
+    other, all over the district, through the greater part of the
+    day, in the same erratic and extraordinary manner."
+
+
+§ 4.
+
+Our imaginary visitor would probably quite fail to grasp the reasons
+why we do not forthwith shake off this obstructive and harmful idea of
+Private Ownership, dispossess our Landowners and so forth as gently as
+possible, and set to work upon collective housing and the rest of it.
+And so he would "exit wondering."
+
+But that would be only the opening of the real argument. A competent
+Anti-Socialist of a more terrestrial experience would have a great
+many very effectual and very sound considerations to advance in
+defence of the present system.
+
+He might urge that our present way of doing things, though it was
+sometimes almost as wasteful as Nature when fresh spawn or pollen
+germs are scattered, was in many ways singularly congenial to the
+infirmities of humanity. The idea of property is a spontaneous product
+of the mortal mind; children develop it in the nursery, and are
+passionately alive to the difference of _meum_ and _tuum_, and its
+extension to land, subterranean products and wild free things, even if
+it is under analysis a little unreasonable, was at least singularly
+acceptable to humanity.
+
+And there would be admirable soundness in all this. There can be
+little or no doubt that the conception of personal ownership has in
+the past contributed elements to human progress that could have come
+through no other means. It has allowed private individuals in odd
+corners to try experiments in new methods and new appliances, that the
+general intelligence, such as it was, of the community could not have
+understood. For all its faults, our present individualistic order
+compared not simply with the communism of primitive tribes, but even
+with the personal and largely illiterate control of the mediĉval
+feudal governments, is a good efficient working method. I don't think
+a Socialist need quarrel with the facts of history or human nature.
+But he would urge that Private Ownership is only a phase, though no
+doubt quite a necessary phase, in human development. The world has
+needed Private Ownership just as (Lester F. Ward declares[5]) it once
+needed slavery to discipline men and women to agriculture and habits
+of industry, and just as it needed autocratic kings to weld warring
+tribes into nations and nations into empires, to build high roads, end
+private war and establish the idea of Law, and a wider than tribal
+loyalty. But just as Western Europe has passed out of the phases of
+slavery and of autocracy (which is national slavery) into
+constitutionalism, so, he would hold, we are passing out of the phase
+of private ownership of land and material and food. We are doing so
+not because we reject it, but because we have worked it out, because
+we have learnt its lessons and can now go on to a higher and finer
+organization.
+
+    [5] _Pure Sociology_, p. 271-2, by Lester F. Ward. (The
+        Macmillan Company, New York.)
+
+There the Anti-Socialist would join issue with a lesser advantage. He
+would have to show not only that Private Ownership has been
+serviceable and justifiable in the past--which many Socialists admit
+quite cheerfully--but that it is the crown and perfection of human
+methods, which the Socialists flatly deny. Universal Private
+Ownership, an extreme development of the sentiment of individual
+autonomy and the limitation of the State to the merest police
+functions, were a necessary outcome of the breakdown of the
+unprogressive authoritative Feudal System in alliance with a dogmatic
+Church. It reached its maximum in the eighteenth century, when even
+some of the prisons and workhouses were run by private contract, when
+people issued a private money, the old token coinage, and even
+regiments of soldiers were raised by private enterprise. It was, the
+Socialist alleges, a mere phase of that breaking up of the old social
+edifice, a weakening of the old circle of ideas that had to precede
+the new constructive effort. But with land, with all sorts of property
+and all sorts of businesses and public services, just as with the old
+isolated private family, the old separateness and independence is
+giving way to a new synthesis. The idea of Private Ownership, albeit
+still the ruling idea of our civilization, does not rule nearly so
+absolutely as it did. It weakens and falters before the inexorable
+demands of social necessity--manifestly under our eyes.
+
+The Socialist would be able to appeal to a far greater number of laws
+in the nature of limitation of the owner of property than could be
+quoted to show the limitation of the old supremacy of the head of the
+family. In the first place he would be able to point to a constantly
+increasing interference with the right of the landowner to do what he
+liked with his own, building regulations, intervention to create
+allotments and so forth. Then there would be a vast mass of factory
+and industrial legislation, controlling, directing, prohibiting;
+fencing machinery, interfering on behalf of health, justice and public
+necessity with the owner's free bargain with his work-people. His
+business undertakings would be under limitations his grandfather never
+knew--even harmless adulterations that merely intensify profit,
+forbidden him!
+
+And in the next place and still more significant is the manifest
+determination to keep in public hands many things that would once
+inevitably have become private property. For example, in the middle
+Victorian period a water supply, a gas supply, a railway or tramway
+was inevitably a private enterprise, the creation of a new property;
+now, this is the exception rather than the rule. While gas and water
+and trains were supplied by speculative owners for profit, electric
+light and power, new tramways and light railways are created in an
+increasing number of cases by public bodies who retain them for the
+public good. Nobody who travels to London as I do regularly in the
+dirty, over-crowded carriages of the infrequent and unpunctual trains
+of the South-Eastern Company, and who then transfers to the cleanly,
+speedy, frequent--in a word, "civilized" electric cars of the London
+County Council, can fail to estimate the value and significance of
+this supersession of the private owner by the common-weal.
+
+All these things, the Socialists insist, are but a beginning. They
+point to a new phase in social development, to the appearance of a
+collective intelligence and a sense of public service taking over
+appliances, powers, enterprises, with a growing confidence that must
+end finally in the substitution of collective for private ownership
+and enterprise throughout the whole area of the common business of
+life.
+
+
+§ 5.
+
+In relation to quite a number of large public services it can be shown
+that even under contemporary conditions Private Ownership does work
+with an enormous waste and inefficiency. Necessarily it seeks for
+profit; necessarily it seeks to do as little as possible for as much
+as possible. The prosperity of all Kent is crippled by a "combine" of
+two ill-managed and unenterprising railway companies, with no funds
+for new developments, grinding out an uncertain dividend by clipping
+expenditure.
+
+I happen to see this organization pretty closely, and I can imagine no
+State enterprise west of Turkey or Persia presenting even to the
+passing eye so deplorable a spectacle of ruin and inefficiency. The
+South-Eastern Company's estate at Seabrook presents the dreariest
+spectacle of incompetent development conceivable; one can see its
+failure three miles away; it is a waste with an embryo slum in one
+corner protected by an extravagant sea-wall, already partly shattered,
+from the sea.
+
+To-day (Nov. 4, 1907) the price of the ordinary South-Eastern stock is
+65 and its deferred stock 31; of the London, Chatham and Dover
+ordinary stock 10-1/2; an eloquent testimony to the disheartened state
+of the owners who now cling reluctantly to this disappointing
+monopoly. Spite of this impoverishment of the ordinary shareholder,
+this railway system has evidently paid too much profit in the past for
+efficiency; the rolling stock is old and ageing--much of it is by
+modern standards abominable--the trains are infrequent, and the
+shunting operations at local stations, with insufficient sidings and
+insufficient staffs, produce a chronic dislocation and unpunctuality
+in the traffic that is exaggerated by the defects of direction evident
+even in the very time-tables. The trains are not well planned, the
+connections with branch lines are often extremely ill managed. The
+service is bad to its details. It is the exception rather than the
+rule to find a ticket-office in the morning with change for a
+five-pound note; and, as a little indication of the spirit of the
+whole machine, I discovered the other day that the conductors upon the
+South-Eastern trams at Hythe start their morning with absolutely no
+change at all. Recently the roof of the station at Charing Cross fell
+in--through sheer decay.... A whole rich county now stagnates
+hopelessly under the grip of this sample of private enterprise, towns
+fail to grow, trade flows sluggishly from point to point. No
+population in the world would stand such a management as it endures at
+the hands of the South-Eastern Railway from any responsible public
+body. Out would go the whole board of managers at the next election.
+Consider what would have happened if the London County Council had
+owned Charing Cross Station three years ago. But manifestly there is
+nothing better to be done under private ownership conditions. The
+common shareholders are scattered and practically powerless, and their
+collective aim is, at any expense to the public welfare, to keep the
+price of the shares from going still lower.
+
+The South-Eastern Railway is only one striking instance of the general
+unserviceableness of private ownership for public services. Nearly all
+the British railway companies, in greater or less degree, present now
+a similar degenerative process. Years of profit-sweating, of high
+dividends, have left them with old stations, old rolling stock, old
+staffs, bad habits and diminishing borrowing power. Only a few of
+these corporations make any attempt to keep pace with invention. It is
+remarkable now in an epoch of almost universal progress how stagnant
+the British privately owned railways are. One travels now-a-days if
+anything with a decrease of comfort from the 1880 accommodation,
+because of the greater overcrowding; and there has been no general
+increase of speed, no increase in smooth running, no increase in
+immunity from accident now for quite a number of years. One travels in
+a dingy box of a compartment that is too ill-lit at night for reading
+and full of invincible draughts. In winter the only warmth is too
+often an insufficient footwarmer of battered tin, for which the
+passengers fight fiercely with their feet. An observant person cannot
+fail to be struck--especially if he is returning from travel upon the
+State railways of Switzerland or Germany--by the shabby-looking
+porters on so many of our lines--they represent the standard of good
+clothing for the year 1848 or thereabouts--and by the bleak misery of
+many of the stations, the universal dirt that electricity might even
+now abolish. You dare not drop a parcel on any British railway cushion
+for fear of the cloud of horrible dust you would raise; you have to
+put it down softly. Consider, too, the congested infrequent suburban
+trains that ply round any large centre of population, the inefficient
+goods and parcel distribution that hangs up the trade of the local
+shopman everywhere. Not only in the arrested standard of comfort, but
+in the efficiency of working also are our privately owned railways a
+hopeless discredit to private ownership.
+
+None of them, hampered by their present equipment, are able to adapt
+themselves readily to the new and better mechanism science produces
+for them, electric traction, electric lighting and so forth; and it
+seems to me highly probable that the last steam-engines and the last
+oil lamps in the world will be found upon the southern railway lines
+of Great Britain. How can they go on borrowing new capital with their
+stock at the prices I have quoted, and how can they do anything
+without new capital? The conception of profit-raising that rules our
+railways takes rather an altogether different direction; it takes the
+form of attempts to procure a monopoly even of the minor traffic by
+resisting the development of light railways, and of keeping the
+standard of comfort, decency and cleanliness low. As for the vast
+social ameliorations that could be wrought now, and are urgently
+needed now, by redistributing population through enhanced and
+cheapened services scientifically planned, and by an efficient
+collection and carriage of horticultural and agricultural produce,
+these things lie outside the philosophy of the Private Owner
+altogether. They would probably not pay him, and there the matter
+ends; that they would pay the community enormously, does not for one
+moment enter into his circle of ideas.
+
+There can be little doubt that in the next decade or so the secular
+decay and lagging of the British railway services which is inevitable
+under existing conditions (in speed, in comfort, they have long been
+distanced by continental lines), the probable increase in accidents
+due to economically administered permanent ways and ageing stations
+and bridges, and the ever more perceptible check to British economic
+development due to this clogging of the circulatory system, will be of
+immense value to the Socialist propaganda as an object lesson in
+private ownership. In Italy the thing has already passed its
+inevitable climax, and the State is now struggling valiantly to put a
+disorganized, ill-equipped and undisciplined network of railways, the
+legacy of a period of private enterprise, into tolerable working
+order.
+
+
+§ 6.
+
+In a second great public service there is a perceptible, a growing
+recognition of the evil and danger of allowing profit-seeking Private
+Ownership to prevail; and that is the general food supply. A great
+quickening of the public imagination in this matter has occurred
+through the "boom" of Mr. Upton Sinclair's book, _The Jungle_--a book
+every student of the elements of Socialism should read. He accumulated
+a considerable mass of facts about the Chicago stockyards, and
+incorporated them with his story, and so enabled people to realize
+what they might with a little imaginative effort have inferred before;
+that the slaughtering of cattle and the preparation of meat, when it
+is done wholly and solely for profit, that is to say when it is done
+as rapidly and cheaply as possible, is done _horribly_; that it is a
+business cruel to the beasts, cruel to the workers and dangerous to
+the public health. The United States has long recognized the
+inadequacy of private consciences in this concern, and while all the
+vast profits of the business go to the meat packers, the community has
+maintained an insufficient supply of underpaid and, it is said in some
+cases, bribable inspectors to look after the public welfare.
+
+In this country also, slaughtering is a private enterprise but
+slightly checked by inspection, and if we have no Chicago, we probably
+have all its mean savings, its dirt and carelessness and filth,
+scattered here and there all over the country, a little in this
+privately owned slaughter-house, a little in that. For what inducement
+has a butcher to spend money and time in making his slaughter-house
+decent, sanitary and humane above the standard of his fellows? To do
+that will only make him poor and insolvent. Anyhow, few of his
+customers will come to see their meat butchered, and, as they say in
+the South of England, "What the eye don't see the heart don't grieve."
+
+Many witnesses concur in declaring that our common jam, pickle and
+preserve trade is carried on under equally filthy conditions. If it is
+not, it is a miracle, in view of the inducements the Private Owner has
+to cut his expenses, economize on premises and wages, and buy his
+fruit as near decay and his sugar as near dirt as he can. The scandal
+of our milk supply is an open one; it is more and more evident that so
+long as Private Ownership rules the milk trade, we can never be sure
+that at every point in the course of the milk from cow to consumer
+there will not creep in harmful and dishonest profit-making elements.
+The milking is too often done dirtily from dirty cows and into dirty
+vessels--why should a business man fool away his profits in paying for
+scrupulous cleanliness when it is almost impossible to tell at sight
+whether milk is clean or dirty?--and there come more or less harmful
+dilutions and adulterations and exposures to infection at every
+handling, at every chance at profit making. The unavoidable
+inefficiency of the private milk trade reflects itself in infant
+mortality--we pay our national tribute to private enterprise in milk,
+a tribute of many thousands of babies every year. We try to reduce
+this tribute by inspection. But why should the State pay money for
+inspection, upon keeping highly-trained and competent persons merely
+to pry and persecute in order that private incompetent people should
+reap profits with something short of a maximum of child murder? It
+would be much simpler to set to work directly, employ and train these
+private persons, and run the dairies and milk distribution ourselves.
+
+There is an equally strong case for a public handling of bakehouses
+and the bread supply. Already the public is put to great and entirely
+unremunerative expense in inspecting and checking weights and hunting
+down the grosser instances of adulteration, grubbiness and dirt, and
+with it all the common bakehouse remains for the most part a
+subterranean haunt of rats, mice and cockroaches, and the ordinary
+baker's bread is so insipid and unnutritious that a great number of
+more prosperous people now-a-days find it advantageous to health and
+pocket alike to bake at home. A considerable amount of physical
+degeneration may be connected with the general poorness of our bread.
+The plain fact of the case is that our population will never get good
+wholesome bread from the Private Owner's bakehouse, until it employs
+one skilled official to watch every half-dozen bakers--and another to
+watch him; and it seems altogether saner and cheaper to abolish the
+Private Owner in this business also and do the job cleanly, honestly
+and straightforwardly in proper buildings with properly paid labour as
+a public concern.
+
+Now, what has been said of the food supply is still truer of the trade
+in fuel. Between the consumer and the collier is a string of private
+persons each resolved to squeeze every penny of profit out of the coal
+on its way to the cheap and wasteful grate one finds in the
+jerry-built homes of the poor. In addition there is every winter now,
+whether in Great Britain or America, a manipulation of the coal market
+and a more or less severe coal famine. Coal is jerked up to
+unprecedented prices, and the small consumer, who has no place for
+storage, who must buy, if not from day to day, from week to week,
+finds he must draw upon his food fund and his savings to meet the
+Private Owner's raised demands--or freeze. Every such coal famine
+reaps its harvest for death of old people and young children, and
+wipes out so many thousands of savings' bank accounts and hoarded
+shillings. Consider the essential imbecility of allowing the nation's
+life and the nation's thrift to be preyed upon for profit in this way!
+Is it possible to doubt that the civilized community of the future
+will have to resume possession of all its stores of fuel, will keep
+itself informed of the fluctuating needs of its population, and will
+distribute and sell coal, gas and oil--not for the maximum profit, but
+the maximum general welfare?[6]
+
+    [6] In Dakota, 1906-7, private enterprise led to a
+        particularly severe coal famine in the bitterest weather,
+        and the shortage was felt so severely that the population
+        rose and attacked and stopped passing coal-trains.
+
+Another great branch of trade in which Private Ownership and private
+freedom is manifestly antagonistic to the public welfare is the Drink
+Traffic. Here we have a commodity, essentially a drug, its use readily
+developing a vice, deleterious at its best, complex in composition,
+and particularly susceptible to adulteration and the enhancement of
+its attraction by poisonous ingredients and indeed to every sort of
+mischievous secret manipulation. Probably nothing is more rarely found
+pure and honest than beer or whisky; whisky begins to be blended and
+doctored before it leaves the distillery. And we allow the production
+and distribution of this drug of alcoholic drink to be from first to
+last a source of private profit. We so contrive it that we put money
+prizes upon the propaganda of drink. Is it any wonder that drink is
+not only made by adulteration far more evil than it naturally is, but
+that it is forced upon the public in every possible way?
+
+"He tempts them to drink," I have heard a clergyman say of his village
+publican. But what else did he think the publican was there for?--to
+preach total abstinence? Naturally, inevitably, the whole of the Trade
+is a propaganda--not of drunkenness, but of habitual heavy drinking.
+The more successful propagandists, the great brewers and distillers
+grow rich just in the proportion that people consume beer and spirits;
+they gain honour and peerages in the measure of their success.
+
+It is very interesting to the Socialist to trace the long struggle of
+the temperance movement against its initial ideas of freedom, and to
+see how inevitably the most reluctant and unlikely people have been
+forced to recognize Private Ownership in this trade and for profit as
+the ultimate evil. I am delighted to have to hand an excellent little
+tract by "A Ratepayer": _National Efficiency and the Drink Traffic_.
+It has a preface by Mr. Haldane, and it is as satisfactory a
+demonstration of the absolute necessity of thoroughgoing Socialism in
+this particular field as any Socialist could wish. One encounters the
+Bishop of Chester, for example, in its pages talking the purest
+Socialism, and making the most luminous admissions of the
+impossibility of continued private control, in phrases that need but a
+few verbal changes to apply equally to milk, to meat, to bread, to
+housing, to book-selling[7]....
+
+    [7] For a clear and admirable account of the Socialist
+        attitude to the temperance question, see the tract on
+        _Municipal Drink Traffic_ published by the Fabian Society;
+        price one penny.
+
+
+§ 7.
+
+Land and housing, railways, food, drink, coal, in each of these great
+general interests there is a separate strong case for the substitution
+of collective control for the Private Ownership methods of the present
+time. There is a great and growing number of people like "A Ratepayer"
+and Mr. Haldane, who do not call themselves Socialists but who are yet
+strongly tinged with Socialist conceptions; who are convinced--some in
+the case of the land, some in the case of the drink trade or the milk,
+that Private Ownership and working for profit must cease. But they
+will not admit a general principle, they argue each case on its
+merits.
+
+The Socialist maintains that, albeit the details of each problem must
+be studied apart, there does underlie all these cases and the whole
+economic situation at the present time, one general fact, that through
+our whole social system from top to base we find things under the
+influence of a misleading idea that must be changed, and which, until
+it is changed, will continue to work out in waste, unserviceableness,
+cramped lives and suffering and death. Each man is for himself, that
+is this misleading idea, seeking, perforce, ends discordant with the
+general welfare; who serves the community without exacting pay, goes
+under; who exacts pay without service prospers and continues; success
+is not to do well, it is to have and to get; failure is not to do ill,
+it is to lose and not have; and under these conditions how can we
+expect anything but dislocated, unsatisfying service at every turn?
+
+The contemporary anti-Socialist moralist and the social satirist would
+appeal to the Owner's sense of duty; he would declare in a
+platitudinous tone that property had its duties as well as its rights,
+and so forth. The Socialist, however, looks a little deeper, and puts
+the thing differently. He brings both rights and duties to a keener
+scrutiny. What underlies all these social disorders, he alleges, is
+one simple thing, a misconception of property; an unreasonable
+exaggeration, an accumulated, inherited exaggeration, of the idea of
+property. He says the idea of private property, which is just and
+reasonable in relation to intimate personal things, to clothes,
+appliances, books, one's home or apartments, the garden one loves or
+the horse one rides, has become unreasonably exaggerated until it
+obsesses the world; that the freedom we have given men to claim and
+own and hold the land upon which we must live, the fuel we burn, the
+supplies of food and metal we require, the railways and ships upon
+which our business goes, and to fix what prices they like to exact for
+all these services, leads to the impoverishment and practical
+enslavement of the mass of mankind.
+
+And so he comes to his second main generalization, which I may perhaps
+set out in these words:--
+
+_The idea of the private ownership of things and the rights of owners
+is enormously and mischievously exaggerated in the contemporary world.
+The conception of private property has been extended to land, to
+material, to the values and resources accumulated by past generations,
+to a vast variety of things that are properly the inheritance of the
+whole race. As a result of this, there is much obstruction and waste
+of human energy and a huge loss of opportunity and freedom for the
+mass of mankind; progress is retarded, there is a vast amount of
+avoidable wretchedness, cruelty and injustice._
+
+_The Socialist holds that the community as a whole should be
+inalienably the owner and administrator of the land, of raw materials,
+of values and resources accumulated from the past, and that private
+property must be of a terminable nature, reverting to the community,
+and subject to the general welfare._
+
+This is the second of the twin generalizations upon which the edifice
+of modern Socialism rests. Like the first, and like the practical side
+of all sound religious teaching, it is a specific application of one
+general rule of conduct, and that is the subordination of the
+individual motive to the happiness and welfare of the species.
+
+
+§ 8.
+
+But now the reader unaccustomed to Socialist discussion will begin to
+see the crude form of the answer to the question raised by the
+previous chapter; he will see the resources from which the enlargement
+of human life we there contemplated is to be derived, and realize the
+economic methods to be pursued. Collective ownership is the necessary
+corollary of collective responsibility. There are to be no private
+land owners, no private bankers and lenders of money, no private
+insurance adventurers, no private railway owners nor shipping owners,
+no private mine owners, oil kings, silver kings, coal and wheat
+forestallers or the like. All this realm of property is to be resumed
+by the State, is to be State-owned and State-managed, and the vast
+revenues that are now devoted to private ends will go steadily to
+feed, maintain and educate a new and better generation, to promote
+research and advance science, to build new houses, develop fresh
+resources, plant, plan, beautify and reconstruct the world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND THE SPIRIT OF SERVICE
+
+
+§ 1.
+
+We have stated now how the constructive plan of Socialism aims to
+replace the accepted ideas about two almost fundamental human
+relations by broader and less fiercely egotistical conceptions; how it
+denies a man "property" rights over his wife and children, leaving,
+however, all his other relations with them intact, how it would insure
+and protect their welfare, and how it asserts that a vast range of
+inanimate things also which are now held as private property must be
+regarded as the inalienable possession of the whole community. This
+change in the circle of ideas (as the Herbartians put it) is the
+essence of the Socialist project.
+
+It means no little change. It means a general change in the spirit of
+living; it means a change from the spirit of gain (which now
+necessarily rules our lives) to the spirit of service.
+
+I have tried to show in the preceding chapter that Socialism seeks to
+make life less squalid and cruel, less degrading and dwarfing for the
+children that are born into it, and I have tried also to make clear
+that realization of, and revolt against, the bad management and waste
+and muddle which result from our present economic system. I want now
+to point out that Socialism seeks to ennoble the intimate personal
+life, by checking and discouraging passions that at present run
+rampant, and by giving wider scope for passions that are now thwarted
+and subdued. The Socialist declares that life is now needlessly
+dishonest, base and mean, because our present social organization,
+such as it is, makes an altogether too powerful appeal to some of the
+very meanest elements in our nature.
+
+Not perhaps to the lowest. There can be no disputing that our present
+civilization does discourage much of the innate bestiality of man;
+that it helps people to a measure of continence, cleanliness and
+mutual toleration; that it does much to suppress brute violence, the
+spirit of lawlessness, cruelty and wanton destruction. But on the
+other hand it does also check and cripple generosity and frank
+truthfulness, any disinterested creative passion, the love of beauty,
+the passion for truth and research, and it stimulates avarice,
+parsimony, overreaching, usury, falsehood and secrecy, by making
+money-getting its criterion of intercourse.
+
+Whether we like it or not, we who live in this world to-day find we
+must either devote a considerable amount of our attention to getting
+and keeping money, and shape our activities--or, if you will, distort
+them--with a constant reference to that process, or we must accept
+futility. Whatever powers men want to exercise, whatever service they
+wish to do, it is a preliminary condition for most of them that they
+must, by earning something or selling something, achieve opportunity.
+If they cannot turn their gift into some saleable thing or get some
+propertied man to "patronize" them, they cannot exercise these gifts.
+The gift for getting is the supreme gift--all others bow before it.
+
+Now this is not a thing that comes naturally out of the quality of
+man; it is the result of a blind and complex social growth, of this
+set of ideas working against that, and of these influences modifying
+those. The idea of property has run wild and become a choking
+universal weed. It is not the natural master-passion of a wholesome
+man to want constantly to own. People talk of Socialism as being a
+proposal "against human nature," and they would have us believe that
+this life of anxiety, of parsimony and speculation, of mercenary
+considerations and forced toil we all lead, is the complete and final
+expression of the social possibilities of the human soul. But, indeed,
+it is only quite abnormal people, people of a narrow, limited,
+specialized intelligence, Rockefellers, Morgans and the like, people
+neither great nor beautiful, mere financial monomaniacs, who can keep
+themselves devoted to and concentrated upon gain. To the majority of
+capable good human stuff, buying and selling, saving and investing,
+insuring oneself and managing property, is a mass of uncongenial,
+irrational and tiresome procedure, conflicting with the general trend
+of instinct and the finer interests of life. The great mass of men and
+women, indeed, find the whole process so against nature, that in spite
+of all the miseries of poverty, all the slavery of the economic
+disadvantage, they cannot urge themselves to this irksome cunning game
+of besting the world, they remain poor. Most, in a sort of despair,
+make no effort; many resort to that floundering endeavour to get by
+accident, gambling; many achieve a precarious and unsatisfactory
+gathering of possessions, a few houses, a claim on a field, a few
+hundred pounds in some investment as incalculable as a kite in a gale;
+just a small minority have and get--for the most part either
+inheritors of riches or energetic people who, through a real dulness
+toward the better and nobler aspects of life, can give themselves
+almost entirely to grabbing and accumulation. To such as these, all
+common men who are not Socialists do in effect conspire to give the
+world.
+
+The Anti-Socialist argues that out of this evil of encouraged and
+stimulated avarice comes good, and that this peculiar meanly greedy
+type that predominates in the individualist world to-day, the
+Rockefeller-Harriman type, "creates" great businesses, exploits the
+possibilities of nature, gives mankind railways, power, commodities.
+As a matter of fact, a modern intelligent community is quite capable
+of doing all these things infinitely better for itself, and the
+beneficent influence of commerce may easily become, and does easily
+become, the basis of a cant. Exploitation by private persons is no
+doubt a necessary condition to economic development in an illiterate
+community of low intelligence, just as flint implements marked a
+necessary phase in the social development of mankind; but to-day the
+avaricious getter, like some obsolescent organ in the body, consumes
+strength and threatens health. And to-day he is far more mischievous
+than ever he was before, because of the weakened hold of the old
+religious organization upon his imagination. For the most part the
+great fortunes of the modern world have been built up by proceedings
+either not socially beneficial, or in some cases positively harmful.
+Consider some of the commoner methods of growing rich. There is first
+the selling of rubbish for money, exemplified by the great patent
+medicine fortunes and the fortunes achieved by the debasement of
+journalism, the sale of prize-competition magazines and the like; next
+there is forestalling, the making of "corners" in such commodities as
+corn, nitrates, borax and the like; then there is the capture of what
+Americans call "franchises," securing at low terms by expedients that
+usually will not bear examination, the right to run some profitable
+public service for private profit which would be better done in public
+hands--the various private enterprises for urban traffic, for example;
+then there are the various more or less complex financial operations,
+watering stock, "reconstructing," "shaking out" the ordinary
+shareholder, which transfer the savings of the common struggling
+person to the financial magnate. All the activities in this list are
+more or less anti-social, yet it is by practising them that the great
+successes of recent years have been achieved. Fortunes of a second
+rank have no doubt been made by building up manufactures and
+industries of various types by persons who have known how to buy
+labour cheap, organize it well and sell its produce dear, but even in
+these cases the social advantage of the new product is often largely
+discounted by the labour conditions. It is impossible, indeed,
+directly one faces current facts, to keep up the argument of the
+public good achieved by men under the incentive of gain and the
+necessity of that incentive to progress and economic development.
+
+Now not only is it true that the subordination of our affairs to this
+spirit of gain placed our world in the hands of a peculiar,
+acquisitive, uncreative, wary type of person, and that the mass of
+people hate serving the spirit of gain and are forced to do so through
+the obsession of the whole community by this idea of Private
+Ownership, but it is also true that even now the real driving force
+that gets the world along is not that spirit at all, but the spirit of
+service. Even to-day it would be impossible for the world to get along
+if the mass of its population was really specialized for gain. A world
+of Rockefellers, Morgans and Rothschilds would perish miserably after
+a vigorous campaign of mutual skinning; it is only because the common
+run of men is better than these profit-hunters that any real and human
+things are achieved.
+
+Let us go into this aspect of the question a little more fully,
+because it is one that appears to be least clearly grasped by those
+who discuss Socialism to-day.
+
+
+§ 2.
+
+This fact must be insisted upon, that most of the work of the world
+and all the good work is done to-day for some other motive than gain;
+that profit-seeking not only is not the moving power of the world but
+that it cannot be, that it runs counter to the doing of effectual work
+in every department of life.
+
+It is hard to know how to set about proving a fact that is to the
+writer's perception so universally obvious. One can only appeal to the
+intelligent reader to use his own personal observation upon the people
+about him. Everywhere he will see the property-owner doing nothing,
+the profit-seeker busy with unproductive efforts, with the writing of
+advertisements, the misrepresentation of goods, the concoction of a
+plausible prospectus and the extraction of profits from the toil of
+others, while the real necessary work of the world--I don't mean the
+labour and toil only, but the intelligent direction, the real planning
+and designing and inquiry, the management and the evolution of ideas
+and methods, is in the enormous majority of cases done by salaried
+individuals working either for a fixed wage and the hope of increments
+having no proportional relation to the work done, or for a wage
+varying within definite limits. All the engineering design, all
+architecture, all our public services,--the exquisite work of our
+museum control, for example,--all the big wholesale and retail
+businesses, almost all big industrial concerns, mines, estates, all
+these things are really in the hands of salaried or quasi-salaried
+persons _now_--just as they would be under Socialism. They are only
+possible now because all these managers, officials, employees are as a
+class unreasonably honest and loyal, are interested in their work and
+anxious to do it well, and do not seek _profits_ in every transaction
+they handle. Give them even a small measure of security and they are
+content with interesting work; they are glad to set aside the urgent
+perpetual search for personal gain that Individualists have persuaded
+themselves is the ruling motive of mankind, they are glad to set these
+aside altogether and, as the phrase goes, "get something done." And
+this is true all up and down the social scale. A bricklayer is no good
+unless he can be interested in laying bricks. One knows whenever a
+domestic servant becomes mercenary, when she ceases to take, as people
+say, "a pride in her work," and thinks only of "tips" and getting, she
+becomes impossible. Does a signalman every time he pulls over a lever,
+or a groom galloping a horse, think of his wages,--or want to?
+
+I will confess I find it hard to write with any patience and civility
+of this argument that humanity will not work except for greed or need
+of money and only in proportion to the getting. It is so patently
+absurd. I suppose the reasonable Anti-Socialist will hardly maintain
+it seriously with that crudity. He will qualify. He will say that
+although it may be true that good work is always done for the interest
+of the doing or in the spirit of service, yet in order to get and keep
+people at work, and to keep the standard high through periods of
+indolence and distraction, there must be the dread of dismissal and
+the stimulating eye of the owner. That certainly puts the case a good
+deal less basely and much more plausibly.
+
+There is, perhaps, this much truth in that, that most people do need a
+certain stimulus to exertion and a certain standard of achievement to
+do their best, but to say that this is provided by private ownership
+and can only be provided by private ownership is an altogether
+different thing. Is the British Telephone Service, for example, kept
+as efficient as it is--which isn't very much, by the bye, in the way
+of efficiency--by the protests of the shareholders or of the
+subscribers? Does the grocer's errand-boy loiter any less than his
+brother who carries the Post Office telegrams? In the matter of the
+public milk supply, again, would not an intelligently critical public
+anxious for its milk good and early be a far more formidable master
+than a speculative proprietor in the back room of a creamery? And when
+one comes to large business organizations managed by officials and
+owned by dispersed shareholders, the contrast is all to the advantage
+of the community.
+
+No! the only proper virtues in work, the virtues that must be relied
+upon, and developed and rewarded in the civilized State we Socialists
+are seeking to bring about, are the spirit of service and the passion
+for doing well, the honourable competition not to get but to _do_. By
+sweating and debasing urgency, we get meagrely done what we might get
+handsomely done by the Good Will of emancipated mankind. For all who
+really make, who really do, the imperative of gain is the
+inconvenience, the enemy. Every artist, every scientific investigator,
+every organizer, every good workman, knows that. Every good architect
+knows that this is so and can tell of time after time when he has
+sacrificed manifest profit and taken a loss to get a thing done as he
+wanted it done, right and well; every good doctor, too, has turned
+from profit and high fees to the moving and interesting case, to the
+demands of knowledge and the public health; every teacher worth his or
+her salt can witness to the perpetual struggle between business
+advantage and right teaching; every writer has faced the alternative
+of his ĉsthetic duty and the search for beauty on one hand and the
+"saleable" on the other. All this is as true of ordinary making as of
+special creative work. Every plumber capable of his business hates to
+have to paint his leadwork; every carpenter knows the disgust of
+turning out unfinished "cheap" work, however well it pays him; every
+tolerable cook can feel shame for an unsatisfying dish, and none the
+less shame because by making it materials are saved and economies
+achieved.
+
+And yet, with all these facts clear as day before any observant
+person, _we are content to live on in an economic system that raises
+every man who subordinates these wholesome prides and desires to
+watchful, incessant getting, over the heads of every other type of
+character_; that in effect gives all the power and influence in our
+State to successful getters; that subordinates art, direction, wisdom
+and labour to these inferior narrow men, these men who clutch and
+keep.
+
+Our social system, based on Private Ownership, encourages and
+glorifies this spirit of gain, and cripples and thwarts the spirit of
+service. You need but have your eyes once opened to its influence, and
+thereafter you will never cease to see how the needs and imperatives
+of property taint the honour and dignity of human life. Just where
+life should flower most freely into splendour, this chill, malign
+obsession most nips and cripples. The law that makes getting and
+keeping an imperative necessity poisons and destroys the freedom of
+men and women in love, in art and in every concern in which spiritual
+or physical beauty should be the inspiring and determining factor.
+Behind all the handsome professions of romantic natures the gaunt
+facts of monetary necessity remain the rulers of life. Every youth who
+must sell his art and capacity for gain, every girl who must sell
+herself for money, is one more sacrifice to the Minotaur of Private
+Ownership--before the Theseus of Socialism comes.
+
+Opponents of Socialism, ignoring all these things and inventing with
+that profusion which is so remarkable a trait of the anti-Socialist
+campaign, are wont to declare that we, whose first and last thought is
+the honour and betterment of life, seek to destroy all beauty and
+freedom in love, accuse us of aiming at some "human stud farm." The
+reader will measure the justice of that by the next chapter, but here
+I would say that just as the private ownership of all that is
+necessary to humanity, except the air and sunlight and a few things
+that it has been difficult to appropriate, debases work and all the
+common services of life, so also it taints and thwarts the emotions,
+and degrades the intimate physical and emotional existence of an
+innumerable multitude of people.
+
+All this amounts to a huge impoverishment of life, a loss of beauty
+and discrimination of rich and subtle values. Human existence to-day
+is a mere tantalizing intimation of what it might be. It is
+frostbitten and dwarfed from palace to slum. It is not only that a
+great mass of our population is deprived of space, beauty and
+pleasure, but that a large proportion of such space, beauty and
+pleasure as there are in the world must necessarily have a
+meretricious taint and be in the nature of things bought and made for
+pay.
+
+
+§ 3.
+
+If there is one profession more than another in which devotion is
+implied and assumed, it is that of the doctor. It happens that on the
+morning when this chapter was drafted, I came upon the paragraph that
+follows; it seemed to me to supply just one striking concrete instance
+of how life is degraded by our present system, and to offer me a
+convenient text for a word or so more upon this question between gain
+and service. It is a little vague in its reference to Mr. Tompkins "of
+Birmingham," and I should not be surprised if it were a considerable
+exaggeration of what really happened. But it is true enough to life in
+this, that it is a common practice, a necessity with doctors in poor
+neighbourhoods to insist inexorably upon a fee before attendance.
+
+    "A case of medical inhumanity is reported from Birmingham. A
+    poor man named Tompkins was taken seriously ill early on
+    Christmas morning, and although snow was falling and the
+    atmosphere was terribly raw, his wife left the house in search
+    of a doctor. The nearest practitioner declined to leave the
+    house without being paid his fee; a second imposed the same
+    condition, and the woman then went to the police station. As
+    the horse ambulance was out, they could not help her, and she
+    tried other doctors. In all the poor woman called on eight,
+    and the only one who did not decline to get up without his fee
+    was down with influenza. Eventually a local chemist was
+    persuaded to see the man, and he ordered his removal to the
+    hospital."
+
+That is the story. You note the charge of "inhumanity" in the very
+first line, and in much subsequent press comment there was the same
+note. Apparently every one expects a doctor to be ready at any point
+in the day or night to attend anybody for nothing. Most Socialists are
+disposed to agree with the spirit of that expectation. A practising
+doctor should be in lifelong perpetual war against pain and disease,
+just as a campaigning soldier is continually alert and serving. But
+existing conditions will not permit that. Existing conditions require
+the doctor to get his fee at any cost; if he goes about doing work for
+nothing, they punish him with shabbiness and incapacitating need, they
+forbid his marriage or doom his wife and children to poverty and
+unhappiness. A doctor _must_ make money whatever else he does or does
+not do; he _must_ secure his fees. He is a private adventurer,
+competing in a crowded market for gain, and keeping his energies
+perforce for those who can pay best for them. To expect him to behave
+like a public servant whose income and outlook are secure, or like a
+priest whose church will never let him want or starve, is ridiculous.
+If you put him on a footing with the greengrocer and coal merchant,
+you must expect him to behave like a tradesman. Why should the press
+blame the poor doctor of a poor neighbourhood because a moneyless man
+goes short of medical attendance, when it does not for one moment
+blame Mr. J. D. Rockefeller because a poor man goes short of oil, or
+the Duke of Devonshire because tramps need lodgings in Eastbourne? One
+never reads this sort of paragraph:--
+
+    "A case of commercial inhumanity is reported from Birmingham.
+    A poor man named Tompkins was seriously hungry early on
+    Christmas morning, and although snow was falling and the
+    atmosphere was terribly raw, his wife left the house in search
+    of food. The nearest grocer declined to supply provisions
+    without being paid his price; a second imposed the same
+    condition, and the woman then went to the police station. As
+    that is not a soup-kitchen, they could not help her, and she
+    tried other grocers and bread-shops. In all the poor woman
+    called on eight, and the only one who did not decline to
+    supply food without payment was for some reason bankrupt and
+    out of stock. Eventually a local overseer was persuaded to see
+    the man, and he ordered his removal to the workhouse, where,
+    after considerable hardship, he was partly appeased with
+    skilly."
+
+I, myself, have known an overworked, financially worried doctor at his
+bedroom window call out, "Have you brought the fee?" and have pitied
+and understood his ugly alternatives. "Once I began that sort of
+thing," he explained to me a little apologetically, "they'd none of
+them pay--none."
+
+The Socialist's remedy for this squalid state of affairs is plain and
+simple. Medicine is a public service, an honourable devotion; it
+should no more be a matter of profit-making than the food-supply
+service or the house-supply service--or salvation. It should be a part
+of the organization of a civilized State to have a Public Health
+service of well-paid, highly-educated men distributed over the country
+and closely correlated with public research departments and a reserve
+of specialists, who would be as ready and eager to face dangers and to
+sacrifice themselves for honour and social necessity as soldiers or
+sailors. I believe every honourable man in the medical profession
+under forty now would rather it were so. It is, indeed, a transition
+from private enterprise to public organization that is already
+beginning. We have the first intimation of the change in the
+appearance of the medical officer of health, underpaid, overworked and
+powerless though he is at the present time. It cannot be long before
+the manifest absurdity of our present conditions begins a process of
+socialization of the medical profession entirely analogous to that
+which has changed three-fourths of the teachers in Great Britain from
+private adventurers to public servants in the last forty years.
+
+And that is the aim of Socialism all along the line; to convert one
+public service after another from a chaotic profit-scramble of
+proprietors amidst a mass of sweated employees into a secure and
+disciplined service, in which every man will work for honour,
+promotion, achievement and the commonweal.
+
+I write a "secure and disciplined service," and I intend by that not
+simply an exterior but an interior discipline. Let us have done with
+this unnatural theory that men may submit unreservedly to the guidance
+of "self-interest." Self-interest never took a man or a community to
+any other end than damnation. For all services there is necessary a
+code of honour and devotion which a man must set up for himself and
+obey, to which he must subordinate a number of his impulses. The must
+is seconded by an internal imperative. Men and women _want_ to have a
+code of honour. In the army, for example, there is among the officers
+particularly, a tradition of courage, cleanliness and good form, more
+imperative than any law; in the little band of men who have given the
+world all that we mean by science, the little host of volunteers and
+underpaid workers who have achieved the triumphs of research, there is
+a tradition of self-abnegation and of an immense, painstaking,
+self-forgetful veracity. These traditions work. They add something to
+the worth of every man who comes under them.
+
+Every writer, again, knows clearly the difference between gain-seeking
+and doing good work, and few there are who have not at times done
+something, as they say, "to please themselves." Then in the studio,
+for all the non-moral protests of Bohemia, there is a tradition, an
+admirable tradition, of disregard for mercenary imperatives, a scorn
+of shams and plagiarism that triumphs again and again over economic
+laws. The public services of the coming civilization will demand, and
+will develop, a far completer discipline and tradition of honour.
+Against the development and persistence of all such honourable codes
+now, against every attempt at personal nobility, at a new chivalry, at
+sincere artistry, our present individualist system wages pitiless
+warfare, says in effect, "Fools you are! Look at Rockefeller! Look at
+Pierpont Morgan! Get money! All your sacrifices only go to their
+enrichment. You cannot serve humanity however much you seek to do so.
+They block your way, enormously receptive of all you give. All the
+increment of human achievement goes to them--they own it _a
+priori_.... Get money! Money is freedom to do, to keep, to rule. Do
+you care nothing for your wives and children? Are you content to breed
+servants and dependants for the children of these men? Make things
+beautiful, make things abundant, make life glorious! Fools! if you
+work and sacrifice yourselves and do not _get_, they will possess.
+Your sons shall be the loan-monger's employees, your daughters
+handmaidens to the millionaire. Or, if you cannot face that, go
+childless, and let your life-work gild the palace of the millionaire's
+still more acquisitive descendants!"
+
+Who can ignore the base scramble for money under these alternatives?
+
+
+§ 4.
+
+Let me here insert a very brief paragraph to point out one particular
+thing, and that is that Socialism does not propose to "abolish
+competition"--as many hasty and foolish antagonists declare. If the
+reader has gone through what has preceded this he will know that this
+is not so. Socialism trusts to competition, looks to competition for
+the service and improvement of the world. And in order that
+competition between man and man may have free play, Socialism seeks to
+abolish one particular form of competition, the competition to get and
+hold property--even to marry property, that degrades our present
+world. But it would leave men free to compete for fame, for service,
+for salaries, for position and authority, for leisure, for love and
+honour.
+
+
+§ 5.
+
+And now let me take up certain difficulties the student of Socialism
+encounters. He comes thus far perhaps with the Socialist argument, and
+then his imagination gets to work trying to picture a world in which a
+moiety of the population, perhaps even the larger moiety, is employed
+by the State, and in which the whole population is educated by the
+State and insured of a decent and comfortable care and subsistence
+during youth and old age. He then begins to think of how all this vast
+organization is to be managed, and with that his real difficulties
+begin.
+
+Now I for one am prepared to take these difficulties very seriously,
+as the latter part of this book will show. I will even go so far as to
+say that, to my mind, the contemporary Socialist controversialist
+meets all this system of objections far too cavalierly. These
+difficulties are real difficulties for the convinced Socialist as for
+the inquirer; they open up problems that have still to be solved
+before the equipment of Socialism is complete. "How will you
+Socialists get the right men in the right place for the work that has
+to be done? How will you arrange promotion? How will you determine" (I
+put the argument in its crudest form) "who is to engage in historical
+research in the Bodleian, and who is to go out seaward in November and
+catch mackerel?" Such "posers"--they have a thousand variants--convey
+the spirit of the living resistance to Socialism; they explain why
+every rational man is not an enraptured Socialist at the present time.
+
+Throughout the rest of this book I hope that the reader will be able
+to see growing together in this aspect and then in that, in this and
+that suggestion, the complex solution of this complex system of
+difficulties. My object in raising them now is not to dispose of them,
+but to give them the fullest recognition--and to ask the student to
+read on. In all these matters the world is imperfect now, and it will
+still be imperfect under Socialism--though, I firmly believe, with an
+infinitely lesser and altogether nobler imperfection.
+
+But I do want to point out here that though these are reasonable and,
+to all undogmatic men, most helpful criticisms of the Socialist
+design, they are no sort of justification for things as they are. All
+the difficulties that the ordinary exposition of Socialism seems to
+leave unsolved are at least equally not solved now. Only rarely does
+the right man seem to struggle to his place of adequate opportunity.
+Men and women get their chance in various ways; some of implacable
+temper and versatile gifts thrust themselves to the position they need
+for the exercise of their powers; others display an astonishing
+facility in securing honours and occasions they can then only waste;
+others, outside their specific gift, are the creatures of luck or the
+victims of modesty, tactlessness or incapacity. Most of the large
+businesses of the world now are in the hands of private proprietors
+and managed either directly by an owner or by directors or managers
+acting for directors. The quality of promotion or the recognition of
+capacity varies very much in these great concerns, but they are on the
+whole probably inferior to the public services. Even where the
+administration is keenest it must be remembered it is not seeking the
+men who work the machine best, but the men who can work it cheapest
+and with the maximum of profit. It is pure romancing to represent the
+ordinary business magnate as being in perpetual search for capacity
+among the members of his staff. He wants them to get along and not
+make trouble.
+
+Among the smaller businesses that still, I suppose, constitute the
+bulk of the world's economic body, capacity is enormously hampered. I
+was once an apprentice in a chemist's shop, and also once in a
+draper's--two of my brothers have been shop assistants, and so I am
+still able to talk understandingly with clerks and employees, and I
+know that in all that world all sorts of minor considerations obstruct
+the very beginnings of efficient selection. Every shop is riddled with
+jealousies, "sucking up to the gov'nor" is the universal crime, and
+among the women in many callings promotion is too often tainted by
+still baser suspicions. No doubt in a badly criticized public service
+there is such a thing as "sucking up to" the head of the department,
+but at its worst it is not nearly so bad as things may be in a small
+private concern under a petty autocrat.
+
+In America it is said that the public services are inferior in
+personal quality to the staffs of the great private business
+organizations. My own impression is that, considering the salaries
+paid, they are, so far as Federal concerns go, immeasurably superior.
+In State and municipal affairs, American conditions offer no
+satisfactory criterion; the Americans are, for reasons I have
+discussed elsewhere,[8] a "State-blind" people concentrated upon
+private getting; they have been negligent of public concerns, and the
+public appointments have been left to the peculiarly ruffianly type of
+politician their unfortunate Constitution and their individualist
+traditions have evolved. In England, too, public servants are
+systematically undersalaried, so that the big businesses have merely
+to pay reasonably well to secure the pick of the national capacity.
+Moreover, it must be remembered by the reader that the public services
+do not advertise, and that the private businesses do; so that while
+there is the fullest ventilation of any defects in our military or
+naval organization, there is a very considerable check upon the
+discussion of individualist incapacity. An editor will rush into print
+with the flimsiest imputations upon the breech of a new field-gun or
+the housing of the militia at Aldershot, but he thinks twice before he
+proclaims that the preserved fruits that pay his proprietor a tribute
+of some hundreds a year are an unwholesome embalmment of decay. On the
+whole it is probable that in spite of scandalously bad pay and of the
+embarrassment of party considerations, the British Navy, Post Office,
+and Civil Service generally, and the educational work and much of the
+transit and building work of the London County Council and of many of
+the greater English and Scotch municipalities, are as well managed as
+any private businesses in the world.
+
+    [8] _The Future in America_, Ch. IX. (Chapman & Hall, 1906.)
+
+On the other hand, one must admit there are political and social
+conditions that can carry the quality of the State service almost as
+low as the lowest type of private enterprise. It is little marvel that
+under the typical eighteenth century monarchy, when the way to ship,
+regiment and the apostolic succession alike lay through the
+ante-chamber of the king's mistress, there was begotten that absolute
+repudiation of State Control to which Herbert Spencer was destined at
+last to give the complete expression, that irrational, passionate
+belief that whatever else is right the State is necessarily
+incompetent and wrong....
+
+The gist of this matter seems to be that where you have honourable
+political institutions, free speech and a general high level of
+intelligence and education, you will have an efficient criticism of
+men and their work and powers, and you will get a wholesome system of
+public promotion and many right men in the right place. The higher the
+collective intelligence, that is to say, the higher is the collective
+possibility. Under Socialist institutions which will give education
+and a sense of personal security to every one, this necessity of
+criticism is likely to be most freely, frankly and disinterestedly
+provided. But it is well to keep in mind the entire dependence of
+Socialism upon a high level of intelligence, education and freedom.
+Socialist institutions, as I understand them, are only possible in a
+civilized State, in a State in which the whole population can read,
+write, discuss, participate and in a considerable measure understand.
+Education must precede the Socialist State. Socialism, modern
+Socialism that is to say, such as I am now concerned with, is
+essentially an exposition of and training in certain general ideas; it
+is impossible in an illiterate community, a basely selfish community,
+or in a community without the capacity to use the machinery and the
+apparatus of civilization. At the best, and it is a poor best, a
+stupid, illiterate population can but mock Socialism with a sort of
+bureaucratic tyranny; for a barbaric population too large and various
+for the folk-meeting, there is nothing but monarchy and the ownership
+of the king; for a savage tribe, tradition and the undocumented will
+of the strongest males. Socialism, I will admit, presupposes
+intelligence, and demands as fundamental necessities schools,
+organized science, literature and a sense of the State.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+WOULD SOCIALISM DESTROY THE HOME?
+
+
+§ 1.
+
+For reasons that will become clearer when we tell something of the
+early history and development of Socialism, the Socialist propositions
+with regard to the family lie open to certain grave misconceptions.
+People are told--and told quite honestly and believingly--that
+Socialism will destroy the home, will substitute a sort of human stud
+farm for that warm and intimate nest of human life, will bring up our
+children in incubators and crèches and--Institutions generally.
+
+But before we come to what modern Socialists do desire in these
+matters, it may be well to consider something of the present reality
+of the home people are so concerned about. The reader must not
+idealize. He must not shut his eyes to facts, dream, as Lord Hugh
+Cecil and Lord Robert Cecil--those admirable champions of a bad
+cause--probably do, of a beautiful world of homes, orderly, virtuous,
+each a little human fastness, each with its porch and creeper, each
+with its books and harmonium, its hymn-singing on Sunday night, its
+dear mother who makes such wonderful cakes, its strong and happy
+father--and then say, "These wicked Socialists want to destroy all
+this." Because, in the first place, such homes are being destroyed and
+made impossible now by the very causes against which Socialism fights,
+and because in this world at the present time very few homes are at
+all like this ideal. In reality every poor home is haunted by the
+spectre of irregular employment and undermined by untrustworthy
+insurance, it must shelter in insanitary dwellings and its children
+eat adulterated food because none other can be got. And that, I am
+sorry to say, it is only too easy to prove, by a second appeal to a
+document of which I have already made use.
+
+One hears at times still of the austere, virtuous, kindly, poor Scotch
+home, one has a vision of the "Cottar's Saturday night." "Perish all
+other dreams," one cries, "rather than that such goodness and
+simplicity should end." But now let us look at the average poor Scotch
+home, and compare it with our dream.
+
+Here is the reality.
+
+These entries come from the recently published Edinburgh Charity
+Organization Society's report upon the homes of about fourteen hundred
+school-children, that is to say, about eight hundred Scotch homes.
+Remember they are _sample homes_. They are, as I have already
+suggested by quoting authorities for London and York--and as any
+district visitor will recognize--little worse and little better than
+the bulk of poor people's homes in Scotland and England at the present
+time. I am just going to copy down--not a selection, mind--but a
+series of consecutive entries taken haphazard from this implacable
+list. My last quotation was from cases 1, 2, 3 and so on; I've now
+thrust my fingers among the pages and come upon numbers 191 and 192,
+etc. Here they are, one after the other, just as they come in the
+list:--
+
+    "191. A widow and child lodging with a married son. Three
+    grown-up people and three children occupy one room and
+    bed-closet. The widow leads a wandering life, and is
+    intemperate. The house is thoroughly bad and insanitary. The
+    child is pallid and delicate looking, and receives little
+    attention, for the mother is usually out working. He plays in
+    the streets. Five children are dead. Boy has glands and is
+    fleabitten. Evidence from Police, School Officer and Employer.
+
+    "192. A miserable home. Father dead. Mother and eldest son
+    careless and indifferent. Of the five children, the two eldest
+    are grown up. The elder girl is working, and she is of a
+    better type and might do well under better circumstances; she
+    looks overworked. The mother is supposed to char; she gets
+    parish relief, and one child earns out of school hours. Four
+    children are dead. The children at school are dirty and
+    ragged. The mother could get work if she did not drink. The
+    children at school get free dinners and clothing, and the
+    family is favourably reported on by the Church. The second
+    child impetigo; neck glands; body dirty. The third, glands;
+    dirty and fleabitten. Housing: six in two small rooms.
+    Evidence from Parish Sister, Parish Council, School Charity,
+    Police, Teacher, Children's Employment and School Officer.
+
+    "193. A widow, apparently respectable and well-doing, but may
+    drink. She must in any case have a struggle to maintain her
+    family, though she has much help from Parish, Church, etc. She
+    works out. The children at school are fed, and altogether a
+    large amount of charity must be received, as two Churches have
+    interested themselves in the matter. Three children dead.
+    Housing: three in two tiny rooms. Evidence from Church, Parish
+    Council, School Charity, Police, Parish Sister, Teacher,
+    Insurance and Factor.
+
+    "194. The father drinks, and, to a certain extent, the mother;
+    but the home is tidy and clean, and the rent is regularly
+    paid. Indeed, there is no sign of poverty. There is a daughter
+    who has got into trouble. Only two children out of nine are
+    alive. The father comes from the country and seems intelligent
+    enough, but he appears to have degenerated. They go to a
+    mission, it is believed for what they can get from it.
+    Housing: four in two rooms. Evidence from Club, Church, Factor
+    and Police.
+
+    "195. The husband is intemperate. The mother is quiet, but it
+    is feared that she drinks also. She seems to have lost control
+    of her little boy of seven. The parents married very young,
+    and the first child was born before the marriage. The man's
+    work is not regular, and probably things are not improving
+    with him. Still, the house is fairly comfortable, and they pay
+    club money regularly, and have a good police report. One child
+    has died. Housing: five in two rooms. Evidence from Parish
+    Sister, Police, Club, Employer, School-mistress and Factor.
+
+    "196. A filthy, dirty house. The most elementary notions of
+    cleanliness seem disregarded. The father's earnings are not
+    large, and the house is insanitary, but more might be made of
+    things if there were sobriety and thrift. There does not,
+    however, appear to be _great_ drunkenness, and five small
+    children must be difficult to bring up on the money coming in.
+    There are two women in the house. The eldest child dirty and
+    fleabitten. Housing: seven in two rooms. Evidence from Police,
+    Club, Employer, School-mistress and School Officer.
+
+    "197. The parents are thoroughly drunken and dissolute. They
+    have sunk almost to the lowest depths of social degradation.
+    There is no furniture in the house, and the five children are
+    neglected and starved. One boy earns a trifle out of school
+    hours. All accounts agree as to the character of the father
+    and mother, though they have not been in the hands of the
+    police. Second child has rickets, bronchitis, slight glands
+    and is bow-legged. Two children have died. Housing: seven in
+    two rooms. Evidence from Police, Parish Sister, Employer and
+    School-mistress.
+
+    "198. This house is fairly comfortable, and there is no
+    evidence of drink, but the surroundings have a bad and
+    depressing effect on the parents. The children are sent to
+    school very untidy and dirty, and are certainly underfed. The
+    father's wages are very small, and only one boy is working;
+    there are six altogether. The mother chars occasionally. Food
+    and clothing is given to school-children. The man is in a
+    saving club. The eldest child fleabitten; body unwashed. The
+    second, glands; fleabitten and dirty; cretinoid; much
+    undergrown. Two have died. Housing: seven in two rooms.
+    Evidence from School Charity, Factor, Police and
+    School-mistress.
+
+    "199. The house was fairly comfortable and the man appeared to
+    be intelligent and the wife hard-working, but the police
+    reports are very bad; there are several convictions against
+    the former. He has consequently been idle, and the burden of
+    the family has rested on the wife. There are six children, two
+    of them are working and earning a little, but a large amount
+    of charity from school, church and private generosity keeps
+    the family going. The children are fearfully verminous. There
+    is a suggestion that some baby farming is done, so many are
+    about. Eldest child anĉmic; glands; head badly crusted; lice
+    very bad. Second child, numerous glands; head covered with
+    crusts; lice very bad. Four have died. Housing: eight in two
+    rooms. Evidence from Police, Teacher, Church, Parish Sister
+    and Factor.
+
+    "200. The home is wretched and practically without furniture.
+    The parents were married at ages 17 and 18. One child died,
+    and their mode of life has been reckless, if not worse. The
+    present means of subsistence cannot be ascertained, as the man
+    is idle; however, he recently joined the Salvation Army and
+    signed the pledge. The child at school is helped with food and
+    clothes. The girl very badly bitten; lice and fleas, hair
+    nits. Housing: four in one room. Evidence from Church, School
+    Charity, Co-operative, Employer, Parish Sister, Police and
+    School-mistress."
+
+Total of children still living, 39.
+
+Total of children dead, 27.
+
+Need I go on? They are all after this fashion, eight hundred of them.
+
+And if you turn from the congested town to the wholesome, simple
+country, here is the sort of home you have. This passage is a cutting
+from the _Daily News_ of Jan. 1, 1907; and its assertions have never
+been contradicted. It fills one with only the mildest enthusiasm for
+the return of our degenerate townsmen "back to the land." I came upon
+it as I read that morning's paper after drafting this chapter.
+
+    "Our attention has been called to a sordid Herefordshire
+    tragedy recently revealed at an inquest on a child aged one
+    year and nine months, who died in Weobly Workhouse of
+    pneumonia. She entered the institution emaciated to half the
+    proper weight of her age and with a broken arm--till then
+    undiscovered--that the doctors found to be of about three
+    weeks' standing. Her mother was shown to be in an advanced
+    stage of consumption; one child had died at the age of seven
+    months, and seven now remain. The father, whose work consists
+    in tending eighty-nine head of cattle and ten pigs, is in
+    receipt of eleven shillings a week, three pints of skim milk a
+    day, and a cottage that has been condemned by the sanitary
+    inspector and described as having no bedroom windows. We are
+    not surprised to learn that the coroner, before taking the
+    verdict, asked the house surgeon, who gave evidence, whether
+    he could say that death 'was accelerated by anything.' Our
+    wonder is that the reply was in the negative. The cottage is
+    in the possession of the farmer who employs the man, but his
+    landlord is said to be liable for repairs. That landlord is a
+    clergyman of the Church of England, a J.P., a preserver of
+    game, and owner of three or four thousand acres of land."
+
+And here, again, is the _Times_, by no means a Socialist organ,
+generalizing from official statements:--
+
+    "Houses unfit for human habitation, rooms destitute of light
+    and ventilation, overcrowding in rural cottages, contaminated
+    water supplies, accumulations of every description of filth
+    and refuse, a total absence of drainage, a reign of
+    unbelievable dirt in milk-shops and slaughter-houses, a total
+    neglect of bye-laws, and an inadequate supervision by
+    officials who are frequently incompetent; such, in a general
+    way, is the picture that is commonly presented in the reports
+    of inquiries in certain rural districts made by medical
+    officers of the Local Government Board."
+
+And even of such homes as this there is an insufficiency. In 1891-95,
+more than a quarter of the deaths in London occurred in workhouses and
+other charitable institutions.[9] Now suppose the modern Socialist did
+want to destroy the home; suppose that some Socialists have in the
+past really wanted to do so, remember that that is the reality they
+wanted to destroy.
+
+    [9] _Studies Scientific and Social_, Vol. II., Ch. XXIV.; by
+        Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace. (Macmillan & Co., 1900.)
+
+But does the modern Socialist want to destroy the home? Rather, I
+hold, he wants to save it from a destruction that is even now going
+on, to--I won't say restore it, because I have very grave doubts if
+the world has ever yet held a high percentage of good homes, but raise
+it to the level of its better realizations of happiness and security.
+And it is not only I say this, but all my fellow Socialists say it
+too. Read, for example, that admirable paper, "Economic and Social
+Justice," in Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace's _Studies Scientific and
+Social_, and you will have the clearest statement of the attitude of a
+representative modern Socialist to this question.
+
+
+§ 2.
+
+The reader must get quite out of his head the idea that the present
+system maintains the home and social purity.
+
+In London at the present time there are thousands of prostitutes; in
+Paris, in Berlin, in every great city of Europe or America, thousands;
+in the whole of Christendom there cannot be less than a million of
+these ultimate instances of our civilization. They are the logical
+extremity of a civilization based on cash payments. Each of these
+women represents a smashed and ruined home and wasted possibilities of
+honour, service and love, each one is so much sheer waste. For the
+food they consume, their clothing, their lodging, they render back
+nothing to the community as a whole, and only a gross, dishonouring
+satisfaction to their casual employers. And don't imagine they are
+inferior women, that there has been any selection of the unfit in
+their sterilization; they are, one may see for oneself, well above the
+average in physical vigour, in spirit and beauty. Few of them have
+come freely to their trade, the most unnatural in the world; few of
+them have anything but shame and loathing for their life; and most of
+them must needs face their calling fortified by drink and drugs. For
+virtuous people do not begin to understand the things they endure. But
+it _pays_ to be a prostitute, it does not pay to be a mother and a
+home-maker, and the gist of the present system of individual property
+is that a thing _must pay_ to exist.... So much for one aspect of our
+present system of a "world of homes."
+
+Consider next the great army of employed men and women, shop
+assistants, clerks, and so forth, living in, milliners, typists,
+teachers, servants who have practically no prospect whatever of
+marrying and experiencing those domestic blisses the Socialist is
+supposed to want to rob them of. They are involuntary monks and nuns,
+celibate not from any high or religious motive, but through economic
+hardship. Consider all that amount of pent-up, thwarted or perverted
+emotional possibility, the sheer irrational waste of life implied....
+
+We have glanced at the reality of the family among the poor; what is
+it among the rich? Does the wealthy mother of the upper middle-class
+or upper class really sit among her teeming children, teaching them in
+an atmosphere of love and domestic exaltation? As a matter of fact she
+is a conspicuously devoted woman if she gives them an hour a day--the
+rest of the time they spend with nurse or governess, and when they are
+ten or eleven off they go to board at the preparatory school. Whenever
+I find among my press-cuttings some particularly scathing denunciation
+of Socialists as home-destroyers, as people who want to snatch the
+tender child from the weeping mother to immure it in some terrible
+wholesale institution, I am apt to walk out into my garden, from which
+three boarding-schools for little children of the prosperous classes
+are visible, and rub my eyes and renew that sight and marvel at my
+kind....
+
+Consider now, with these things in mind, the real drift of the first
+main Socialist proposition, and compare its tendency with these
+contemporary conditions. Socialism regards parentage under proper
+safeguards and good auspices as "not only a duty but a service" to the
+State; that is to say it proposes to pay for good parentage--in other
+words to _endow the home_. Socialism comes not to destroy but to save.
+
+And how will the endowment be done? Very probably it will be found
+that the most convenient and best method of doing this will be to
+subsidize the mother--who is, or should be, the principal person
+concerned in this affair--for her children; to assist her, not as a
+charity, but as a right in the period before the birth of her
+anticipated child, and afterwards to provide her with support for that
+child so long as it is kept clean in a tolerable home, in good health,
+well taught and properly clad. It will say to the sound mothering
+woman, Not type-writing, nor shirt-sewing, nor charing is your
+business--these children are. Neglect them, ill-treat them, prove
+incompetent, and your mother-right will cease and we shall take them
+away from you and do what we can for them; love them, serve them and,
+through them, the State, and you will serve yourself. Is that
+destroying the home? Is it not rather the rescue of the home from
+economic destruction?
+
+Certain restrictions, it is true, upon our present way of doing things
+would follow almost necessarily from the adoption of these methods. It
+is manifest that no intelligent State would willingly endow the homes
+of hopelessly diseased parents, of imbecile fathers or mothers, of
+obstinately criminal persons or people incapable of education. It is
+evident, too, that the State would not tolerate chance fatherhood,
+that it would insist very emphatically upon marriage and the purity of
+the home, much more emphatically than we do now. Such a case as the
+one numbered 197, a beautiful instance of the sweet, old-fashioned,
+homely, simple life of the poor we Socialists are supposed to be
+vainly endeavouring to undermine--would certainly be dealt with in a
+drastic and conclusive spirit....
+
+
+§ 3.
+
+So far Socialism goes toward regenerating the family and sustaining
+the home. But let there be no ambiguity on one point. It will be
+manifest that while it would reinvigorate and confirm the home, it
+does quite decidedly tend to destroy what has hitherto been the most
+typical form of the family throughout the world, that is to say the
+family which is in effect the private property of the father, the
+patriarchal family. The tradition of the family in which we are still
+living, we must remember, has developed from a former state in which
+man owned the wife or child as completely as he owned horse or hut. He
+was the family's irresponsible owner. Socialism seeks to make him and
+his wife its jointly responsible heads. Until quite recently the
+husband might beat his wife and put all sorts of physical constraint
+upon her; he might starve her or turn her out of doors; her property
+was his; her earnings were his; her children were his. Under certain
+circumstances it was generally recognized he might kill her. To-day we
+live in a world that has faltered from the rigours of this position,
+but which still clings to its sentimental consequences. The wife
+now-a-days is a sort of pampered and protected half-property. If she
+leaves her husband for another man, it is regarded not as a public
+offence on her part, but as a sort of mitigated theft on the part of
+the latter, entitling the former to damages. Politically she doesn't
+exist; the husband sees to all that. But on the other hand he mustn't
+drive her by physical force, but only by the moral pressure of
+disagreeable behaviour. Nor has he the same large powers of violence
+over her children that once he had. He may beat--within limits. He may
+dictate their education so far as his religious eccentricities go, and
+be generous or meagre with the supplies. He may use his "authority" as
+a vague power far on into their adult life, if he is a forcible
+character. But it is at its best a shorn splendour he retains. He has
+ceased to be an autocrat and become a constitutional monarch; the
+State, sustained by the growing reasonableness of the world,
+intervenes more and more between him and the wife and children who
+were once powerless in his hands.
+
+The Socialist would end that old legal predominance altogether. The
+woman, he declares, must be as important and responsible a citizen in
+the State as the man. She must cease to be in any sense or degree
+private property. The man must desist from tyrannizing in the nursery
+and do his proper work in the world. So far, therefore, as the family
+is a name for a private property in a group of related human beings
+vesting in one of them, the Head of the Family, Socialism repudiates
+it altogether as unjust and uncivilized; but so far as the family is a
+grouping of children with their parents, with the support and consent
+and approval of the whole community, Socialism advocates it, would
+make it for the first time, so far as a very large moiety of our
+population is concerned, a possible and efficient thing.
+
+Moreover, as the present writer has pointed out elsewhere,[10] this
+putting of the home upon a public basis destroys its autonomy. Just as
+the Socialist and all who have the cause of civilization at heart
+would substitute for the inefficient, wasteful, irresponsible,
+unqualified "private adventure school" that did such infinite injury
+to middle-class education in Great Britain during the Victorian period
+a public school, publicly and richly endowed and responsible and
+controlled, so the Socialist would put an end to the uncivilized
+go-as-you-please of the private adventure family. "Socialism in fact
+is the State family. The old family of the private individual must
+vanish before it just as the old water-works of private enterprise or
+the old gas company."[11] To any one not idiotic nor blind with a
+passionate desire to lie about Socialism, the meaning of this passage
+is perfectly plain. Socialism seeks to broaden the basis of the family
+and to make the once irresponsible parent responsible to the State for
+its welfare. Socialism creates parental responsibility.
+
+   [10] _Socialism and the Family._ (A. C. Fifield. 6_d._)
+
+   [11] _Socialism and the Family._
+
+
+§ 4.
+
+And here we may give a few words to certain questions that are in
+reality outside the scope of Socialists altogether, special questions
+involving the most subtle ethical and psychological decisions. Upon
+them Socialists are as widely divergent as people who are not
+Socialists, and Socialism as a whole presents nothing but an open
+mind. They are questions that would be equally open to discussion in
+relation to an Individualist State or to any sort of State. Certain
+religious organizations have given clear and imperative answers to
+some or all of these questions, and so far as the reader is a member
+of such an organization, he may rest assured that Socialism, as an
+authoritative whole, has nothing to say for or against his
+convictions. This cannot be made too plain by Socialists, nor too
+frequently repeated by them. A very large part of the so-called
+arguments against them arise out of deliberate misrepresentations and
+misconceptions of some alleged Socialist position in these indifferent
+matters.
+
+I refer more particularly to the numerous problems in private morality
+and social organization arising from sexual conduct. May a man love
+one woman only in his life, or more, and may a woman love only one
+man? Should marriage be an irrevocable life union or not? Is sterile
+physical love possible, permissible, moral, honourable or intolerable?
+Upon all these matters individual Socialists, like most other people,
+have their doubts and convictions, but it is no more just to saddle
+all Socialism with their private utterances and actions upon these
+issues than it would be to declare that the Roman Catholic Communion
+is hostile to beauty because worshippers coming and going have knocked
+the noses off the figures on the bronze doors of the Church of San
+Zeno at Verona, or that Christianity involves the cultivation of
+private vermin, because of the condition of Saint Thomas à Beckett's
+hair shirt.[12] To argue in that way is to give up one's birthright as
+a reasonable being.
+
+   [12] "The haircloth encased the whole body down to the
+        knees; the hair drawers, as well as the rest of the dress,
+        being covered on the outside with white linen so as to
+        escape observation; and the whole so fastened together as to
+        admit of being readily taken off for his daily scourgings,
+        of which yesterday's portion was still apparent in the
+        stripes on his body. Such austerity had hitherto been
+        unknown to English saints, and the marvel was increased by
+        the sight--to our notions so revolting--of the innumerable
+        vermin with which the haircloth abounded--boiling over with
+        them, as one account describes it, like water in a simmering
+        cauldron. At the dreadful sight all the enthusiasm of the
+        previous night revived with double ardour. They looked at
+        each other in silent wonder, then exclaimed, 'See, see what
+        a true monk he was, and we knew it not!' and burst into
+        alternate fits of weeping and laughter, between the sorrow
+        of having lost such a head, and the joy of having found such
+        a saint." (_Historical Memorials of Canterbury_, by the Rev.
+        Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D.D.)
+
+Upon certain points modern Socialism is emphatic; women and children
+must not be dealt with as private property, women must be citizens
+equally with men, children must not be casually born, their parents
+must be known and worthy; that is to say there must be deliberation in
+begetting children, marriage under conditions. And there Socialism
+stops.
+
+Socialism has not even worked out what are the reasonable conditions
+of a State marriage contract, and it would be ridiculous to pretend it
+had. This is not a defect in Socialism particularly, but a defect in
+human knowledge. At countless points in the tangle of questions
+involved, the facts are not clearly known. Socialism does not present
+any theory whatever about the duration of marriage, whether, as among
+the Roman Catholics, it should be absolutely for life, or, as some
+hold, for ever; or, as among the various divorce-permitting Protestant
+bodies, until this or that eventuality; or even, as Mr. George
+Meredith suggested some years ago, for a term of ten years. In these
+matters Socialism does not decide, and it is quite reasonable to argue
+that Socialism need not decide. Socialism maintains an attitude of
+neutrality. And the practical effect of an attitude of neutrality is
+to leave these things as they are at present. The State is not
+urgently concerned with these questions. So long as a marriage
+contract provides for the health and sanity of the contracting
+parties, and for their proper behaviour so far as their offspring is
+concerned, and for so long as their offspring need it, the demands of
+the community, as the guardian of the children, are satisfied. That
+certainly would be the minimum marriage, the State marriage, and I,
+for my own part, would exact nothing more _in the legal contract_. But
+a number of more representative Socialists than I are for a legally
+compulsory life marriage. Some--but they are mostly of the older, less
+definite, Social Democratic teaching--are for a looser tie. Let us
+clearly understand that we are here talking of the legal marriage
+only--the State's share. We are not talking of what people will do,
+but of how much they are to be made to do. A vast amount of stupid
+confusion arises from forgetting that. What was needed more than that
+minimum I have specified would be provided, I believe--it always has
+been provided hitherto, even to excess--by custom, religion, social
+influence, public opinion.
+
+For it may not be altogether superfluous to remind the reader how
+little of our present moral code is ruled by law. We have in England,
+it is true, certain laws prescribing the conditions of the marriage
+contract, penalties of a quite ferocious kind to prevent bigamy, and a
+few quite trivial disabilities put upon those illegitimately born. But
+there is no legal compulsion upon any one to marry now, and far less
+legal restriction upon irregular and careless parentage than would be
+put in any scientifically organized Socialism. Do let us get it out of
+our heads that monogamy is enforced by law at the present time. It is
+not. You are only forbidden to enter into normal marriage with more
+than one person. If a man of means chooses to have as many concubines
+as King Solomon and live with them all openly, the law (I am speaking
+of Great Britain) will do nothing to prevent him. If he chooses to go
+through any sort of nuptial ceremony, provided it does not simulate a
+legal marriage, with some or all of them he may. And to any one who
+evades the legal marriage bond, there is a vast range of betrayal and
+baseness as open as anything can be. "Free Love" is open to any one
+who chooses to practise it to-day. The real controlling force in these
+matters is social influence, public opinion, a sort of conscience and
+feeling for the judgment of others that is part of the normal human
+equipment. And the same motives and considerations that keep people's
+lives pure and discreet now, will be all the more freely in operation
+under Socialism, when money will count for less and reputation for
+more than they do now. Modern Socialism is a project to change the
+organization of living and the circle of human ideas; but it is no
+sort of scheme to attempt the impossible, to change human nature and
+to destroy the social sensitiveness of man.
+
+I do not deny the intense human interest of these open questions, the
+imperative need there is to get the truth, whether one considers it to
+be one's own truth or the universal truth, upon them. But my point is
+that they are to be discussed apart from Socialist theory, and that
+anyhow they have nothing to do with Socialist politics. It is no doubt
+interesting to discuss the benefits of vaccination and the justice and
+policy of its public compulsion, to debate whether one should eat meat
+or confine oneself to a vegetable dietary, whether the overhead or the
+slot system is preferable for tramway traction, whether steamboats are
+needed on the Thames in winter, and whether it is wiser to use metal
+or paper for money; but none of these things have anything to do with
+the principles of Socialism. Nor need we decide whether Whistler,
+Raphael or Carpaccio has left us the most satisfying beauty, or which
+was the greater musician, Wagner, Scarlatti or Beethoven, nor
+pronounce on the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy in any prescribed way,
+because we accept Socialism.
+
+Coming to graver matters there are ardent theologians who would create
+an absolute antagonism between Socialism and Christianity, who would
+tie up Socialism with some extraordinary doctrine of Predestination,
+or deny the possibility of a Christian being a Socialist or a
+Socialist being a Christian. But these are matters on different
+planes. In a sense Socialism is a religion; to me it is a religion, in
+the sense, that is, that it gives a work to do that is not
+self-seeking, that it determines one in a thousand indecisions, that
+it supplies that imperative craving of so many human souls, a
+devotion. But I do not see why a believer in any of the accepted
+creeds of Christianity, from the Apostles' Creed upward, should not
+also whole-heartedly give himself to this great work of social
+reconstruction. To believe in a real and personal Heaven is surely not
+to deny earth with its tragedy, its sorrows, its splendid
+possibilities. It is simply to believe a little more concretely than I
+do, that is all. To assert the brotherhood of man under God seems to
+me to lead logically to a repudiation of the severities of Private
+Ownership--that is to Socialism. When the rich young man was told to
+give up his property to follow Christ, when the disciples were told to
+leave father and mother, it seems to me ridiculous to present
+Christianity as opposed to the self-abnegation of the two main
+generalizations of Socialism--that relating to property in things, and
+that relating to property in persons. It is true that the Church of
+Rome has taken the deplorable step of forbidding Socialism (or at
+least _Socialismus_) to its adherents; but there is no need for
+Socialists to commit a reciprocal stupidity. Let us Socialists at any
+rate keep our intellectual partitions up. The Church that now quarrels
+with Socialism once quarrelled with astronomy and geology, and
+astronomers and geologists went on with their own business. Both
+religion and astronomy are still alive and in the same world together.
+And the Vatican observatory, by the bye, is honourably distinguished
+for its excellent stellar photographs. Perhaps, after all, the Church
+does not mean by _Socialismus_ Socialism as it is understood in
+English; perhaps it simply means the dogmatically anti-Christian
+Socialism of the Continental type.
+
+I am not advocating indifference to any interest I have here set aside
+as irrelevant to Socialism. Men have discussed and will, I hope,
+continue to discuss such questions as I have instanced with passionate
+zeal; but Socialism need not be entangled by their decisions. We can
+go on our road to Socialism, we can get to Socialism, to the Civilized
+State, whichever answer is given to any of these questions, great or
+small.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+WOULD MODERN SOCIALISM ABOLISH ALL PROPERTY?
+
+
+§ 1.
+
+Having in the previous chapter cleared up a considerable mass of
+misconception and possibility of misrepresentation about the attitude
+of Socialism to the home, let us now devote a little more attention to
+the current theory of property and say just exactly where Modern
+Socialism stands in that matter.
+
+The plain fact of the case is that the Socialist, whether he wanted to
+or no, would no more be able to abolish personal property altogether
+than he would be able to abolish the human liver. The extension of
+one's personality to things outside oneself is indeed as natural and
+instinctive a thing as eating. But because the liver is necessary and
+inevitable, there is no reason why it should be enlarged to
+uncomfortable proportions, and because eating is an unconquerable
+instinct there is no excuse for repletion. The position of the modern
+Socialist is that the contemporary idea of personal property is
+enormously exaggerated and improperly extended to things that ought
+not to be "private"; not that it is not a socially most useful and
+desirable idea within its legitimate range.
+
+There can be no doubt that many of those older writers who were
+"Socialists before Socialism," Plato, for instance, and Sir Thomas
+More, did very roundly abolish private property altogether. They were
+extreme Communists, and so were many of the earlier Socialists; in
+More's Utopia, doors might not be fastened, they stood open; one
+hadn't even a private room. These earlier writers wished to insist
+upon the need of self-abnegation in the ideal State, and to startle
+and confound, they insisted overmuch. The early Christians, one
+gathers, were almost completely communistic, and that interesting
+experiment in Christian Socialism (of a rather unorthodox type of
+Christianity), the American Oneida community, was successfully
+communistic in every respect for many years. But the modern Socialist
+is not a communist; the modern Socialist, making his scheme of social
+reconstruction for the whole world and for every type of character,
+recognizes the entire impracticability of such dreams, recognizing,
+too, it may be, the sacrifice of human personality and distinction
+such ideals involve.
+
+The word "property," one must remember, is a slightly evasive word.
+Absolute property hardly exists--absolute, that is to say, in the
+sense of unlimited right of disposal; almost all property is
+incomplete and relative. A man, under our present laws, has no
+absolute property even in his own life; he is restrained from suicide
+and punished if he attempt it. He may not go offensively filthy nor
+indecently clad; there are limits to his free use of his body. The
+owner of a house, of land, of a factory is subject to all sorts of
+limitations, building regulations for example, and so is the owner of
+horse or dog. Nor again is any property exempt from taxation. Even now
+property is a limited thing, and it is well to bear that much in mind.
+It can be defined as something one may do "what one likes with,"
+subject only to this or that specific restriction, and at any time, it
+would seem, the State is at least legally entitled to increase the
+quantity and modify the nature of the restriction. The extremest
+private property is limited to a certain sanity and humanity in its
+use.
+
+In that sense every adult now-a-days has private property in his or
+her own person, in clothes, in such personal implements as hand-tools,
+as a bicycle, as a cricket-bat or golf-sticks. In quite the same sense
+would he have it under Socialism so far as these selfsame things go.
+The sense of property in such things is almost instinctive; my little
+boys of five and three have the keenest sense of _mine_ and (almost,
+if not quite so vividly) _thine_ in the matter of toys and garments.
+The disposition of modern Socialism is certainly no more to override
+these natural tendencies than it is to fly in the face of human nature
+in regard to the home. The disposition of modern Socialism is indeed
+far more in the direction of confirming and insuring this natural
+property. And again modern Socialism has no designs upon the money in
+a man's pocket. It is quite true that the earlier and extreme
+Socialist theorists did in their communism find no use for money, but
+I do not think there are any representative Socialists now who do not
+agree that the State must pay and receive in money, that money is
+indispensable to human freedom. The featurelessness of money, its
+universal convertibility, gives human beings a latitude of choice and
+self-expression in its spending that is inconceivable without its use.
+
+All such property Socialism will ungrudgingly sustain, and it will
+equally sustain property in books and objects of ĉsthetic
+satisfaction, in furnishing, in the apartments or dwelling-house a man
+or woman occupies and in their household implements. It will sustain
+far more property than the average working-class man has to-day. Nor
+will it prevent savings or accumulations, if men do not choose to
+expend their earnings--nor need it interfere with lending. How far it
+will permit or countenance usury is another question altogether. There
+will no doubt remain, after all the work-a-day needs of the world have
+been met by a scientific public organization of the general property
+in Nature, a great number of businesses and enterprises and new and
+doubtful experiments outside the range of legitimate State activity.
+In these, interested and prosperous people will embark their surplus
+money as shareholders in a limited liability company, making
+partnership profits or losses in an entirely proper manner. But
+whether there should be debentures and mortgages or preference shares,
+or suchlike manipulatory distinctions, or interest in any shape or
+form, I am inclined to doubt. A money-lender should share risk as well
+as profit--that is surely the moral law in lending that forbids usury;
+he should not be allowed to bleed a failing business with his
+inexorable percentage and so eat up the ordinary shareholder or
+partner any more than the landlord should be allowed to eat up the
+failing tenant for rent. That was once the teaching of Christianity,
+and I do not know enough of the history or spiritual development of
+the Catholic Church to tell when she became what she now appears to
+be--the champion of the rent-exacting landlord and the usurer against
+Socialism. It is the present teaching of Socialism. If usury obtains
+at all under the Socialist State, if inexorable repayments are to be
+made in certain cases, it will, I conceive, be a State monopoly. The
+State will be the sole banker for every hoard and every enterprise,
+just as it will be the universal landlord and the universal fire and
+accident and old age insurance office. In money matters as in public
+service and administration, it will stand for the species, the
+permanent thing behind every individual accident and adventure.
+
+Posthumous property, that is to say the power to bequeath and the
+right to inherit things, will also persist in a mitigated state under
+Socialism. There is no reason whatever why it should not do so. There
+is a strong natural sentiment in favour of the institution of
+heirlooms, for example; one feels a son might well own--though he
+should certainly not sell--the intimate things his father desires to
+leave him. The pride of descent is an honourable one, the love for
+one's blood, and I hope that a thousand years from now some descendant
+will still treasure an obsolete weapon here, a picture there, or a
+piece of faint and faded needlework from our days and the days before
+our own. One may hate inherited privileges and still respect a family
+tree.
+
+Widows and widowers again have clearly a kind of natural property in
+the goods they have shared with the dead; in the home, in the garden
+close, in the musical instruments and books and pleasant home-like
+things. Now, in nine cases out of ten, we do in effect bundle the
+widow out; she remains nominally owner of the former home, but she has
+to let it furnished or sell it, to go and live in a boarding-house or
+an exiguous flat.
+
+Even perhaps a proportion of accumulated money may reasonably go to
+friend or kin. It is a question of public utility; Socialism has done
+with absolute propositions in all such things, and views these
+problems now as questions of detail, matters for fine discriminations.
+We want to be quit of pedantry. All that property which is an
+enlargement of personality, the modern Socialist seeks to preserve; it
+is that exaggerated property that gives power over the food and needs
+of one's fellow-creatures, property and inheritance in land, in
+industrial machinery, in the homes of others and in the usurer's grip
+upon others, that he seeks to destroy. The more doctrinaire Socialists
+will tell you they do not object to property for use and consumption,
+but only to property in "the means of production," but I do not choose
+to resort to over-precise definitions. The general intention is clear
+enough, the particular instance requires particular application. But
+it is just because we modern Socialists want every one to have play
+for choice and individual expression in all these realities of
+property that we object to this monstrous property of a comparatively
+small body of individuals expropriating the world.
+
+
+§ 2.
+
+I am inclined to think--but here I speak beyond the text of
+contemporary Socialist literature--that in certain directions
+Socialism, while destroying property, will introduce a compensatory
+element by creating rights. For example, Socialism will certainly
+destroy all private property in land and in natural material and
+accumulated industrial resources; it will be the universal landlord
+and the universal capitalist, but that does not mean that we shall all
+be the State's tenants-at-will. There can be little doubt that the
+Socialist State will recognize the rights of the improving occupier
+and the beneficial hirer. It is manifestly in accordance both with
+justice and public policy that a man who takes a piece of land and
+creates a value on it--by making a vineyard, let us say--is entitled
+to security of tenure, is to be dispossessed only in exceptional
+circumstances and with ample atonement. If a man who takes an
+agricultural or horticultural holding comes to feel that there he will
+toil and there later he will rest upon his labours, I do not think a
+rational Socialism will war against this passion for the vine and
+fig-tree. If it absolutely refuses the idea of freehold, it will
+certainly not repudiate leasehold. I think the State may prove a far
+more generous and sentimental landlord in many things than any private
+person.
+
+In another correlated direction, too, Socialism is quite reconcilable
+with a finer quality of property than our landowner-ridden Britain
+allows to any but the smallest minority. I mean property in the house
+one occupies.... If I may indulge in a quite unauthorized speculation,
+I am inclined to think there may be two collateral methods of
+home-building in the future. For many people always there will need to
+be houses to which they may come and go for longer and shorter
+tenancies and which they will in no manner own. Now-a-days such people
+are housed in the exploits of the jerry-builder--all England is
+unsightly with their meagre pretentious villas and miserable cottages
+and tenement houses. Such homes in the Socialist future will certainly
+be supplied by the local authority, but they will be fair, decent
+houses by good architects, fitted to be clean and lit, airy and
+convenient, the homes of civilized people, sightly things altogether
+in a generous and orderly world. But in addition there will be the
+prosperous private person with a taste that way, building himself a
+home as a lease-holder under the public landlord. For him, too, there
+will be a considerable measure of property, a measure of property that
+might even extend to a right, if not of bequest, then at any rate of
+indicating a preference among his possible successors in the occupying
+tenancy....
+
+Then there is a whole field of proprietary sensations in relation to
+official duties and responsibility. Men who have done good work in any
+field are not to be lightly torn from it. A medical officer of health
+who has done well in his district, a teacher who has taught a
+generation of a town, a man who has made a public garden, have a moral
+lien upon their work for all their lives. They do not get it under our
+present conditions. I know that it will be quite easy to say all this
+is a question of administration and detail. It is. But it is,
+nevertheless, important to state it clearly here, to make it evident
+that the coming of Socialism involves no destruction of this sort of
+identification of a man with the thing he does; this identification
+that is so natural and desirable--that this living and legitimate
+sense of property will if anything be encouraged and its claims
+strengthened under Socialism. To-day that particularly living sort of
+property-sense is often altogether disregarded. Every day one hears of
+men who have worked up departments in businesses, men who have created
+values for employers, men who have put their lives into an industrial
+machine, being flung aside because their usefulness is over, or out of
+personal pique, or to make way for favourites, for the employer's son
+or cousin or what not, without any sort of appeal or compensation.
+Ownership is autocracy; at the best it is latent injustice in all such
+matters of employment.
+
+Then again, consider the case of the artist and the inventor who are
+too often forced by poverty now to sell their early inventions for the
+barest immediate subsistence. Speculators secure these initial
+efforts--sometimes to find them worthless, sometimes to discover in
+them the sources of enormous wealth. In no matter is it more difficult
+to estimate value than in the case of creative work; few geniuses are
+immediately recognized, and the history of art, literature and
+invention is full of Chattertons and Savages who perished before
+recognition came, and of Dickenses who sold themselves unwisely.
+Consider the immense social benefit if the creator even now possessed
+an inalienable right to share in the appreciation of his work. Under
+Socialism it would for all his life be his--and the world's, and
+controllable by him. He would be free to add, to modify, to repeat.
+
+In all these respects modern Socialism tends to create and confirm
+property and rights, the property of the user, the rights of the
+creator. It is quite other property it tends to destroy; the property,
+the claim, of the creditor, the mortgagee, the landlord, and usurer,
+the forestaller, gambling speculator, monopolizer and absentee.... In
+very truth Socialism would destroy no property at all, but only that
+sham property that, like some wizard-cast illusion, robs us all.
+
+
+§ 3.
+
+And now we are discussing the Socialist attitude towards property, it
+may be well to consider a little group of objections that are often
+made in anti-Socialist tracts. I refer more particularly to a certain
+hard case, the hard case of the Savings of the Virtuous Small Man.
+
+The reader, if he is at all familiar with this branch of controversial
+literature, probably knows how that distressing case is put. One is
+presented with a poor man of inconceivable industry, goodness and
+virtue; he has worked, he has saved; at last, for the security of his
+old age, he holds a few shares in a business, a "bit of land"
+or--perhaps through a building society--house property. Would we--the
+Anti-Socialist chokes with emotion--so alter the world as to rob him
+of _that_? ... The Anti-Socialist gathers himself together with an
+effort and goes on to a still more touching thought ... the widow![13]
+
+   [13] "The ethical case for slavery in the Southern States of
+        America," my friend Mr. Graham Wallas reminds me, "was
+        largely argued on the instance of the widow 'with a few
+        strong slaves.'"
+
+Well, I think there are assurances in the previous section to disabuse
+the reader's mind a little in this matter. This solicitude for the
+Saving Small Man and for the widow and orphan seems to me one of the
+least honest of all the anti-Socialist arguments. The man "who has
+saved a few pounds," the poor widow woman and her children clinging to
+some scrap of freehold are thrust forward to defend the harvest of the
+landlord and the financier. Let us look at the facts of the case and
+see how this present economic system of ours really does treat the
+"stocking" of the poor.
+
+In the first place it does not guarantee to the small investor any
+security for his little hoard at all. He comes into the world of
+investment ill-informed, credulous or only unintelligently
+suspicious--and he is as a class continually and systematically deprived
+of his little accumulations. One great financial operation after another
+in the modern world, as any well-informed person can witness, eats up
+the small investor. Some huge, vastly respectable-looking enterprise is
+floated with a capital of so many scores or hundreds of thousands,
+divided into so many thousands of ordinary shares, so many five or six
+per cent. preference, so much debentures. It begins its career with a
+flourish of prosperity, the ordinary shares for a few years pay seven,
+eight, ten per cent. The Virtuous Small Man provides for his widow and
+his old age by buying this estimable security. Its price clambers to a
+premium, and so it passes slowly and steadily from its first speculative
+holder into the hands of the investing public. Then comes a slow, quiet,
+downward movement, a check at the interim dividend, a rapid contraction.
+Consider such a case as that of the great British Electric Traction
+Company which began with ordinary shares at ten, which clambered above
+twenty-one (21-7/8), which is now (October 1907) fluctuating about two.
+Its six per cent, preference shares have moved between fourteen and five
+and a half. Its ordinary shares represent a total capital of
+£1,333,010, and its preference £1,614,370; so that here in this one
+concern we have a phantom appearance and disappearance of over two
+million pounds' worth of value and a real disappearance of perhaps half
+that amount. It requires only a very slight knowledge of the world to
+convince one that the bulk of that sum was contributed by the modest
+investments of mediocre and small people out of touch with the real
+conditions of the world of finance.
+
+
+These little investors, it is said, are the bitter champions of
+private finance against the municipalities and Socialists. One wonders
+why.
+
+One could find a score of parallels and worse instances representing
+in the end many scores of millions of pounds taken from the investing
+public in the last few years. I will, however, content myself with one
+sober quotation from the New York _Journal of Commerce_, which the
+reader will admit is not likely to be a willing witness for Socialism.
+Commenting on the testimony of the principal witness, Mr. Harriman, of
+the Illinois Central Railroad, before the Inter-State Commerce
+Commission (March 1907), it says:--
+
+    "On his own admission he was one of a 'combine' of four who
+    got possession of the Chicago and Alton Railroad, and
+    immediately issued bonds for $40,000,000, out of the proceeds
+    of which they paid themselves a dividend of 30 per cent, on
+    the stock they held, besides taking the bonds at 65 and
+    subsequently selling them at 90 or more, some of them to life
+    insurance companies with which Mr. Harriman had some kind of
+    relation. There were no earnings or surplus out of which the
+    dividend could be paid, but the books of the company were
+    juggled by transferring some $12,000,000 expended for
+    betterments to capital account as a sort of bookkeeping basis
+    for the performance.
+
+    "Besides this, the Chicago and Alton Railroad was transformed
+    into a 'railway,' and a capitalization of a little under
+    $40,000,000 was swollen to nearly $123,000,000 to cover an
+    actual expenditure in improvements of $22,500,000. In the
+    process there was an injection of about $60,600,000 of 'water'
+    into the stock held by the four, some of which was sold to the
+    Union Pacific, of which Mr. Harriman was president, and more
+    was 'unloaded' upon the Rock Island. Mr. Harriman refused to
+    tell how much he made out of that operation.
+
+    "It shows how some of our enormous fortunes are made, as well
+    as what motives and purposes sometimes prevail in the use of
+    the power entrusted to the directors and officers of
+    corporations. It is a simple and elementary principle that all
+    values are created by the productive activity of capital,
+    labour and ability in industrial operations of one kind and
+    another. No wealth comes out of nothing, but all must be
+    produced and distributed, and what one gets by indirection
+    another loses or fails to get. The personal profit of these
+    speculative operations in which the capital, credit and power
+    of corporations are used by those entrusted with their
+    direction come out of the general body of stockholders whose
+    interests are sacrificed, or out of the public investors who
+    are lured and deceived, or out of shippers who are overtaxed
+    for the service for which railroads are chartered, or out of
+    all these in varying proportions. In other words they are the
+    fruits of robbery."
+
+So that you see it is not only untrue that Socialism would rob a poor
+man of his virtuously acquired "bit of property," but the direct
+contrary is the truth, that the present system, non-Socialism, is now
+constantly _butchering thrift_! Simple people believe the great
+financiers win and lose money to each other. They are not--to put it
+plainly--such fools. They use the public, and the public goes on being
+used, as a perpetual source of freshly accumulated wealth. I know one
+case of a man of fifty who serves in a shop, a most industrious,
+competent man, who has been saving and investing money all his life in
+what he had every reason to believe were safe and sober businesses; he
+has been denying himself pleasures, cramping his life to put by about
+a third of his wages every year since he was two-and-twenty, and
+to-day he has not got his keep for a couple of years, and his only
+security against disablement and old age is his subscription to a
+Friendly Society, a society which I have a very strong suspicion is no
+better off than most other Friendly Societies--and that is by no means
+well off, and by no means confident of the future.
+
+It is possible to argue that the small man ought to take more pains
+about his investments, but, as a matter of fact, investing money
+securely and profitably is a special occupation of extraordinary
+complexity, and the common man with a few hundred pounds has no more
+chance in that market than he would have under water in Sydney Harbour
+amidst a shoal of sharks. It may be said that he is greedy, wants too
+much interest, but that is nonsense. One of the crudest gulfs into
+which small savings have gone in the case of the British public has
+been the trap of Consols, which pay at the present price less than
+three per cent. Servants and working men with Post Office Savings'
+Bank accounts were urged, tempted and assisted to invest in this
+solemn security--even when it stood at 114. Those who did so have now
+(November 1907) lost almost a third of their money.
+
+It is scarcely too much to say that a very large proportion of our
+modern great properties, tramway systems, railways, gas-works, bread
+companies, have been created for their present owners the debenture
+holders and mortgagers, the great capitalists, by the unintentional
+altruism of that voluntary martyr, the Saving Small Man.
+
+Of course the habitual saver can insure with an insurance company for
+his old age and against all sorts of misadventures, and because of the
+Government interference with "private enterprise" in that sort of
+business, be reasonably secure; but under Socialism he would be able
+to do that with absolute security in the State Insurance Office--if
+the universal old age pension did not satisfy him. That, however, is
+beside our present discussion. I am writing now only of the sort of
+property that Socialism would destroy, and to show how little benefit
+or safety it brings to the small owner now. The unthinking rich prate
+"thrift" to the poor, and grow richer by a half-judicious,
+half-unconscious absorption of the resultant savings; that, in brief,
+is the grim humour of our present financial method.
+
+It is not only in relation to investments that this absorption of
+small parcels of savings goes on. In every town the intelligent and
+sympathetic observer may see, vivid before the eyes of all who are not
+blind by use and wont, the slow subsidence of petty accumulations, The
+lodging-house and the small retail shop are, as it were, social
+"destructors"; all over the country they are converting hopeful,
+enterprising, ill-advised people with a few score or hundreds of
+pounds, slowly, inevitably into broken-hearted failures. It is, to my
+mind, the crudest aspect of our economic struggle. In the little High
+Street of Sandgate, over which my house looks, I should say between a
+quarter and a third of the shops are such downward channels from
+decency to despair; they are sanctioned, inevitable citizen breakers.
+Now it is a couple of old servants opening a "fancy" shop or a tobacco
+shop, now it is a young couple plunging into the haberdashery, now it
+is a new butcher or a new fishmonger or a grocer. This perpetual
+procession of bankruptcies has made me lately shun that
+pleasant-looking street, that in my unthinking days I walked through
+cheerfully enough. The doomed victims have a way of coming to the
+doors at first and looking out politely and hopefully. There is a rich
+and lucrative business done by certain wholesale firms in starting the
+small dealer in almost every branch of retail trade; they fit up his
+shop, stock him, take his one or two hundred pounds and give him
+credit for forty or fifty. The rest of his story is an impossible
+struggle to pay rent and get that debt down. Things go on for a time
+quite bravely. I go furtively and examine the goods in the window,
+with a dim hope that this time something really will come off; I learn
+reluctantly from my wife that they are no better than any one else's,
+and rather dearer than those of the one or two solid and persistent
+shops that do the steady business of the place. Perhaps I see the new
+people going to church once or twice very respectably, as I set out
+for a Sunday walk, and if they are a young couple the husband usually
+wears a silk hat. Presently the stock in the window begins to
+deteriorate in quantity and quality, and then I know that credit is
+tightening. The proprietor no longer comes to the door, and his first
+bright confidence is gone. He regards one now through the darkling
+panes with a gloomy animosity. He suspects one all too truly of
+dealing with the "Stores." ... Then suddenly he has gone; the savings
+are gone, and the shop--like a hungry maw--waits for a new victim.
+There is the simple common tragedy of the little shop; the landlord of
+the house has _his_ money all right, the ground landlord has, of
+course, every penny of his money, the kindly wholesalers are well out
+of it, and the young couple or the old people, as the case may be, are
+looking for work or the nearest casual ward--just as though there was
+no such virtue as thrift in the world.
+
+The particular function of the British lodging-house--though the
+science of economics is silent on this point--is to use up the last
+strength of the trusty old servant and the plucky widow. These people
+will invest from two or three hundred to a thousand pounds in order to
+gain a bare subsistence by toiling for boarders and lodgers. It is
+their idea of a safe investment. They can see it all the time. All
+over England this process goes on. The curious inquirer may see every
+phase for himself by simply looking for rooms among the apartment
+houses of such a region as Camden Town, London; he will realize more
+and more surely as he goes about that none of these people gain money,
+none of them ever recover the capital they sink, they are happy if
+they die before their inevitable financial extinction. It is so
+habitual with people to think of classes as stable, of a butcher or a
+baker as a man who keeps a shop of a certain sort at a certain level
+throughout a long and indeterminate life, that it may seem incredible
+to many readers that those two typically thrifty classes, the
+lodging-letting householder and the small retailer, are maintained by
+a steady supply of failing individuals; the fact remains that it is
+so. Their little savings are no good to them, investments and business
+beginnings mock them alike: steadily, relentlessly our competitive
+system eats them up.
+
+It is said that no class of people in the community is more hostile to
+Socialism and Socialistic legislation than these small owners and
+petty investors, these small ratepayers. They do not understand. Rent
+they consider in the nature of things like hunger and thirst; the
+economic process that dooms the weak enterprise to ruin is beyond the
+scope of their intelligence; but the rate-collector who calls and
+calls again for money, for more money, to educate "other people's
+children," to "keep paupers in luxury," to "waste upon roads and light
+and trams," seems the agent of an unendurable wrong. So the poor
+creatures go out pallidly angry to vote down that hated thing
+municipal enterprise, and to make still more scope for that big
+finance that crushes them in the wine-press of its exploitation. It is
+a wretched and tragic antagonism, for which every intelligent
+Socialist must needs have sympathy, which he must meet with
+patience--and lucid explanations. If the public authority took rent
+there would be no need of rates; that is the more obvious proposition.
+But the ampler one is the cruelty, the absurdity and the social injury
+of the constant consumption of unprotected savings which is an
+essential part of our present system.
+
+It is a doctrinaire and old-fashioned Socialism that quarrels with the
+little hoard; the quarrel of modern Socialism is with the landowner
+and the great capitalist who devour it.
+
+
+§ 4.
+
+While we are discussing the true attitude of modern Socialism to
+property, it will be well to explain quite clearly the secular change
+of opinion that is going on in the Socialist ranks in regard to the
+process of expropriation. Even in the case of those sorts of property
+that Socialism repudiates, property in land, natural productions,
+inherited business capital and the like, Socialism has become
+humanized and rational from its first extreme and harsh positions.
+
+The earlier Socialism was fierce and unjust to owners. "Property is
+Robbery," said Proudhon, and right down to the nineties Socialism kept
+too much of the spirit of that proposition. The property owner was to
+be promptly and entirely deprived of his goods, and to think himself
+lucky he was not lynched forthwith as an abominable rascal. The first
+Basis of the Fabian Society, framed so lately as 1884, seems to
+repudiate "compensation," even a partial compensation of property
+owners, though in its practical proposals the Fabian Society has
+always admitted compensatory arrangements. The exact words of the
+Basis are "without compensation though not without such relief to
+expropriated individuals as may seem fit to the community." The
+wording is pretty evidently the result of a compromise between modern
+views and older teachings. If the Fabian Society were rewriting its
+Basis now I doubt if any section would insist even upon that
+eviscerated "without compensation."
+
+Now property is not robbery. It may be a mistake, it may be unjust and
+socially disadvantageous to recognize private property in these great
+common interests, but every one concerned, and the majority of the
+property owners certainly, held and hold in good faith, and do their
+best by the light they have. We live to-day in a vast tradition of
+relationships in which the rightfulness of that kind of private
+property is assumed, and suddenly, instantly, to deny and abolish it
+would be--I write this as a convinced and thorough Socialist--quite
+the most dreadful catastrophe human society could experience. For what
+sort of provisional government should we have in that confusion?
+
+Expropriation must be a gradual process, a process of economic and
+political readjustment, accompanied at every step by an explanatory
+educational advance. There is no reason why a cultivated property
+owner should not welcome and hasten its coming. Modern Socialism is
+prepared to compensate him, not perhaps "fully" but reasonably, for
+his renunciations and to avail itself of his help, to relieve him of
+his administrative duties, his excess of responsibility for estate and
+business. It does not grudge him a compensating annuity nor
+terminating rights of user. It has no intention of obliterating him
+nor the things he cares for. It wants not only to socialize his
+possessions, but to socialize his achievement in culture and all that
+leisure has taught him of the possibilities of life. It wants all men
+to become as fine as he. Its enemy is not the rich man but the
+aggressive rich man, the usurer, the sweater, the giant plunderer, who
+are developing the latent evil of riches. It repudiates altogether the
+conception of a bitter class-war between those who Have and those who
+Have Not.
+
+But this new tolerant spirit in method involves no weakening of the
+ultimate conception. Modern Socialism sets itself absolutely against
+the creation of new private property out of land, or rights or
+concessions not yet assigned. All new great monopolistic enterprises
+in transit, building and cultivation, for example, must from the first
+be under public ownership. And the chief work of social statesmanship,
+the secular process of government, must be the steady, orderly
+resumption by the community, without violence and without delay, of
+the land, of the apparatus of transit, of communication, of food
+distribution and of all the great common services of mankind, and the
+care and training of a new generation in their collective use and in
+more civilized conceptions of living.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE MIDDLE-CLASS MAN, THE BUSINESS MAN, AND SOCIALISM
+
+
+§ 1.
+
+Let me insert here a few remarks upon a question that arises naturally
+out of the preceding discussion, and that is the future of that
+miscellaneous section of the community known as the middle class. It
+is one that I happen to know with a peculiar intimacy.
+
+For a century or more the grinding out of the middle class has been
+going on. I began to find it interesting--altogether too interesting
+indeed, when I was still only a little boy. My father was one of that
+multitude of small shopkeepers which has been caught between the
+"Stores" and such-like big distributors above and the rising rates
+below, and from the knickerbocker stage onward I was acutely aware of
+the question hanging over us. "This isn't going on," was the
+proposition. "This shop in which our capital is invested will never
+return it. Nobody seems to understand what is happening, and there is
+nobody to advise or help us. What are we going to do?"
+
+Except that people are beginning to understand a little now what it
+all means, exactly the same question hangs over many hundreds of
+thousands of households to-day, not only over the hundreds of small
+shopkeepers, but of small professional men, of people living upon
+small parcels of investments, of clerks who find themselves growing
+old and their value depreciated by the competition of a new,
+better-educated generation, of private school-masters, of boarding-and
+lodging-house keepers and the like. They are all vaguely aware of
+something more than personal failure, of a drift and process which is
+against all their kind, of the need of "doing something" for
+themselves and their children, something different from just sticking
+to the shop or the "situation"--and they don't know what to do! What
+ought they to do?
+
+Well, first, before one answers that, let us ask what it is exactly
+that is grinding the middle class in this way. Is it a process we can
+stop? Can we direct the millstones? If we can, ought we to do so? And
+if we cannot, or decide that it isn't worth while, then what can we do
+to mitigate this cruelty of slowly impoverishing and taxing out of
+existence a class that was once the backbone of the community? It is
+not mere humanity dictates this much, it is a question that affects
+the State as a whole. It must be extremely bad for the spirit of the
+nation and for our national future that its middle mass should be in a
+state of increasing financial worry and stress, irritated, depressed,
+and broken in courage. One effect is manifest in our British politics
+now. Each fresh election turns upon expenditure more evidently than
+the last, and the promise to reduce taxation or lower the rates
+overrides more and more certainly any other consideration. What are
+Empire or Education to men who feel themselves drifting helplessly
+into debt? What chance has any constructive scheme with an electorate
+of men who are being slowly submerged in an economic bog?
+
+The process that has brought the middle class into these troubles is a
+complex one, but the essential thing about it seems to be this, that
+there is a _change of scale_ going on in most human affairs, a
+substitution of big organizations for detached individual effort
+almost everywhere. A hundred and fifty years ago or so the only very
+rich people in the community were a handful of great landowners and a
+few bankers; the rest of the world's business was being done by small
+prosperous independent men. The labourers were often very poor and
+wretched, ill clad, bootless, badly housed and short of food, but
+there was nevertheless a great deal of middle-class comfort and
+prosperity. The country was covered with flourishing farmers, every
+country town was a little world in itself, with busy tradespeople and
+professional men; manufacturing was still done mainly by small people
+employing a few hands, master and apprentice working together; in
+every town you found a private school or so, an independent doctor and
+the like, doing well in a mediocre, comfortable fashion. All the
+carrying trade was in the hands of small independent carriers; the
+shipping was held by hundreds of small shipowners. And London itself
+was only a larger country town. It was, in effect, a middle-class
+world ruled over by aristocrats; the millstones had as yet scarcely
+stirred.
+
+Then machinery came into the lives of men, and steam power, and there
+began that change of scale which is going on still to-day, making an
+ever-widening separation of master and man and an ever-enlarging
+organization of industry and social method. Its most striking
+manifestation was at first the substitution of organized manufacture
+in factories for the half-domestic hand-industrialism of the earlier
+period; the growth of the fortunes of some of the merchants and
+manufacturers to dimensions comparable with the wealth of the great
+landowners, and the sinking of the rest of their class towards the
+status of wage-earners. The development of joint-stock enterprise
+arose concurrently with this to create a new sort of partnership
+capable of handling far greater concerns than any single wealthy
+person, as wealth was measured by the old scale, could do. There
+followed a great development of transit, culminating for a time in the
+coming of the railways and steamships, which abolished the isolation
+of the old towns and brought men at the remotest quarters of the earth
+into business competition. Big towns of the modern type, with
+half-a-million inhabitants or more, grew up rapidly all over Europe
+and America. For the European big towns are as modern as New York, and
+the East End and south side of London scarcely older than Chicago.
+Shopkeeping, like manufactures, began to concentrate in large
+establishments, and big wholesale distribution to replace individual
+buying and selling. As the need for public education under the
+changing conditions of life grew more and more urgent, the individual
+enterprise of this school-master and that gave place to the organized
+effort of such giant societies as (in Britain) the old National School
+Society and the British School Society, and at last to State
+education. And one after another the old prosperous middle-class
+callings fell under the stress of the new development.
+
+The process still goes on, and there can be little doubt of the
+ultimate issue. The old small manufacturers are either ruined or
+driven into sweating and the slums; the old coaching innkeeper and
+common carrier have been impoverished or altogether superseded by the
+railways and big carrier companies; the once flourishing shopkeeper
+lives to-day on the mere remnants of the trade that great distributing
+stores or the branches of great companies have left him. Tea
+companies, provision-dealing companies, tobacconist companies, make
+the position of the old-established private shop unstable and the
+chances of the new beginner hopeless. Railways and tramways take the
+custom more and more effectually past the door of the small draper and
+outfitter to the well-stocked establishments at the centre of things;
+telephone and telegraph assist that shopping at the centre more and
+more. The small "middle-class" school-master finds himself beaten by
+revived endowed schools and by new public endowments; the small
+doctor, the local dentist, find Harley Street always nearer to them
+and practitioners in motor-cars from the great centres playing havoc
+with their practices. And while the small men are more and more
+distressed, the great organizations of trade, of production, of public
+science, continue to grow and coalesce, until at last they grow into
+national or even world trusts, or into publicly-owned monopolies. In
+America slaughtering and selling meat has grown into a trust, steel
+and iron are trustified, mineral oil is all gathered into a few hands.
+All through the trades and professions and sciences and all over the
+world the big eats up the small, the new enlarged scale replaces the
+old.
+
+And this is equally true, though it is only now beginning to be
+recognized, of the securities of that other section of the middle
+class, the section which lives upon invested money. There, too, big
+eats little. There, too, the small man is more and more manifestly at
+the mercy of the large organization. It was a pleasant illusion of the
+Victorian time that one put one's hundred pounds or thousand pounds
+"into something," beside the rich man's tens of thousands, and drew
+one's secure and satisfying dividends. The intelligent reader of Mr.
+Lawson's _Frenzied Finance_ or of the bankruptcy proceedings of Mr.
+Hooley realizes this idyll is scarcely true to nature. Through the
+seas and shallows of investment flow great tides and depressions, on
+which the big fortunes ride to harbour while the little accumulations,
+capsized and swamped, quiver down to the bottom. It becomes more and
+more true that the small man saves his money for the rich man's
+pocket. Only by drastic State intervention is a certain measure of
+safety secured for insurance, and in America recently we have had the
+spectacle of the people's insurance-money used as a till by the rich
+financiers.
+
+And when the middle-class man turns in his desperation from the
+advance of the big competitor who is consuming him, as a big codfish
+eats its little brother, to the State, he meets a tax-paper; he sees
+as the State's most immediate aspect the rate-collector and inexorable
+demands. The burthen of taxation certainly falls upon him, and it
+falls upon him because he is collectively the weakest class that
+possesses any property to be taxed. Below him are classes either too
+poor to tax or too politically effective to stand taxation. Above him
+is the class which owns a large part of the property in the world; but
+it also owns the newspapers and periodicals that are necessary for an
+adequate discussion of social justice, and it finds it cheaper to pay
+a voluntary tax to the hoardings at election time than to take over
+the small man's burdens. He rolls about between these two parties,
+antagonized first to one and then the other, and altogether helpless
+and ineffectual. So the millstones grind, and so it would seem they
+will continue to grind until there is nothing between them; until
+organized property in the hands of the few on the one hand and the
+proletariat on the other grind face to face. So, at least, Karl Marx
+taught in _Das Kapital_.
+
+But when one says the middle class will disappear, one means that it
+will disappear as a class. Its individuals and its children will
+survive, and the whole process is not nearly so fatalistic as the
+Marxists would have us believe. The new great organizations that are
+replacing the little private enterprises of the world before machinery
+are not all private property. There are alternatives in the matter of
+handling a great business. To the exact nature of these alternatives
+the middle-class mind needs to direct itself if it is to exert any
+control whatever over its future. Take the case of the butcher. It is
+manifestly written on the scroll of destiny that the little private
+slaughter-house, the little independent butcher's shop, buying and
+selling locally, must disappear. The meat will all be slaughtered at
+some great, conveniently organized centre, and distributed thence to
+shops that will necessarily be mere agencies for distributing meat.
+Now, this great slaughtering and distributing business may either be
+owned by one or a group of owners working it for profit--in which case
+it will be necessary for the State to employ an unremunerative army of
+inspectors to see that the business is kept decently clean and
+honest--or it may be run by the public authority. In the former case
+the present-day butcher or his son will be a slaughterman or
+shopkeeper employed by the private owners; in the latter case by the
+public authority. This is equally true of a milk-seller, of a small
+manufacturer, of a builder, of a hundred and one other trades. They
+are bound to be incorporated in a larger organization; they are bound
+to become salaried men where formerly they were independent men, and
+it is no good struggling against that. It is doubtful, indeed, whether
+from the standpoint of welfare it would be worth the middle-class
+man's while to struggle against that. But in the case of very many
+great public services--meat, milk, bread, transit, housing and land
+administration, education and research, and the public health--it is
+still an open question whether the big organization is to be publicly
+owned, publicly controlled, and constantly refreshed by public
+scrutiny and comment, or whether it is to be privately owned, and
+conducted solely for the profit of a small group of very rich owners.
+The alternatives are Plutocracy or Socialism, and between these the
+middle-class man remains weakly undecided and ineffectual, lending no
+weight to and getting small consideration therefore from either side.
+He remains so because he has not grasped the real nature of his
+problem, because he clings in the face of overwhelming fate to the
+belief that in some way the wheels of change may be arrested and his
+present method of living preserved.
+
+I think, if he could shake himself free from that impossible
+conservatism he would realize that his interests lie with the
+interests of the intelligent working-class man--that is to say, in the
+direction of Socialism rather than in the direction of capitalistic
+competition; that the best use he can make of such educational and
+social advantages as still remain for him is to become the willing
+leader instead of the panic-fierce antagonist of the Socialist
+movement. His place, I hold, is to forward the development of that
+State and municipal machinery the Socialist foreshadows, and to secure
+for himself and his sons and daughters an adequate position and voice
+in the administration. Instead of struggling to diminish that burthen
+of public expenditure which educates and houses, conveys and protects
+him and his children, he ought rather to increase it joyfully, while
+at the same time working manfully to transfer its pressure to the
+broad shoulders of those very rich people who have hitherto evaded
+their legitimate share of it. The other course is to continue his
+present policy of obstinate resistance to the extension of public
+property and public services. In which case these things will
+necessarily become that basis of monopolistic property on which the
+coming plutocracy will establish itself. The middle-class man will be
+taxed and competed out of independence just the same, and he will
+become a salaried officer just the same, but with a different sort of
+master and under different social conditions according as one or other
+of these alternatives prevails.
+
+Which is the better master--the democratic State or a "combine" of
+millionaires? Which will give the best social atmosphere for one's
+children to breathe--a Plutocracy or a Socialism? That is the real
+question to which the middle-class man should address himself.
+
+No doubt to many minds a Plutocracy presents many attractions. In the
+works of Thomas Love Peacock, and still more clearly in the works of
+Mr. W. H. Mallock, you will find an agreeable rendering of that
+conception. The bulk of the people will be organized out of sight in a
+state of industrious and productive congestion, and a wealthy,
+leisurely, and refined minority will live in spacious homes, with
+excellent museums, libraries, and all the equipments of culture; will
+go to town, concentrate in Paris, London, and Rome, and travel about
+the world. It is to these large, luxurious, powerful lives that the
+idealist naturally turns. Their motor-cars, their aeroplanes, their
+steam yachts will awaken terror and respect in every corner of the
+globe. Their handsome doings will fill the papers. They will patronize
+the arts and literature, while at the same time mellowing them by
+eliminating that too urgent insistence upon contemporary fact which
+makes so much of what is done to-day harsh and displeasing. The
+middle-class tradition will be continued by a class of stewards,
+tenants, managers, and foremen, secretaries and the like, respected
+and respectful. The writer, the artist, will lead lives of comfortable
+dependence, a link between class and class, the lowest of the rich
+man's guests, the highest of his servants. As for the masses, they
+will be fed with a sort of careless vigour and considerable economy
+from the Chicago stockyards, and by agricultural produce trusts, big
+breweries, fresh-water companies, and the like; they will be organized
+industrially and carefully controlled. Their spiritual needs will be
+provided for by churches endowed by the wealthy, their physical
+distresses alleviated by the hope of getting charitable aid, their
+lives made bright and adventurous by the crumbs of sport that fall
+from the rich man's table. They will crowd to see the motor-car races,
+the aeroplane competitions. It will be a world rich in contrasts and
+not without its gleam of pure adventure. Every bright young fellow of
+capacity will have the hope of catching the eye of some powerful
+personage, of being advanced to some high position of trust, of even
+ending his days as a partner, a subordinate assistant plutocrat. Or he
+may win a quite agreeable position by literary or artistic merit. A
+pretty girl, a clever woman of the middle class would have before her
+even more brilliant and romantic possibilities.
+
+There can be no denying the promises of colour and eventfulness a
+Plutocracy holds out, and though they do not attract me, I can quite
+understand their appeal to the more ductile and appreciative mind of
+Mr. Mallock. But there are countervailing considerations. There is, it
+is said, a tendency in Plutocracies either to become unprogressive,
+unenterprising and stagnantly autocratic, or to develop states of
+stress and discontent, and so drift towards Cĉsarism. The latter was
+the fate of the Roman Republic, and may perhaps be the destiny of the
+budding young Plutocracy of America. But the developing British
+Plutocracy, like the Carthaginian, will be largely Semitic in blood,
+and like the Carthaginian may resist these insurgent tendencies.
+
+So much for the Plutocratic possibility. If the middle-class man on
+any account does not like that outlook, he can turn in the other
+direction; and then he will find fine promises indeed, but much more
+uncertainty than towards Plutocracy. Plutocracies the world has seen
+before, but a democratic civilization organized upon the lines laid
+down by modern Socialists would be a new beginning in the world's
+history. It is not a thing that will come about by itself; it will
+have to be the outcome of a sustained moral and intellectual effort in
+the community. If there is not that effort, if things go on as they
+are going now, the coming of a Plutocracy is inevitable. That effort,
+I am convinced, cannot be successfully made by the lower-class man
+alone; from him, unaided and unguided, there is nothing to be expected
+but wild convulsive attempts at social upheaval, which, whether they
+succeed (as the French Revolution did) or fail (as did the
+insurrectionary outbreaks of the Republic in Rome), lead ultimately to
+a Napoleon or a Cĉsar. But our contemporary civilization is
+unprecedented in the fact that the whole population now reads, and
+that intelligence and free discussion saturate the whole mass. Only
+time can show what possibilities of understanding, leadership, and
+political action lie in our new generation of the better-educated
+middle class. Will it presently begin to define a line for itself?
+Will it remain disorganized and passive, or will it become intelligent
+and decisive between these millstones of the organized property and
+the organizing State, between Plutocracy and Socialism, whose
+opposition is the supreme social and political fact in the world at
+the present time?
+
+
+§ 2.
+
+Perhaps, also, it may be helpful here to insert a view of the
+contemporary possibilities of Socialism from a rather different angle,
+a view that follows on to the matter of the previous section, but
+appeals to a different section of the Middle Class. It is a quotation
+from the _Magazine of Commerce_ for September 1907, and leads to an
+explanation by the present writer.
+
+    "The recent return of Mr. Grayson, a Socialist, as member of
+    Parliament for the Colne Valley, has brought prominently
+    before the public mind the question of Socialism. Mr. Pete
+    Curran's success at Jarrow a month or so ago, and the large
+    number of Labour members returned at the last General
+    Election, caused more or less desultory comment on Socialism
+    as a possible feature of practical politics in the remote
+    future; but Mr. Grayson can certainly claim that his
+    achievement at Colne Valley brought the question of Socialism
+    in to the very forefront at one bound. It is difficult to
+    ignore Socialism, to dismiss it as a mere fad and fancy of a
+    few hare-brained enthusiasts, after Mr. Grayson's success. The
+    verdict of Colne Valley may be the verdict of many another
+    constituency where the so-called working-class electors are
+    numerically predominant. When we consider that the manual
+    worker represents the majority of the electorate of the
+    country, this contingency does not appear to be so very
+    remote, provided that the leaders of Socialism can organize
+    their resources and canvass the working-men on a wide and
+    carefully-planned scale. In this respect the Colne Valley
+    result may very well give them the lead and stimulus they have
+    been waiting for. It must be borne in mind, too, that the
+    forward section of the Labour Party is avowedly Socialist in
+    its sympathies, and a definite start may therefore be said to
+    have been made towards capturing the machinery of Government
+    in the Cause of Socialism.
+
+    "How will Socialism affect the business world? This is a
+    question which many thoughtful business men must have already
+    put to themselves. For reply we must go to the leaders of
+    Socialism, and discover what their policy actually is. The
+    common impression that Socialism spells barefaced confiscation
+    is too superficial to be seriously adduced as an argument
+    against Socialism. The leaders of the Cause include some of
+    the cleverest men of the day--men who have a more rational
+    basis for their policy than that of simply robbing Peter to
+    pay Paul. The suggestion that Socialism means a compulsory
+    'share out' may be rightly dismissed as an idle scare. The
+    most bitter opponent of Socialism must at least admit that
+    there is a stronger argument to be met than that implied by
+    the parrot-cry of 'spoliation.' Socialism has, at any rate, so
+    far advanced as to be allowed the ordinary courtesies of
+    debate. We may oppose it tooth and nail, but we must confront
+    argument with argument and not with abuse.
+
+    "Despite much excellent literature which is read widely by
+    cultured people, very little is known by the general public of
+    the principles which modern British Socialists have adopted as
+    their guiding rules. Few business men care to study the
+    subject. We have therefore addressed a letter to the chief
+    leaders of the Cause, with the purpose of ascertaining the
+    effect which Socialism would have on our business habits. Our
+    object was to discover how far Socialism might disturb or
+    improve business; whether it would altogether subvert present
+    methods, or whether it could be applied without injury to
+    these methods. To put the matter very plainly, we wished to
+    learn whether we should carry on our business much as we do
+    now, giving free play to individual effort and individual
+    fortune-building.
+
+    "The reply of Mr. Wells is as follows:--
+
+        "'MY DEAR SIR,
+
+        "'I wish very much I could reply at adequate length to
+        your very admirably framed question. The constant stream
+        of abuse and of almost imbecile misrepresentations of
+        Socialism in the Press has no doubt served to distort
+        the idea of our movement in the minds of a large
+        proportion of busy men, and filled them with an
+        unfounded dread of social insecurity. If it were
+        possible to allay that by an epigrammatic programme,
+        "Socialism in a Nutshell," so to speak, I would do my
+        best. But the economic and trading system of a modern
+        State is not only a vast and complex tangle of
+        organizations, but at present an uncharted tangle, and
+        necessarily the methods of transition from the limited
+        individualism of our present condition to the
+        scientifically-organized State, which is the Socialist
+        ideal, must be gradual, tentative and various.
+
+        "'To build up a body of social and economic science, to
+        develop a class of trained administrators, to rearrange
+        local government areas, to educate the whole community
+        in the "sense of the State" are necessary parts of the
+        Socialist scheme. You must try and induce your readers
+        to recognize that when Socialism finds such supporters
+        as Sir Oliver Lodge and Professor Karl Pearson, as
+        William Morris (who revolutionized the furniture trade),
+        as Granville Barker (who is revolutionizing the London
+        stage), as Mr. George Cadbury and Mr. Fels (whose names
+        are not unknown in the world of advertisement), as Mr.
+        Allan (of the Allan Line), as Mr. George Bernard Shaw
+        and Mrs. Shaw, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb and Sir Sidney
+        Olivier (the present Governor of Jamaica)--all of them
+        fairly comfortable and independent people, practically
+        acquainted with the business of investment and affairs
+        generally and quite alive to the present relations of
+        property to the civilized life--the suggestion that it
+        is a raid of the ignorant "Have-nots" on the possessions
+        of the wise and good "Haves" cannot be a very
+        intelligent one nor addressed to very intelligent
+        people. Essentially Socialism is the
+        scientifically-organized State as distinguished from the
+        haphazard, wasteful, blundering, child-sweating State of
+        the eighteenth century. It is the systematization of
+        present tendency. Necessarily its methods of transition
+        will be progressively scientific and humane.
+
+        "'So far as your specific questions go, I do not think
+        there could possibly be anything in the nature of
+        "compulsory profit-sharing" if a Socialist Government
+        came into office. There is at present a compulsory
+        profit-sharing in the form of an income-tax, but that
+        tax does not appeal to the Socialist as a particularly
+        scientific one. The advent of a strongly-Socialist
+        Government would mean no immediate revolutionary changes
+        at all. There would be, no doubt, a vigorous
+        acceleration of the educational movement to increase the
+        economic value and productivity of the average citizen
+        of the next generation, and legislation upon the lines
+        laid down by the principle of the "minimum wage" to
+        check the waste of our national resources by destructive
+        employment. Also a systematic shifting of the burthen of
+        taxation from enterprise to rent would begin. But
+        nothing convulsive would occur.'"
+
+        "'The means of transit and communication of the country
+        (both internal and external), and especially the
+        railways and canals (which are now rapidly falling into
+        inefficiency through the exhaustion of their capital
+        upon excessive dividends in the past), would probably be
+        transferred from competitive private to organized public
+        control--a transfer that would certainly be enormously
+        stimulating to business generally. There would be no
+        "robbery," the former shareholders would become stock or
+        annuity holders. Nor would there be any financial
+        convulsion due to the raising of the "enormous sum"
+        necessary to effect this purchase. The country would
+        simply create stock, while at the same time taking over
+        assets to balance the new liability.
+
+        "'A Socialist Government would certainly also acquire
+        the coal mines and the coal trade, and relieve industry
+        from the inconveniences due to the manipulation of the
+        supply of this vitally important factor, and it would
+        accelerate the obvious tendency of the present time to
+        bring the milk trade, the drink trade, slaughtering,
+        local traffic, lighting and power supply into public
+        hands. But none of this is the destruction of property,
+        but only its organization and standardization. Such a
+        State organization of public services is, I submit,
+        enough to keep a Socialist Government busy for some few
+        years, and makes not only for social progress, but
+        social stability.
+
+        "'And does an honest and capable business man stand to
+        lose or gain by the coming of such a Socialist
+        Government? I submit that, on the whole, he stands to
+        gain. Let me put down the essential points in his
+        outlook as I conceive them.
+
+        "'Under a Socialist Government such as is quite possible
+        in England at the present time:--
+
+        "'He will be restricted from methods of production and
+        sale that are socially mischievous.
+
+        "'He will pay higher wages.
+
+        "'He will pay a larger proportion of his rate-rent
+        outgoings to the State and Municipality, and less to the
+        landlord. Ultimately he will pay it all to the State or
+        Municipality, and as a voter help to determine how it
+        shall be spent, and the landlord will become a
+        Government stock-holder. Practically he will get his
+        rent returned to him in public services.
+
+        "'He will speedily begin to get better-educated,
+        better-fed and better-trained workers, so that he will
+        get money value for the higher wages he pays.
+
+        "'He will get a regular, safe, cheap supply of power and
+        material. He will get cheaper and more efficient
+        internal and external transit.
+
+        "'He will be under an organized scientific State, which
+        will naturally pursue a vigorous scientific collective
+        policy in support of the national trade.
+
+        "'He will be less of an adventurer and more of a
+        citizen....'"
+
+So I wrote to the _Magazine of Commerce_, and that for the energetic
+man who is conducting a real and socially useful business is the
+outlook. Socialism is not the coming of chaos and repudiation, it is
+the coming of order and justice. For confusion and accident and waste,
+the Socialist seeks to substitute design and collective economy. That
+too is the individual aim of every good business man who is not a mere
+advertising cheat or financial adventurer. To the sound-minded,
+clear-headed man of affairs, Socialism appeals just as it appeals to
+the scientific man, to the engineer, to the artist, because it is the
+same reality, the large scale aspect of the same constructive motive,
+that stirs in himself.
+
+
+§ 3.
+
+Let me finally quote the chairman of one of the most enterprising and
+enlightened business organizations of our time to show that in
+claiming the better type of business man for modern Socialism I am
+making no vain boast. Sir John Brunner may not call himself a
+Socialist, but this is very probably due to the fact that he gets his
+ideas of Socialism from the misquotations of its interested
+adversaries. This that follows from the _Manchester Guardian_ is pure
+Socialism.
+
+    Speaking at the annual meeting of Brunner, Mond and Co., Ltd.,
+    in Liverpool (1907), the chairman, Sir John Brunner, M.P.,
+    made a remarkable pronouncement on the subject of the
+    collective ownership of canals. He said:--
+
+    "I have been one of a Royal Commission visiting the North of
+    France, Belgium, and Northern Germany, and our duty has been
+    to examine what those three countries have done in the
+    improvement of their canals and their waterways. We have been
+    very deeply impressed by what we have seen, and I can tell you
+    to-day, speaking as a man of business to men of business, that
+    the fact that in these three countries there is communal
+    effort--that is to say, that the State in money and in credit
+    for the benefit of the national trade--has brought to those
+    three countries enormous, almost incalculable, benefits; and I
+    think that any man, any intelligent man, who studies this
+    matter as I have studied it for a great many years, will come
+    the conclusion, as I have come very clearly and decidedly,
+    that the old policy which we have adopted for generations of
+    leaving all public works to private enterprise--the old
+    policy, so called, of _laissez faire_--is played out
+    completely, and I am of opinion, very firmly, that, if we mean
+    to hold our own in matters of trade, we must learn to follow
+    the example that has been set us not only by France, Belgium,
+    and Germany, but by the United States and by every one of the
+    Colonies of our Empire. Everywhere do you find that trade is
+    helped by the effort of the community, by the force of the
+    State, and I shall be very heartily pleased if those who hear
+    me will think the matter over and decide for themselves
+    whether or not we as business people--preeminently the
+    business people of the world--are to maintain the old policy
+    of leaving everything to private enterprise, or whether we are
+    to act together for the good of all in this important matter
+    of the national trade."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+SOME COMMON OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM
+
+
+§ 1.
+
+In the preceding eight chapters I have sought to give as plain and
+full an account of the great generalizations of Socialism as I can,
+and to make it clear exactly what these generalizations convey, and
+how far they go in this direction and that. Before we go on to a brief
+historical and anticipatory account of the actual Socialist movement,
+it may be worth while to take up and consider compactly the chief
+objections that are urged against the general propositions of
+Socialism in popular discussion.
+
+Now a very large proportion of these arise out of the commonest vice
+of the human mind, its disposition to see everything as "yes" or "no,"
+as "black" or "white," its impatience, its incapacity for a fine
+discrimination of intermediate shades.[14] The queer old scholastic
+logic still prevails remarkably in our modern world; you find Mr.
+Mallock, for example, going about arranging his syllogisms, extracting
+his opponent's "self-contradictions," and disposing of Socialism with
+stupendous self-satisfaction in all the magazines. He disposes of
+Socialism quite in the spirit of the young mediĉval scholar returning
+home to prove beyond dispute that "my cat has ten tails" and, given a
+yard's start, that a tortoise can always keep ahead of a running man.
+The essential fallacy is always to declare that either a thing is A or
+it is not A; either a thing is green or it is not green; either a
+thing is heavy or it is not heavy. Unthinking people, and some who
+ought to know better, fall into that trap. They dismiss from their
+minds the fact that there is a tinge of green in nearly every object
+in the world, and that there is no such thing as pure green, unless it
+be just one line or so in the long series of the spectrum; they forget
+that the lightest thing has weight and that the heaviest thing can be
+lifted. The rest of the process is simple and has no relation whatever
+to the realities of life. They agree to some hard and fast impossible
+definition of Socialism, permit the exponent to extract absurdities
+therefrom as a conjurer gets rabbits from a hat, and retire with a
+conviction that on the whole it is well to have had this disturbing
+matter settled once for all.
+
+   [14] See "Scepticism of the Instrument," the Appendix to _A
+        Modern Utopia_. (Chapman & Hall.)
+
+For example, the Anti-Socialist declares that Socialism "abolishes
+property." He makes believe there is a hard absolute thing called
+"property" which must either be or not be, which is now, and which
+will not be under Socialism. To any person with a philosophical
+education this is a ridiculous mental process, but it seems perfectly
+rational to an untrained mind--and that is the usual case with the
+Anti-Socialist. Having achieved this initial absurdity, he then asks
+in a tone of bitter protest whether a man may not sleep in his own
+bed, and is he to do nothing if he finds a coal-heaver already in
+possession when he retires? This is the method of Mr. G. R. Sims, that
+delightful writer, who from altitudes of exhaustive misunderstanding
+tells the working-man that under Socialism he will have--I forget his
+exact formula, but it is a sort of refrain--no money of his own, no
+home of his own, no wife of his own, no hair of his own! It is
+effective nonsense in its way--but nonsense nevertheless. In my
+preceding chapters I hope I have made it clear that "property" even
+to-day is a very qualified and uncertain thing, a natural vague
+instinct capable of perversion and morbid exaggeration and needing
+control, and that Socialism seeks simply to give it a sharper, juster
+and rationally limited form in relation to the common-weal.
+
+Or again, the opponent has it that Socialism "abolishes the
+family"--and with it, of course, "every sacred and tender
+association," etc., etc. To that also I have given a chapter.
+
+I do not think much Anti-Socialism is dishonest in these matters. The
+tricks of deliberate falsification, forgery and falsehood that
+discredit a few Conservative candidates and speakers in the north of
+England and smirch the reputations of one or two London papers, are
+due to a quite exceptional streak of baseness in what is on the whole
+a straightforward opposition to Socialism. Anti-Socialism, as its name
+implies, is no alternative doctrine; it is a mental resistance, not a
+mental force. For the most part one is dealing with sheer intellectual
+incapacity; with people, muddle-headed perhaps, but quite
+well-meaning, who are really unable to grasp the quantitative element
+in things. They think with a simple flat certitude that if, for
+example, a doctor says quinine is good for a case it means that he
+wishes to put every ounce of quinine that can be procured into his
+patient, to focus all the quinine in the world upon him; or that if a
+woman says she likes dancing, that thereby she declares her intention
+to dance until she drops. They are dear lumpish souls who like things
+"straightforward" as they say--all or nothing. They think
+qualifications or any quantitative treatment "quibbling," to be loudly
+scorned, bawled down and set aside.
+
+In controversy the temptations for a hot and generous temperament,
+eager for victory, to misstate and overstate the antagonist's position
+are enormous, and the sensible Socialist must allow for them unless he
+is to find discussion intolerable. The reader of the preceding
+chapters should know exactly how Socialism stands to the family
+relations, the things it urges, the things it regards with
+impartiality or patient toleration, the things it leaves alone. The
+preceding chapters merely summarize a literature that has been
+accessible for years. Yet it is extraordinary how few antagonists of
+Socialism seem able even to approach these questions in a rational
+manner. One admirably typical critic of a pamphlet in which I
+propounded exactly the same opinions as are here set out in the third
+chapter, found great comfort in the expression "brood mares." He took
+hold of my phrase, "State family," and ran wild with it. He declared
+it to be my intention that women were no longer to be wives but "brood
+mares" for the State. Nothing would convince him that this was a
+glaring untruth. His mind was essentially equestrian; "human stud
+farm" was another of his expressions.[15] Ridicule and argument failed
+to touch him; I believe he would have gone to the stake to justify his
+faith that Socialists want to put woman in the Government _haras_. His
+thick-headedness had, indeed, a touch of the heroic.
+
+   [15] What makes the expression particularly inappropriate in
+        my case is the fact that in my _Mankind in the Making_ there
+        is a clearly-reasoned chapter (Ch. II.) which has never been
+        answered, in which I discuss and, I think, conclusively
+        dispose of Mr. Francis Galton's ideas of Eugenics and
+        deliberate stirpiculture.
+
+Then a certain Father Phelan of St. Louis, no doubt in a state of
+mental exaltation as honest as it was indiscriminating, told the world
+through the columns of an American magazine that I wanted to tear the
+babe from the mother's breast and thrust it into an "Institution." He
+said worse things than that--but I set them aside as pulpit eloquence.
+Some readers, no doubt, knew better and laughed, but many were quite
+sincerely shocked, and resolved after that to give Socialism a very
+wide berth indeed. _Honi soit qui mal y pense_; the revolting ideas
+that disgusted them were not mine, they came from some hot dark
+reservoir of evil thoughts that years of chastity and discipline seem
+to have left intact in Father Phelan's soul.
+
+The error in all these cases is the error of overstatement, of getting
+into a condition of confused intellectual excitement, and because a
+critic declares your window curtains too blue, saying, therefore, and
+usually with passion, that he wants the whole universe, sky and sea
+included, painted bright orange. The inquirer into the question of
+Socialism will find that an almost incurable disease of these
+controversies. Again and again he will meet with it. If after that
+critic's little proposition about your window curtains he chances to
+say that on the whole he thinks an orange sky would be unpleasant, the
+common practice is to accuse him of not "sticking to his guns."
+
+My friends, Mr. G. K. Chesterton and Mr. Max Beerbohm, those brilliant
+ornaments of our age, when they chance to write about Socialism,
+confess this universal failing--albeit in a very different quality and
+measure. They are not, it is true, distressed by that unwashed
+coal-heaver who haunts the now private bed of the common
+Anti-Socialist, nor have they any horrid vision of the fathers of the
+community being approved by a select committee of the County
+Council--no doubt wrapped in horse-cloths and led out by their
+grooms--such as troubles the spurred and quivering soul of that
+equestrian--I forget his name--the "brood-mare" gentleman who
+denounced me in the _Pall Mall Gazette_; but their souls fly out in a
+passion of protest against the hints of discipline and order the
+advancement of Socialism reveals. Mr. G. K. Chesterton mocks valiantly
+and passionately, I know, against an oppressive and obstinately
+recurrent anticipation of himself in Socialist hands, hair clipped,
+meals of a strictly hygienic description at regular hours, a fine for
+laughing--not that he would want to laugh--and austere exercises in
+several of the more metallic virtues daily. Mr. Max Beerbohm's
+conception is rather in the nature of a nightmare, a hopeless, horrid,
+frozen flight from the pursuit of Mr. Sidney Webb and myself, both of
+us short, inelegant men indeed, but for all that terribly resolute,
+indefatigable, incessant, to capture him, to drag him off to a
+mechanical Utopia and there to take his thumb-mark and his name,
+number him distinctly in indelible ink, dress him in an unbecoming
+uniform, and let him loose (under inspection) in a world of neat round
+lakes of blue lime water and vistas of white sanitary tiling....
+
+The method of reasoning in all these cases is the same; it is to
+assume that whatever the Socialist postulates as desirable is wanted
+without limit or qualification, to imagine whatever proposal is chosen
+for the controversy is to be carried out by uncontrolled monomaniacs,
+and so to make a picture of the Socialist dream. This picture is
+presented to the simple-minded person in doubt with "This is
+Socialism. Surely! SURELY! you don't want this!"
+
+And occasionally the poor, simple-minded person really is overcome by
+these imagined terrors. He turns back to our dingy realities again, to
+the good old grimy world he knows, thanking God beyond measure that he
+will never live to see the hateful day when one baby out of every four
+ceases to die in our manufacturing towns, when lives of sordid care
+are banished altogether from the earth, and when the "sense of humour"
+and the cult of Mark Tapley which flourishes so among these things
+will be in danger of perishing from disuse....
+
+But the reader sees now what Socialism is in its essentials, the
+tempered magnificence of the constructive scheme to which it asks him
+to devote his life. It is a laborious, immense project to make the
+world a world of social justice, of opportunity and full living, to
+abolish waste, to abolish the lavish unpremeditated cruelty of our
+present social order. Do not let the wit or perversity of the
+adversary or, what is often a far worse influence, the zeal and
+overstatement of the headlong advocate, do not let the manifest
+personal deficiencies of this spokesman or that, distract you from the
+living heart in Socialism, its broad generosity of conception, its
+immense claim in kinship and direction upon your Good Will.
+
+
+§ 2.
+
+For the convenience of those readers who are in the position of
+inquirers, I had designed at this point a section which was to contain
+a list of the chief objections to Socialism--other than mere
+misrepresentations--which are current now-a-days. I had meant at first
+to answer each one fully and gravely, to clear them all up
+exhaustively and finally before proceeding. But I find now upon
+jotting them down, that they are for the most part already anticipated
+by the preceding chapters, and so I will note them here, very
+compactly indeed, and make but the briefest comment upon each.
+
+There is first the assertion, which effectually bars a great number of
+people from further inquiry into Socialist teaching, that _Socialism
+is contrary to Christianity_. I would urge that this is the absolute
+inversion of the truth. Christianity involves, I am convinced, a
+practical Socialism if it is honestly carried out. This is not only my
+conviction, but the reader, if he is a Nonconformist, can find it set
+out at length by Dr. Clifford in a Fabian tract, _Socialism and the
+Teaching of Christ_; and, if a Churchman, by the Rev. Stewart Headlam
+in another, _Christian Socialism_. He will find a longer and fuller
+discussion of this question in the Rev. R. J. Campbell's _Christianity
+and Social Order_. In the list of members of such a Socialist Society
+as the Fabian Society will be found the names of clergy of the
+principal Christian denominations, excepting only the Roman Catholic
+Church. It is said, indeed, that a good Catholic of the Roman
+Communion cannot also be any sort of Socialist. Even this very general
+persuasion may not be correct. I believe the papal prohibition was
+originally aimed entirely at a specific form of Socialism, the
+Socialism of Marx, Engels and Bebel, which is, I must admit,
+unfortunately strongly anti-Christian in tone, as is the Socialism of
+the British Social Democratic Federation to this day. It is true that
+many leaders of the Socialist party have also been Secularists, and
+that they have mingled their theological prejudices with their
+political work. This is the case not only in Germany and America, but
+in Great Britain, where Mr. Robert Blatchford of the _Clarion_, for
+example, has also carried on a campaign against doctrinal
+Christianity. But this association of Secularism and Socialism is only
+the inevitable throwing together of two sets of ideas because they
+have this in common, that they run counter to generally received
+opinions; there is no other connection. Many prominent Secularists,
+like Charles Bradlaugh and Mr. J. M. Robertson, are as emphatically
+anti-Socialist as the Pope. Secularists and Socialists get thrown
+together and classed together just as early Christians and criminals
+and rebels against the Emperor were no doubt thrown together in the
+Roman gaols. They had this much in common, that they were in conflict
+with what most people considered to be right. It is a confusion that
+needs constant explaining away. It is to me a most lamentable
+association of two entirely separate thought processes, one
+constructive socially and the other destructive intellectually, and I
+have already, in Chapter VI., § 4, done my best to disavow it.
+
+_Socialism is pure Materialism, it seeks only physical
+well-being_,--just as much as nursing lepers for pity and the love of
+God is pure materialism that seeks only physical well-being.
+
+_Socialism advocates Free Love._ This objection I have also disposed
+of in Chapter VI., §§ 2 and 4.
+
+_Socialism renders love impossible, and reduces humanity to the
+condition of a stud farm._ This, too, has been already dealt with; see
+Chapter III., §§ 2 and 5, and Chapter VI., §§ 2, 3, and 4. These two
+objections generally occur together in the same anti-Socialist speech
+or tract.
+
+_Socialism would destroy parental responsibility._ This absurd
+perversion is altogether disposed of in Chapter VI., § 3. It is a
+direct inversion of current Socialist teaching.
+
+
+§ 3.
+
+_Socialism would open the way to vast public corruption._ This is
+flatly opposed to the experience of America, where local
+administration has been as little Socialistic and as corrupt as
+anywhere in the world. Obviously in order that a public official
+should be bribed, there must be some wealthy person outside the system
+to bribe him and with an interest in bribing him. When you have a weak
+administration with feeble powers and resources and strong
+unscrupulous private corporations seeking to override the law and
+public welfare, the possibilities of bribing are at the highest point.
+In a community given over to the pursuit of gain, powerful private
+enterprises will resort to corruption to get and protract franchises,
+to evade penalties, to postpone expropriation, and they will do it
+systematically and successfully. And even where there is partial
+public enterprise and a competition among contractors, there will
+certainly be, at least, attempts at corruption to get contracts. But
+where the whole process is in public hands, where can the bribery
+creep in; who is going to find the money for the bribes, and why?
+
+It is urged that in another direction there is likely to be a
+corruption of public life due to the organized voting of the
+_employés_ in this branch of the public service or that, seeking some
+advantage for their own service. This is Lord Avebury's bogey.[16]
+Frankly, such voting by services is highly probable. The tramway men
+or the milk-service men may think they are getting too long hours or
+too low pay in comparison with the teachers or men on the ocean
+liners, and the thing may affect elections. That is only human nature,
+and the point to bear in mind is that this sort of thing goes on
+to-day, and goes on with a vigour out of all proportion to the mild
+possibilities of a Socialist _régime_. The landowners of Great
+Britain, for example, are organized in the most formidable manner
+against the general interests of the community, and constantly
+subordinate the interests of the common-weal to their conception of
+justice to their class; the big railways are equally potent, and so
+are the legal profession and the brewers. But to-day these political
+interventions of great organized services athwart the path of
+statesmanship are sustained by enormous financial resources. The State
+_employés_ under Socialism will be in the position of employing one
+another and paying one another; the teacher, for example, will be
+educating the sons of the tramway men up to the requirements of the
+public paymaster, and travelling in the trams to and from his work;
+there will be close mutual observation and criticism, therefore, and a
+strong community of spirit, and that will put very definite limits
+indeed upon the possibly evil influence of class and service interests
+in politics.
+
+   [16] _On Municipal and National Trading_, by Lord Avebury.
+        (Macmillan & Co., 1907.)
+
+_Socialism would destroy Incentive and Efficiency._ This is dealt with
+in Chapter V. on the Spirit of Gain and the Spirit of Service.
+
+_Socialism is economically unsound._ The student of Socialism who
+studies--and every student of Socialism should study very
+carefully--the literature directed against Socialism, will encounter a
+number of rather confused and frequently very confusing arguments
+running upon "business" or "economic" lines. In nearly all of these
+the root error is a misconception of the nature and aim of Socialist
+claims. Sometimes this misconception is stated and manifest, often it
+is subtly implied, and then it presents the greatest difficulties to
+the inexpert dialectician. I find, for instance, Mr. W. H. Lever, in
+an article on Socialism and Business in the _Magazine of Commerce_ for
+October 1907, assuming that there will be no increase in the total
+wealth of the community under Socialism, whereas, as my fourth chapter
+shows, Socialist proposals in the matter of property aim directly at
+the cessation of the waste occasioned by competition through the
+duplication and multiplication of material and organizations (see for
+example the quotation from Elihu, p. 69), and at the removal of the
+obstructive claims of private ownership (see p. 65) from the path of
+production. If Socialism does not increase the total wealth of the
+community, Socialism is impossible.
+
+Having made this assumption, however, Mr. Lever next assumes that all
+contemporary business is productive of honest, needed commodities, and
+that its public utility and its profitable conduct measure one
+another. But this ignores the manifest fact that success in business
+now-a-days is far more often won by the mere salesmanship of mediocre
+or inferior or short-weight goods than it is by producing exceptional
+value, and the Kentish railways, for example, are a standing contrast
+of the conflict between public service and private profit-seeking. But
+having committed himself to these two entirely unsound assumptions, it
+is easy for Mr. Lever to show that since Socialism will give no more
+wealth, and since what he calls Labour, Capital and the Employer (_i.e._
+Labour, Plant and Management) are necessary to production and must
+be maintained out of the total product, there will be little more,
+practically, for the Labourer under Socialist conditions than under
+the existing _régime_. Going on further to assume that the Owner is
+always enterprising and intelligent and public-spirited, and the State
+stupid (which is a quite unjustifiable assumption), he shows their
+share may even be less. But the whole case for the Socialist
+proposals, the student must bear in mind, rests upon the recognition
+that private management of our collective concerns means chaotic and
+socially wasteful management--however efficient it may be in
+individual cases for competitive purposes--and that the systematic
+abolition of the parasitic Owner from our economic process implies the
+replacement of confusion by order and an immense increase in the
+efficiency of that economic process. Socialism is economy. If the
+student of Socialism does not bear this in mind, if once he allows the
+assumption to creep in that Socialism is not so much a proposal to
+change, concentrate and organize the economic process, as one to
+distribute the existing wealth of the country in some new manner, he
+will find there is a bad case for Socialism.
+
+It is an amusing and I think a fair comment on the arguments of Mr.
+Lever that a year or so ago he was actually concerned--no doubt in the
+interests of the public as well as his own--in organizing the
+production and distribution of soap so as to economize the waste and
+avoid the public disservice due to the extreme competition of the soap
+dealers. He wanted to do in the soap industry just exactly what
+Socialism wants to do in the case of all public services, that is to
+say he wanted to give it the economic advantages of a Great Combine.
+In some directions the saving to the soap interest would have been
+immense; all the vast expenditure upon newspaper advertisements, for
+example, all the waste upon competing travellers would have been
+saved. Whether the public would have benefited greatly or not is
+beside the present question; Mr. Lever and other great soap
+proprietors would certainly have benefited enormously. They would have
+benefited by working as a collective interest instead of as
+independent private owners. But in this little experiment in what was
+really a sort of voluntary Socialism for particular ends, Mr. Lever
+reckoned without another great system of private adventurers, the
+halfpenny newspaper proprietors, who had hitherto been drawing large
+sums from soap advertisement, and who had in fact been so far
+parasitic on the public soap supply. One group of these papers at once
+began a campaign against the "Soap Trust," a campaign almost as noisy
+and untruthful as the anti-Socialist campaign. They accused Mr. Lever
+of nearly every sort of cheating that can be done by a soap seller,
+and anticipated every sort of oppression a private monopolist can
+practise. In the end they paid unprecedented damages for libel, but
+they stopped Mr. Lever's intelligent and desirable endeavours to
+replace the waste and disorder of our existing soap supply by a simple
+and more efficient organization. Mr. Lever cannot have forgotten these
+facts; they were surely in the back of his mind when he wrote his
+"Socialism and Business" paper, and it is a curious instance of the
+unconscious limitations one may encounter in a mind of exceptional
+ability that he could not bring them forward and apply them to the
+problem in hand.
+
+_Socialism is unbusinesslike._ See Chapter VIII., §§ 2 and 3.
+
+
+§ 4.
+
+_Socialism would destroy freedom._ This is a more considerable
+difficulty. To begin with it may be necessary to remind the reader
+that absolute freedom is an impossibility. As I have written in my
+_Modern Utopia_:--
+
+    "The idea of individual liberty is one that has grown in
+    importance and grows with every development of modern thought.
+    To the classical Utopists freedom was relatively trivial.
+    Clearly they considered virtue and happiness as entirely
+    separable from liberty, and as being altogether more important
+    things. But the modern view, with its deepening insistence
+    upon individuality and upon the significance of its
+    uniqueness, steadily intensifies the value of freedom, until
+    at last we begin to see liberty as the very substance of life,
+    that indeed it is life, and that only the dead things, the
+    choiceless things live in absolute obedience to law. To have
+    free play for one's individuality is, in the modern view, the
+    subjective triumph of existence, as survival in creative work
+    and offspring is its objective triumph. But for all men, since
+    man is a social creature, the play of will must fall short of
+    absolute freedom. Perfect human liberty is possible only to a
+    despot who is absolutely and universally obeyed. Then to will
+    would be to command and achieve, and within the limits of
+    natural law we could at any moment do exactly as it pleased us
+    to do. All other liberty is a compromise between our own
+    freedom of will and the wills of those with whom we come in
+    contact. In an organized state each one of us has a more or
+    less elaborate code of what he may do to others and to
+    himself, and what others may do to him. He limits others by
+    his rights and is limited by the rights of others, and by
+    considerations affecting the welfare of the community as a
+    whole.
+
+    "Individual liberty in a community is not, as mathematicians
+    would say, always of the same sign. To ignore this is the
+    essential fallacy of the cult called Individualism. But in
+    truth, a general prohibition in a State may increase the sum
+    of liberty, and a general permission may diminish it. It does
+    not follow, as these people would have us believe, that a man
+    is more free where there is least law, and more restricted
+    where there is most law. A socialism or a communism is not
+    necessarily a slavery, and there is no freedom under
+    anarchy....
+
+    "It follows, therefore, in a modern Utopia, which finds the
+    final hope of the world in the evolving interplay of unique
+    individualities, that the State will have effectually chipped
+    away just all those spendthrift liberties that waste liberty,
+    and not one liberty more, and so have attained the maximum
+    general freedom."...
+
+That is the gist of the Socialist's answer to this accusation. He asks
+what freedom is there to-day for the vast majority of mankind? They
+are free to do nothing but work for a bare subsistence all their
+lives, they may not go freely about the earth even, but are prosecuted
+for trespassing upon the health-giving breast of our universal mother.
+Consider the clerks and girls who hurry to their work of a morning
+across Brooklyn Bridge in New York, or Hungerford Bridge in London; go
+and see them, study their faces. They are free, with a freedom
+Socialism would destroy. Consider the poor painted girls who pursue
+bread with nameless indignities through our streets at night. They are
+free by the current standard. And the poor half-starved wretches
+struggling with the impossible stint of oakum in a casual ward, they
+too are free! The nimble footman is free, the crushed porter between
+the trucks is free, the woman in the mill, the child in the mine. Ask
+them! They will tell you how free they are. They have happened to
+choose these ways of living--that is all. No doubt the piquancy of the
+life attracts them in many such cases.
+
+Let us be frank; a form of Socialism might conceivably exist without
+much freedom, with hardly more freedom than that of a British worker
+to-day. A State Socialism tyrannized over by officials who might be
+almost as bad at times as uncontrolled small employers, is so far
+possible that in Germany it is practically half-existent now. A
+bureaucratic Socialism might conceivably be a state of affairs
+scarcely less detestable than our own. I will not deny there is a
+clear necessity of certain addenda to the wider formulĉ of Socialism
+if we are to be safeguarded effectually from the official. We need
+free speech, free discussion, free publication, as essentials for a
+wholesome Socialist State. How they may be maintained I shall discuss
+in a later chapter. But these admissions do not justify the present
+system. Socialism, though it failed to give us freedom, would not
+destroy anything that we have in this way. We want freedom now, and we
+have it not. We speak of freedom of speech, but to-day, in innumerable
+positions, Socialist _employés_ who declared their opinions openly
+would be dismissed. Then again in religious questions there is an
+immense amount of intolerance and suppression of social and religious
+discussion to-day, especially in our English villages. As for freedom
+of action, most of us, from fourteen to the grave, are chased from
+even the leisure to require freedom by the necessity of earning a
+living....
+
+Socialism, as I have stated it thus far, and as it is commonly stated,
+would give economic liberty to men and women alike, it would save them
+from the cruel urgency of need, and so far it would enormously enlarge
+freedom, but it does not guarantee them political or intellectual
+liberty. That I frankly admit, and accept as one of the
+incompletenesses of contemporary Socialism. I conceive, therefore, as
+I shall explain at length in a later chapter, that it is necessary to
+supplement such Socialism as is currently received by certain new
+propositions. But to admit that Socialism does not guarantee freedom,
+is not to admit that Socialism will destroy it. It is possible, given
+certain conditions, for men to be nearly absolutely free in speech, in
+movement, in conduct; enormously free, that is, as compared with our
+present conditions, in a Socialist State established upon the two
+great propositions I have formulated in Chapters III. and IV. So that
+the statement that Socialism will destroy freedom is a baseless one of
+no value as a general argument against the Socialist idea.
+
+
+§ 5.
+
+_Socialism would reduce life to one monotonous dead level!_ This in a
+world in which the majority of people live in cheap cottages, villa
+residences and tenement houses, read halfpenny newspapers and wear
+ready-made clothes!
+
+_Socialism would destroy Art, Invention and Literature._ I do not know
+why this objection is made, unless it be that the objectors suppose
+that artists will not create, inventors will not think, and no one
+write or sing except to please a wealthy patron. Without his opulent
+smile, where would they be? Well, do not let us be ungrateful; the
+arts owe much to patronage. Go to Venice, go to Florence, and you will
+find a glorious harvest of pictures and architecture, sown and reaped
+by a mercantile plutocracy. But then in Rome, in Athens, you will find
+an equal accumulation made under very different conditions. Reach a
+certain phase of civilization, a certain leisure and wealth, and art
+will out, however the wealth may be distributed. In certain sumptuous
+directions art flourishes now, and would certainly flourish less in a
+Socialist State; in the gear of ostentatious luxury, in private
+furniture of all sorts, in palace building, in the exquisite
+confections of costly feminine adornment, in the luxurious binding of
+books, in the cooking of larks, in the distinguished portraiture of
+undistinguished persons, in the various refinements of prostitution,
+in the subtle accommodations of mystic theology, in jewellery. It is
+quite conceivable that in such departments Socialism will discourage
+and limit ĉsthetic and intellectual effort. But no mercantile
+plutocracy could ever have produced a Gothic cathedral, a folk-lore, a
+gracious natural type of cottage or beautiful clothing for the common
+people, and no mercantile plutocracy will ever tolerate a literature
+of power. If the coming of Socialism destroys arts, it will also
+create arts; the architecture of private palaces will give place to an
+architecture of beautiful common homes, cottages and colleges, and to
+a splendid development of public buildings, the Sargents of Socialism
+will paint famous people instead of millionaires' wives, poetry and
+popular romantic literature will revive. For my own part I have no
+doubt where the balance of advantage lies.
+
+It seems reasonable to look to the literary and artistic people
+themselves for a little guidance in this matter. Well, we had in the
+nineteenth century an absolute revolt of artists against
+Individualism. The proportion of open and declared Socialists among
+the great writers, artists, playwrights, critics, of the Victorian
+period was out of all proportion to the number of Socialists in the
+general population. Wilde in his _Soul of Man under Socialism_, Ruskin
+in many volumes of imperishable prose, Morris in all his later life,
+have witnessed to the unending protest of the artistic spirit against
+the rule of gain. Some of these writers are not, perhaps, to be
+regarded as orthodox Socialists in the modern sense, but their disgust
+with and contempt for Individualist competition is entirely in the
+vein of our teaching.
+
+Even this Individualistic country of ours, after the shameful shock of
+the Great Exhibition of 1851, decided that it could no longer leave
+art to private enterprise, and organized that systematic government
+Art Teaching that has, in spite of its many defects, revolutionized
+the ĉsthetic quality of this country. And so far as research and
+invention go, one may very reasonably appeal to such an authority on
+the other side, as the late Mr. Beit, of Wernher Beit & Co. The
+outcome of his experience as an individualist financier was to
+convince him that the only way to raise the standard of technical
+science in England, and therewith of economic enterprise, was by the
+endowment of public teaching, and the huge "London Charlottenburg"
+rises--out of his conviction. Even Messrs. Rockefeller and Carnegie
+admit the failure of Individualism in this matter by pouring money
+into public universities and public libraries. All these heads of the
+commercial process confess by such acts just exactly what this
+objection of the inexperienced denies, that is to say the power of the
+State to develop art, invention and knowledge; the necessity that this
+duty should be done if not by, then at any rate through, the State.
+
+Socialism may very seriously change the direction of intellectual and
+ĉsthetic endeavour; that one admits. But there is no reason whatever
+for supposing it will not, and there are countless reasons for
+supposing that it will, enormously increase the opportunities and
+encouragements for ĉsthetic and intellectual endeavour.
+
+
+§ 6.
+
+_Socialism would arrest the survival of the Fittest._ Here is an
+objection from quite a new quarter. It is the stock objection of the
+science student. Hitherto we have considered religious and ĉsthetic
+difficulties, but this is the difficulty of the mind that realizes
+clearly the nature of the biological process, the secular change in
+every species under the influence of its environment, and is most
+concerned with that. Species, it is said, change--and the student of
+the elements of science is too apt to conclude that this change is
+always ascent in the scale of being--by the killing off of the
+individuals out of harmony with the circumstances under which the
+species is living. This is not quite true. The truer statement is that
+species change because, allowing for chance and individual exceptions,
+only those individuals survive to reproduce themselves who are fairly
+well adjusted to the conditions of life; so that in each generation
+there is only a small proportion of births out of harmony with these
+conditions. This sounds very like the previous proposition, but it
+differs in this that the accent is shifted from the "killing" to the
+suppression of births, that is the really important fact. In any case,
+then, the believer in evolution holds that the qualities encouraged by
+the environment increase in the species and the qualities discouraged
+diminish. The qualities that have survival value are not always what
+we human beings consider admirable--that is a consideration many
+science students fail to grasp. The remarkable habits of all the
+degenerating crustacea, for example, the appetite of the vulture, the
+unpleasing personality of the common hyĉna, all that less charming
+side of Mother Nature that her scandalized children may read of in
+Cobbold's _Human Parasites_, are the result of survival under the
+pressure of environment, just as much as the human eye or the wing of
+an eagle. Let the objector therefore ask himself what sort of
+"fittest" are surviving now.
+
+The plain answer is that under our present conditions the
+_Breeding-Getter_ wins, the man who can hold and keep and reproduce
+his kind. People with the instinct of owning stronger than any other
+instinct float out upon the top of our seething mass, and flourish
+there. Aggressive, intensely acquisitive, reproductive people--the
+ignoble sort of Jew is the very type of it--are the people who will
+prevail in a social system based on private property and mercantile
+competition. No creative power, no nobility, no courage can battle
+against them. And below--in the slums and factories, what will be
+going on? The survival of a race of stunted toilers, with great
+resisting power to infection, contagion and fatigue, omnivorous as
+rats....
+
+Don't imagine that the high infantile death rate of our manufacturing
+centres spares the fine big children. It does not. Here is the
+effectual answer to that. It is taken from the Report of the Education
+Committee of the London County Council for the year 1905, and it is
+part of an account of an inquiry conducted by the headmaster of one
+school in a poor neighbourhood.
+
+    "The object of the inquiry was to discover the causes of
+    variation in the physical condition of children within the
+    limits of this single school. Each of the 405 boys was
+    carefully weighed and measured without boots, a note was made
+    of the condition of the teeth, and a general estimate of the
+    personal cleanliness and sufficiency of clothing as a basis
+    for determining the home conditions of neglect or otherwise
+    from external evidence. The teacher of each class added an
+    estimate of mental capacity." (Here follow tabular
+    arrangements of results, and height and weight charts.)
+
+    "... It may be noted in the heights and weights for each age
+    that the curve is not a continuous line of growth, but that at
+    some ages it springs nearer to, and at others sinks further
+    from, the normal. The greatest effect upon the life capital of
+    the population is produced by the infantile mortality, which
+    in some years actually kills off during the first year one in
+    five of all children born; the question naturally arises what
+    is its effect upon the survivors--do the weakly ones get
+    killed off and only the strong muddle through, or does the
+    adverse environment which slaughters one in five have a
+    maiming effect upon those left?... When the infantile
+    mortality for the parish in which the school is situate was
+    charted above the physique curve, an absolute correspondence
+    is to be observed. The children born in a year when infantile
+    mortality is low show an increased physique, rising nearest to
+    the normal in the extraordinary good year 1892; and those born
+    in the years of high mortality show a decreased physique....
+    It appears certain, therefore, that in years of high infantile
+    mortality the conditions, to which one in five or six of the
+    children born are sacrificed, have a maiming effect upon the
+    other four or five."
+
+_The fine big children are born in periods of low infantile
+mortality_, that is the essential point.
+
+So that anyhow, since the fittest under present conditions is
+manifestly the ratlike, the survival of the fittest that is going on
+now is one that it is highly desirable to stop as soon as possible,
+and so far Socialism _will_ arrest the survival of the fittest. But
+that does not mean that it will stop the development of the species
+altogether. It will merely shift the incident of selection and
+rejection to a new set of qualities. I think I have already hinted
+(Chapter VI., § 2) that a State that undertakes to sustain all the
+children born into it will do its best to secure good births. That
+implies a distinct bar to the marriage and reproduction of the halt
+and the blind, the bearers of transmissible diseases and the like. And
+women being economically independent will have a far freer choice in
+wedlock than they have now. Now they must in practice marry men who
+can more or less keep them, they must subordinate every other
+consideration to that. Under Socialism they will certainly look less
+to a man's means and acquisitive gifts, and more to the finer
+qualities of his personality. They will prefer prominent men, able
+men, fine, vigorous and attractive persons. There will, indeed, be far
+more freedom of choice on either side than under the sordid conditions
+of the present time. I submit that such a free choice is far more
+likely to produce a secular increase in the beauty, the intellectual
+and physical activity and the capacity of the race, than our present
+haphazard mercenariness.
+
+The science student will be interested to read in this connection _The
+Ethic of Free Thought_ (A. & C. Black, 1888), _Socialism in Theory and
+Practice_ (1884), and _The Chances of Death, and other Studies in
+Evolution_ (Arnold, 1897), by Karl Pearson. Professor Pearson is not
+in all respects to be taken as an authoritative exponent of Modern
+Socialism, and he is associated with no Socialist organization, but
+his treatment of the biological aspect is that of a specialist and a
+master.
+
+
+§ 7.
+
+_Socialism is against Human Nature._ This objection I have left until
+last because, firstly, it is absolutely true, and secondly, it leads
+naturally to the newer ideas that have already peeped out once or
+twice in my earlier chapters and which will now ride up to a
+predominance in what follows, and particularly the idea that an
+educational process and a moral discipline are not only a necessary
+part, but the most fundamental part of any complete Socialist scheme.
+Socialism is against Human Nature. That is true, and it is equally
+true of everything else; capitalism is against human nature,
+competition is against human nature, cruelty, kindness, religion and
+doubt, monogamy, polygamy, celibacy, decency, indecency, piety and sin
+are all against human nature. The present system in particular is
+against human nature, or what is the policeman for, the soldier, the
+debt-collector, the judge, the hangman? What means the glass along my
+neighbour's wall? Human nature is against human nature. For human
+nature is in a perpetual conflict; it is the Ishmael of the universe,
+against everything, and with everything against it; and within, no
+more and no less than a perpetual battleground of passion, desire,
+cowardice, indolence and good will. So that our initial proposition as
+it stands at the head of this section, is, as an argument against
+Socialism, just worth nothing at all.
+
+None the less valuable is it as a reminder of the essential
+constructive task of which the two primary generalizations of
+Socialism we have so far been developing are but the outward and
+visible forms. There is no untutored naturalness in Socialism, no
+uneducated blind force on our side. Socialism is made of struggling
+Good Will, made out of a conflict of wills. I have tried to let it
+become apparent that while I do firmly believe not only in the
+splendour and nobility of the Socialist dream but in its ultimate
+practicality, I do also recognize quite clearly that with people just
+as they are now, with their prejudices, their ignorances, their
+misapprehensions, their unchecked vanities and greeds and jealousies,
+their crude and misguided instincts, their irrational traditions, no
+Socialist State can exist, no better State can exist, than the one we
+have now with all its squalor and cruelty. Every change in human
+institutions must happen concurrently with a change of ideas. Upon
+this plastic, uncertain, teachable thing Human Nature, within us and
+without, we have, if we really contemplate Socialism as our
+achievement, to impose guiding ideas and guiding habits, we have to
+co-ordinate all the Good Will that is active or latent in our world in
+one constructive plan. To-day the spirit of humanity is lost to
+itself, divided, dispersed and hidden in little narrow distorted
+circles of thought. These divided, misshapen circles of thought are
+not "human nature," but human nature has fallen into these forms and
+has to be released. Our fundamental business is to develop the human
+spirit. It is in the enlargement and enrichment of the average circle
+of thought that the essential work and method of Socialism is to be
+found.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+SOCIALISM A DEVELOPING DOCTRINE
+
+
+§ 1.
+
+So far we have been discussing the broad elementary propositions of
+Modern Socialism. As we have dealt with them, they amount to little
+more than a sketch of the foundation for a great scheme of social
+reconstruction. It would be a poor service to Socialism to pretend
+that this scheme is complete. From this point onward one enters upon a
+series of less unanimous utterances and more questionable suggestions.
+Concerning much of what follows, Socialism has as yet not elaborated
+its teaching. It has to do so, it is doing so, but huge labours lie
+before its servants. Before it can achieve any full measure of
+realization, it has to overcome problems at present but half solved,
+problems at present scarcely touched, the dark unsettling suggestion
+of problems that still await formulation. The Anti-Socialist is freely
+welcome to all these admissions. No doubt they will afford grounds for
+some cheap transitory triumph. They affect our great generalizations
+not at all; they detract nothing from the fact that Socialism presents
+the most inspiring, creative scheme that ever came into the chaos of
+human affairs. The fact that it is not cut and dried, that it lives
+and grows, that every honest adherent adds not only to its forces but
+to its thought and spirit, is itself inspiration.
+
+The new adherent to Socialism in particular must bear this in mind,
+that Socialism is no garment made and finished that we can reasonably
+ask the world to wear forthwith. It is not that its essentials remain
+in doubt, it is not that it does not stand for things supremely true,
+but that its proper method and its proper expedients have still to be
+established. Over and above the propaganda of its main constructive
+ideas and the political work for their more obvious and practical
+application, an immense amount of intellectual work remains to be done
+for Socialism. The battle for Socialism is to be fought not simply at
+the polls and in the market-place, but at the writing-desk and in the
+study. To many questions, the attitude of Socialism to-day is one of
+confessed inquiring imperfection.[17] It would indeed be very
+remarkable if a proposition for changes so vast and comprehensive as
+Socialism advances was in any different state at this present time.
+
+   [17] The student will find very clear, informing, and
+        suggestive reading in Kirkup's _History of Socialism_ (A. &
+        C. Black, 1906). It is a fine, impartial account of these
+        developments, which may well be used as a corrective (or
+        confirmation) of this book.
+
+It is so recently as 1833 that the world first heard the word
+Socialism.[18] It appeared then, with the vaguest implications and the
+most fluctuating definition, as a general term for a disconnected
+series of protests against the extreme theories of Individualism and
+Individualist Political Economy; against the cruel, race-destroying
+industrial spirit that then dominated the world. Of these protests the
+sociological suggestions and experiments of Robert Owen were most
+prominent in the English community, and he it is, more than any other
+single person, whom we must regard as the father of Socialism. But in
+France ideas essentially similar were appearing about such movements
+and personalities as those of Saint Simon, Proudhon and Fourier. They
+were part of a vast system of questionings and repudiations, political
+doubts, social doubts, hesitating inquiries and experiments.
+
+   [18] It was probably first used in the _Poor Man's Guardian_
+        in that year. See _The Life of Francis Place_, by Graham
+        Wallas, p. 353.
+
+It is only to be expected that early Socialism should now appear as
+not only an extremely imperfect but a very inconsistent system of
+proposals. Its value lay not so much in its plans as in its hopeful
+and confident denials. It had hold of one great truth; it moved one
+great amendment to the conception of practical equality the French
+Revolution had formulated, and that was its clear indication of the
+evil of unrestricted private property and of the necessary antagonism
+of the interests of the individual to the common-weal, of "Wealth
+against Commonwealth," that went with that. While most men had to go
+propertyless in a world that was privately owned, the assertion of
+equality was an empty lie. For the rest, primordial Socialism was
+entirely sketchy and experimental. It was wild as the talk of
+school-boys. It disregarded the most obvious needs. It did not provide
+for any principle of government, or for the maintenance of collective
+thought and social determination, it offered no safeguards and
+guarantees for even the most elementary privacies and freedoms; it was
+extraordinarily non-constructive. It was extreme in its proposed
+abolition of the home, and it flatly ignored the huge process of
+transition needed for a change so profound and universal.
+
+The early Socialism was immediately millennial. It had no patience.
+The idea was to be made into a definite project forthwith; Fourier
+drew up his compact scheme, arranged how many people should live in
+each _phalange_ and so forth, and all that remained to do, he thought,
+was to sow _phalanges_ as one scatters poppy seed. With him it was to
+be Socialism by contagion, with many of his still hastier
+contemporaries it was to be Socialism by proclamation. All the evils
+of society were to crumble to ruins like the Walls of Jericho at the
+first onset of the Great Idea.
+
+Our present generation is less buoyant perhaps, but wiser. However
+young you may be as a reformer, you know you must face certain facts
+those early Socialists ignored. Whatever sort of community you dream
+of, you realize that it has to be made of the sort of people you meet
+every day or of the children growing up under their influence. The
+damping words of the old philosopher to the ardent Social reformer of
+seventeen were really the quintessence of our criticism of
+revolutionary Socialism: "Will your aunts join us, my dear? No!
+Well--is the grocer on our side? And the family solicitor? We shall
+have to provide for them all, you know, unless you suggest a lethal
+chamber."
+
+For a generation Socialism, in the exaltation of its self-discovery,
+failed to measure these primary obstacles, failed to recognize the
+real necessity, the quality of the task of making these people
+understand. To this day the majority of Socialists still fail to grasp
+completely the Herbartian truth, the fact that every human soul moves
+within its _circle of ideas_, resisting enlargement, incapable indeed
+if once it is adult of any extensive enlargement, and that all
+effectual human progress can be achieved only through such
+enlargement. Only ideas cognate to a circle of ideas are assimilated
+or assimilable; ideas too alien, though you shout them in the ear,
+thrust them in the face, remain foreign and incomprehensible.
+
+The early Socialists, arriving at last at their Great Idea, after
+toilsome questionings, after debates, disputations, studies, trials,
+_saw_, and instantly couldn't understand those others who did not see;
+they failed altogether to realize the leaps they had made, the
+brilliant omissions they had achieved, the difficulties they had
+evaded to get to this magnificent conception. I suppose such
+impatience is as natural and understandable as it is unfortunate. None
+of us escape it. Much of this early Socialism is as unreal as
+mathematics, has much the same relation to truth as the abstract
+absolute process of calculation has to concrete individual things;
+much of it more than justifies altogether that "black or white" method
+of criticism of which I wrote in the preceding chapter. They were as
+downright and unconsidering, as little capable of the reasoned middle
+attitude. Proudhon, perceiving that the world was obsessed by a
+misconception of the scope of property whereby the many were enslaved
+to the few, went off at a tangent to the announcement that "Property
+is Robbery," an exaggeration that, as I have already shown, still
+haunts Socialist discussion. The ultimate factor of all human affairs,
+the psychological factor, was disregarded. Like the classic
+mathematical problem, early Socialism was always "neglecting the
+weight of the elephant"--or some other--from the practical point of
+view--equally essential factor. This was, perhaps, an unavoidable
+stage. It is probable that by no other means than such exaggeration
+and partial statement could Socialism have got itself begun. The world
+of 1830 was fatally wrong in its ideas of property; early Socialism
+rose up and gave those ideas a flat, extreme, outrageous
+contradiction. After that analysis and discussion became possible.
+
+The early Socialist literature teems with rash, suggestive schemes. It
+has the fertility, the confusion, the hopefulness, the promise of
+glowing youth. It is a quarry of ideas, a mine of crude expedients, a
+fountain of emotions. The abolition of money, the substitution of
+Labour Notes, the possibility, justice and advantage of equalizing
+upon a time-basis the remuneration of the worker, the relation of the
+new community to the old family, a hundred such topics were
+ventilated--were not so much ventilated as tossed about in an
+impassioned gale.
+
+Much of this earlier Socialist literature was like Cabet's book,
+actually Utopian in form; a still larger proportion was Utopian in
+spirit; its appeal was imaginative, and it aimed to be a plan of a new
+state as definite and detailed as the plan for the building of a
+house. It has been the fashion with a number of later Socialist
+writers and speakers, mind-struck with that blessed word "evolution,"
+confusing "scientific," a popular epithet to which they aspired, with
+"unimaginative," to sneer at the Utopian method, to make a sort of
+ideal of a leaden practicality, but it does not follow because the
+Utopias produced and the experiments attempted were in many aspects
+unreasonable and absurd that the method itself is an unsound one. At a
+certain phase of every creative effort you must cease to study the
+thing that is, and plan the thing that is not. The early Socialisms
+were only premature plans and hasty working models that failed to
+work.
+
+And it must be remembered when we consider Socialism's early
+extravagancies, that any idea or system of ideas which challenges the
+existing system is necessarily, in relation to that system, outcast.
+Mediocre men go soberly on the highroads, but saints and scoundrels
+meet in the gaols. If A and B rebel against the Government, they are
+apt, although they rebel for widely different reasons, to be classed
+together; they are apt indeed to be thrown together and tempted to
+sink even quite essential differences in making common cause against
+the enemy. So that from its very beginning Socialism was mixed up--to
+this day it remains mixed up--with other movements of revolt and
+criticism, with which it has no very natural connection. There is, for
+example, the unfortunate entanglement between the Socialist theory and
+that repudiation of any but subjective sexual limitations which is
+called "free love," and there is that still more unfortunate
+association of its rebellion against orthodox economic theories, with
+rebellion against this or that system of religious teaching. Several
+of the early Socialist communities, again, rebelled against ordinary
+clothing, and their women made short hair and bloomers the outward and
+visible associations of the communistic idea. In Holyoake's _History
+of Co-operation_ it is stated that one early experiment was known to
+its neighbours as "the grass-eating Atheists of Ham Common." I have
+done my very best (in Chapter VIII., § 2) to clear the exposition of
+Socialism from these entanglements, but it is well to recognize that
+these are no corruptions of its teaching, but an inevitable
+birth-infection that has still to be completely overcome.
+
+
+§ 2.
+
+The comprehensively constructive spirit of modern Socialism is very
+much to seek in these childhood phases that came before Marx. These
+early projects were for the most part developed by literary men (and
+by one philosophic business man, Owen) to whose circle of ideas the
+conception of State organization and administration was foreign. They
+took peace and order for granted--they left out the school-master, the
+judge and the policeman, as the amateur architect of the anecdote left
+out the staircase. They set out to contrive a better industrial
+organization, or a better social atmosphere within the present scheme
+of things. They wished to reform what they understood, and what was
+outside their circle of ideas they took for granted, as they took the
+sky and sea. Not only was their literature Utopian literature, about
+little islands of things begun over again from the beginning, but
+their activities tended in the direction of Utopian experiments
+equally limited and isolated. Here again a just critic will differ
+from many contemporary Socialists in their depreciation of this sort
+of work. Owen's experiments in socialized production were of enormous
+educational and scientific value. They were, to use a mining expert's
+term, "hand specimens" of human welfare of the utmost value to
+promoters. They made factory legislation possible; they initiated the
+now immense co-operative movement; they stirred commonplace
+imaginations as only achievement can stir them; they set going a
+process of amelioration in industrial conditions that will never, I
+believe, cease again until the Socialist state is attained.
+
+But apart from Owen and the general advertisement given to Socialist
+ideas, it must be admitted that a great majority of Socialist
+communities have, by every material standard, failed rather than
+succeeded. Some went visibly insolvent and to pieces, others were
+changed by prosperity. Some were wrecked by the sudden lapse of the
+treasurer into an extreme individualism. Essentially Socialism is a
+project for the species, but these communities made it a system of
+relationships within a little group; to the world without they had
+necessarily to turn a competitive face, to buy and sell and advertise
+on the lines of the system as it is. If they failed, they failed; if
+they succeeded they presently found themselves landlords, employers,
+no more and no less than a corporate individualism. I have described
+elsewhere[19] the fate of the celebrated Oneida community of New York
+State, and how it is now converted into an aggressive, wealthy,
+fighting corporation of the most modern type, employing immigrant
+labour.
+
+        [19] _The Future in America._ (Chapman & Hall, 1906.)
+
+Professed and conscious Socialism in its earliest stages, then, was an
+altogether extreme proposition, it was at once imperfect and
+over-emphatic, and it was confused with many quite irrelevant and
+inconsistent novelties with regard to diet, dress, medicine and
+religion. Its first manifest, acknowledged and labelled fruits were a
+series of futile "communities"--Noyes' _History of American
+Socialisms_ gives their simple history of births and of fatal
+infantile ailments--Brook Farm, Fourierite "Phalanges" and the like.
+But correlated with these extreme efforts, drawing ideas and
+inspiration from them, was the great philanthropic movement for the
+amelioration of industrialism, that was, I insist, for all its absence
+of a definite Socialist label in many cases, an equally legitimate
+factor in the making of the great conception of modern Socialism.
+Socialism may be the child of the French Revolution, but it certainly
+has one aristocratic Tory grandparent. There can be little dispute of
+the close connection of Lord Shaftesbury's Factory Acts, that
+commencement of constructive statesmanship in industrialism, with the
+work of Owen. The whole Victorian period marks a steady development of
+social organization out of the cruel economic anarchy of its
+commencement; the beginnings of public education, adulteration acts
+and similar checks upon the extremities of private enterprise, the
+great successful experiments of co-operative consumers' associations
+and the development of what has now become a quasi-official
+representation of labour in the State through the Trade Unions. Two
+great writers, Carlyle and Ruskin, the latter a professed Socialist,
+spent their powers in a relentless campaign against the harsh theories
+of the liberty of property, the gloomy superstitions of political
+economy that barred the way to any effectual constructive scheme. An
+enormous work was done throughout the whole Victorian period by
+Socialists and Socialistic writers, in criticizing and modifying the
+average circle of ideas, in bringing conceptions that had once seemed
+weird, outcast and altogether fantastic, more and more within the
+range of acceptable practicality.
+
+The first early Socialisms were most various and eccentric upon the
+question of government and control. They had no essential political
+teaching. Many, but by no means all, were inspired by the democratic
+idealism of the first French Revolution. They believed in a mystical
+something that was wiser and better than any individual,--the People,
+the Common Man. But that was by no means the case with all of them.
+The Noyes community was a sort of Theocratic autocracy; the Saint
+Simonian tendency was aristocratic. The English Socialism that in the
+middle Victorian period developed partly out of the suggestions of
+Owen's beginnings and partly as an independent fresh outpouring of the
+struggling Good Will in man, that English Socialism that found a voice
+in Ruskin and in Maurice and Kingsley and the Christian Socialists,
+was certainly not democratic. It kept much of what was best in the
+"public spirit" of contemporary English life, and it implied if it did
+not postulate a "governing class." Benevolent and even generous in
+conception, its exponents betray all too often the ties of social
+habituations, the limited circle of ideas of English upper and upper
+middle-class life, easy and cultivated, well served and distinctly,
+most unmistakably, authoritative.
+
+While the experimental Utopian Socialisms gave a sort of variegated
+and conflicting pattern of a reorganized industrialism and
+(incidentally to that) a new heaven and earth, the benevolent
+Socialism, Socialistic Liberalism and Socialistic philanthropy of the
+middle Victorian period, really went very little further in effect
+than a projected amelioration and moralization of the relations of
+rich and poor. It needed the impact of an entirely new type of mind
+before Socialism began to perceive its own significance as an ordered
+scheme for the entire reconstruction of the world, began to realize
+the gigantic breadth of its implications.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM
+
+
+§ 1.
+
+It was Karl Marx who brought the second great influx of suggestion
+into the intellectual process of Socialism. Before his time there does
+not seem to have been any clear view of economic relationships as
+having laws of development, as having interactions that began and went
+on and led towards new things. But Marx had vision. He had--as Darwin
+and the evolutionists had, as most men with a scientific training, and
+many educated men without that advantage now have--a sense of secular
+change. Instead of being content with the accepted picture of the
+world as a scene where men went on producing and distributing wealth
+and growing rich or poor, it might be for endless ages, he made an
+appeal to history and historical analogies, and for the first time
+viewed our age of individualist industrial development, not as a
+possibly permanent condition of humanity, but as something unstable
+and in motion, as an economic process, that is to say, with a
+beginning, a middle, and as he saw it, an almost inevitable end.
+
+The last thing men contrive to discern in every question is the
+familiar obvious, and it came as a great and shattering discovery to
+the economic and sociological thought of the latter half of the
+nineteenth century that there was going on not simply a production but
+an immense concentration of wealth, a differentiation of a special
+wealthy class of landholder and capitalist, a diminution of small
+property owners and the development of a great and growing class of
+landless, nearly propertyless men, the _proletariat_. Marx showed--he
+showed so clearly that to-day it is recognized by every intelligent
+man--that _given a continuance of our industrial and commercial
+system_, of uncontrolled gain seeking, that is, given a continuance of
+our present spirit and ideas of property, there must necessarily come
+a time when the owner and the proletarian will stand face to face,
+with nothing--if we except a middle class of educated professionals
+dependent on the wealthy, who are after all no more than the upper
+stratum of the proletariat--to mask or mitigate their opposition. We
+shall have two classes, the class-conscious worker and the
+class-conscious owner, and they will be at war. And with a broad
+intellectual sweep he flung the light of this conception upon the
+whole contemporary history of mankind. _Das Kapital_ was no sketch of
+Utopias, had no limitation to the conditions or possibilities of this
+country or that. "Here," he says, in the widest way, "is what is going
+on all over the world. So long as practically untrammelled private
+property, such as you conceive it to-day, endures, this must go on.
+The worker gravitates steadily everywhere to a bare subsistence, the
+rest of the proceeds of his labour swell the power of the owners. So
+it will go on while gain and getting are the rule of your system,
+until accumulated tensions between class and class smash this present
+social organization and inaugurate a new age."
+
+In considering the thought and work of Karl Marx, the reader must bear
+in mind the epoch in which that work commenced. The intellectual world
+was then under the sway of an organized mass of ideas known as the
+Science of Political Economy, a mass of ideas that has now not so much
+been examined and refuted as slipped away imperceptibly from its hold
+upon the minds of men. In the beginning, in the hands of Adam
+Smith--whose richly suggestive book is now all too little
+read--political economy was a broad-minded and sane inquiry into the
+statecraft of trade based upon current assumptions of private
+ownership and personal motives, but from him it passed to men of
+perhaps, in some cases, quite equal intellectual energy but inferior
+vision and range. The history of Political Economy is indeed one of
+the most striking instances of the mischief wrought by intellectual
+minds devoid of vision, in the entire history of human thought.
+Special definition, technicality, are the stigmata of second-rate
+intellectual men; they cannot work with the universal tool, they
+cannot appeal to the general mind. They must abstract and separate. On
+such men fell the giant's robe of Adam Smith, and they wore it after
+their manner. Their arid atmospheres are intolerant of clouds, an
+outline that is not harsh is abominable to them. They criticized their
+master's vagueness and must needs mend it. They sought to give
+political economy a precision and conviction such a subject will not
+stand. They took such words as "_value_," an incurably and necessarily
+vague word, "_rent_," the name of the specific relation of landlord
+and tenant, and "_capital_," and sought to define them with relentless
+exactness and use them with inevitable effect. So doing they departed
+more and more from reality. They developed a literature more abundant,
+more difficult and less real than all the exercises of the schoolmen
+put together. To use common words in uncommon meanings is to sow a
+jungle of misunderstanding. It was only to be expected that the bulk
+of this economic literature resolves upon analysis into a ponderous,
+intricate, often astonishingly able and foolish wrangling about
+terminology.
+
+Now in the early Victorian period in which Marx planned his
+theorizing, political economy ruled the educated world. Ruskin had
+still to attack the primary assumptions of that tyrannous and dogmatic
+edifice. The duller sort of educated people talked of the "immutable
+laws of political economy" in the blankest ignorance that the basis of
+everything in this so-called science was a plastic human convention.
+Humane impulses were checked, creative effort tried and condemned by
+these mystical formulĉ. Political economy traded on the splendid
+achievements of physics and chemistry and pretended to an inexorable
+authority. Only a man of supreme intelligence and power, a man
+resolved to give his lifetime to the task, could afford in those days
+to combat the pretensions of the political economist; to deny that his
+categories presented scientific truth, and to cast that jargon aside.
+As for Marx, he saw fit to accept the verbal instruments of his time
+(albeit he bent them not a little in use), to accommodate himself to
+their spirit and to split and re-classify and re-define them at his
+need. So that he has become already difficult to follow, and his more
+specialized exponents among Socialists use terms that arouse no echoes
+in the contemporary mind. The days when Socialism need present its
+theories in terms of a science whose fundamental propositions it
+repudiates, are at an end. One hears less and less of "surplus value"
+now, as one hears less and less of McCulloch's Law of Wages. It may
+crop up in the inquiries of some intelligent mechanic seeking
+knowledge among the obsolescent accumulations of a public library, or
+it may for a moment be touched upon by some veteran teacher. But the
+time when social and economic science had to choose between debatable
+and inexpressive technicalities on the one hand or the stigma of
+empiricism on the other, is altogether past.
+
+The language a man uses, however, is of far less importance than the
+thing he has to say, and it detracts little from the cardinal
+importance of Marx that his books will presently demand restatement in
+contemporary phraseology, and revision in the light of contemporary
+facts. He opened out Socialism. It is easy to quibble about Marx, and
+say he didn't see this or that, to produce this eddy in a backwater or
+that as a triumphant refutation of his general theory. One may quibble
+about the greatness of Marx as one may quibble about the greatness of
+Darwin; he remains great and cardinal. He first saw and enabled the
+world to see capitalistic production as a world process, passing by
+necessity through certain stages of social development, and unless
+some change of law and spirit came to modify it, moving towards an
+inevitable destiny. His followers are too apt to regard that as an
+absolutely inevitable destiny, but the fault lies not at his door. He
+saw it as Socialism. It did not appear to him as it does to many that
+there is a possible alternative to Socialism, that the process may
+give us, not a triumph for the revolting proletariat, but their
+defeat, and the establishment of a plutocratic aristocracy culminating
+in imperialism and ending in social disintegration. From his study,
+from the studious rotunda of the British Museum Reading-room he made
+his prophecy of the growing class consciousness of the workers, of the
+inevitable class war, of the revolution and the millennium that was to
+follow it. He gathered his facts, elaborated his deductions and waited
+for the dawn.
+
+So far as his broad generalization of economic development goes,
+events have wonderfully confirmed Marx. The development of Trusts, the
+concentration of property that America in particular displays, he
+foretold. Given that men keep to the unmodified ideas of private
+property and individualism, and it seems absolutely true that so the
+world must go. And in the American _Appeal to Reason_, for example,
+which goes out weekly from Kansas to a quarter of a million of
+subscribers, one may, if one chooses, see the developing class
+consciousness of the workers, and the promise--and when strikers take
+to rifles and explosives as they do in Pennsylvania and Colorado,
+something more than the promise--of the class war....
+
+But the modern Socialist considers that this generalization is a
+little too confident and comprehensive; he perceives that a change in
+custom, law or public opinion may delay, arrest or invert the economic
+process, and that Socialism may arrive after all not by a social
+convulsion, but by the gradual and detailed concession of its
+propositions. The Marxist presents dramatically what after all may
+come methodically and unromantically, a revolution as orderly and
+quiet as the precession of the equinoxes. There may be a concentration
+of capital and a relative impoverishment of the general working mass
+of people, for example, and yet a general advance in the world's
+prosperity and a growing sense of social duty in the owners of capital
+and land may do much to mask this antagonism of class interests and
+ameliorate its miseries. Moreover, this antagonism itself may in the
+end find adequate expression through temperate discussion, and the
+class war come disguised beyond recognition, with hates mitigated by
+charity and swords beaten into pens, a mere constructive conference
+between two classes of fairly well-intentioned albeit perhaps still
+biassed men and women.
+
+
+§ 2.
+
+The circle of ideas in which Marx moved was that of a student deeply
+tinged with the idealism of the renascent French Revolution. His life
+was the life of a recluse from affairs--an invalid's life; a large
+part of it was spent round and about the British Museum Reading-room,
+and his conceptions of Socialism and the social process have at once
+the spacious vistas given by the historical habit and the abstract
+quality that comes with a divorce from practical experience of human
+government. Only in England and in the eighties did the expanding
+propositions of Socialism come under the influence of men essentially
+administrative. As a consequence Marx, and still more the early
+Marxists, were and are negligent of the necessities of government and
+crude in their notions of class action. He saw the economic process
+with a perfect lucidity, practically he foretold the consolidation of
+the Trusts, and his statement of the necessary development of an
+entirely propertyless working-class with an intensifying class
+consciousness is a magnificent generalization. He saw clearly up to
+that opposition of the many and the few, and then his vision failed
+because his experience and interests failed. There was to be a class
+war, and numbers schooled to discipline by industrial organization
+were to win.
+
+After that the teaching weakens in conviction. The proletariat was to
+win in the class war; then classes would be abolished, property in the
+means of production and distribution would be abolished, all men would
+work reasonably--and the millennium would be with us.
+
+The constructive part of the Marxist programme was too slight. It has
+no psychology. Contrasted, indeed, with the splendid destructive
+criticisms that preceded it, it seems indeed trivial. It diagnoses a
+disease admirably, and then suggests rather an incantation than a
+plausible remedy. And as a consequence Marxist Socialism appeals only
+very feebly to the man of public affairs or business or social
+experience. It does not attract teachers or medical men or engineers.
+It arouses such men to a sense of social instability but it offers no
+remedy. They do not believe in the mystical wisdom of the People. They
+find no satisfactory promise of a millennium in anything Marx
+foretold.
+
+To the labouring man, however, accustomed to take direction and
+government as he takes air and sky, these difficulties of the
+administrative and constructive mind do not occur. His imagination
+raises no questioning in that picture of the proletariat triumphant
+after a class war and quietly coming to its own. It does not occur to
+him for an instant to ask "how?"
+
+Question the common Marxist upon these difficulties and he will
+relapse magnificently into the doctrine of _laissez faire_. "That will
+be all right," he will tell you.
+
+"How?"
+
+"We'll take over the Trusts and run them."...
+
+It is part of the inconveniences attending all powerful new movements
+of the human mind that the disciple bolts with the teacher, overstates
+him, underlines him, and it is no more than a tribute to the potency
+of Marx that he should have paralyzed the critical faculty in a number
+of very able men. To them Marx is a final form of truth. They talk
+with bated breath of a "classic Socialism," to which no man may add
+one jot or one tittle, to which they are as uncritically pledged as
+extreme Bible Christians are bound to the letter of the "Word."...
+
+The peculiar evil of the Marxist teaching is this, that it carries the
+conception of a necessary economic development to the pitch of
+fatalism, it declares with all the solemnity of popular "science" that
+Socialism _must_ prevail. Such a fatalism is morally bad for the
+adherent; it releases him from the inspiring sense of uncertain
+victory, it leads him to believe the stars in their courses will do
+his job for him. The common Marxist is apt to be sterile of effort,
+therefore, and intolerant--preaching predestination and salvation
+without works.
+
+By a circuitous route, indeed, the Marxist reaches a moral position
+curiously analogous to that of the disciple of Herbert Spencer. Since
+all improvement will arrive by leaving things alone, the worse things
+get, the better; for so much the nearer one comes to the final
+exasperation, to the class war and the Triumph of the Proletariat.
+This certainty of victory in the nature of things makes the Marxists
+difficult in politics, pedantic sticklers for the letter of the
+teaching, obstinate opponents of what they call "Palliatives"--of any
+instalment system of reform. They wait until they can make the whole
+journey in one stride, and would, in the meanwhile, have no one set
+forth upon the way. In America the Marxist fatalism has found a sort
+of supreme simplification in the gospel of Mr. H. G. Wilshire. The
+Trusts, one learns, are to consolidate all the industry in the
+country, own all the property. Then when they own everything, the
+Nation will take them over. "Let the Nation own the Trusts!" The
+Nation in the form of a public, reading capitalistic newspapers,
+inured to capitalistic methods, represented and ruled by
+capital-controlled politicians, will suddenly take over the Trusts and
+begin a new system....
+
+It would be quite charmingly easy--if it were only in the remotest
+degree credible.
+
+
+§ 3.
+
+The Marxist teaching tends to an unreasonable fatalism. Its conception
+of the world after the class war is over is equally antagonistic to
+intelligent constructive effort. It faces that Future, utters the word
+"democracy," and veils its eyes.
+
+The conception of democracy to which the Marxist adheres is that same
+mystical democracy that was evolved at the first French Revolution; it
+will sanction no analysis of the popular wisdom. It postulates a sort
+of spirit hidden as it were in the masses and only revealed by a
+universal suffrage of all adults--or, according to some Social
+Democratic Federation authorities who do not believe in women, all
+adult males--at the ballot box. Even a large proportion of the adults
+will not do--it must be all. The mysterious spirit that thus peers out
+and vanishes again at each election is the People, not any particular
+person, but the quintessence, and it is supposed to be infallible; it
+is supposed to be not only morally but intellectually omniscient. It
+will not even countenance the individuality of elected persons, they
+are to be mere tools, _delegates_, from this diffused, intangible
+Oracle, the Ultimate Wisdom....
+
+Well, it may seem ungracious to sneer at the grotesque formulation of
+an idea profoundly wise, at the hurried, wrong, arithmetical method of
+rendering that collective spirit a community undoubtedly can and
+sometimes does possess--I myself am the profoundest believer in
+democracy, in a democracy awake intellectually, conscious and
+self-disciplined--but so long as this mystic faith in the crowd, this
+vague, emotional, uncritical way of evading the immense difficulties
+of organizing just government and a collective will prevails, so long
+must the Socialist project remain not simply an impracticable but, in
+an illiterate, badly-organized community, even a dangerous suggestion.
+I as a Socialist am not blind to these possibilities, and it is
+foolish because a man is in many ways on one's side that one should
+not call attention to his careless handling of a loaded gun.
+Social-Democracy may conceivably become a force that in the sheer
+power of untutored faith may destroy government and not replace it. I
+do not know how far that is not already the case in Russia. I do not
+know how far this may not ultimately be the case in the United States
+of America.
+
+The Marxist teaching, great as was its advance on the dispersed
+chaotic Socialism that preceded it, was defective in other directions
+as well as in its innocence of any scheme of State organization. About
+women and children, for example, it was ill-informed; its founders do
+not seem to have been inspired either by educational necessities or
+philoprogenitive passion. No biologist--indeed no scientific mind at
+all--seems to have tempered its severely "economic" tendencies. It so
+over-accentuates the economic side of life that at moments one might
+imagine it dealt solely with some world of purely "productive"
+immortals, who were never born and never aged, but only warred for
+ever in a developing industrial process.
+
+Now reproduction and not production is the more central fact of social
+life. Women and children and education are things in the background of
+the Marxist proposal--like a man's dog, or his private reading, or his
+pet rabbits. They are in the foreground of modern Socialism. The
+Social Democrat's doctrines go little further in this direction than
+the Liberalism that founded the United States, which ignored women,
+children and niggers, and made the political unit the adult white man.
+They were blind to the supreme importance of making the next
+generation better than the present as the aim and effort of the whole
+community. Herr Bebel's book, _Woman_, is an ample statement of the
+evils of woman's lot under the existing _régime_, but the few pages
+upon the Future of Woman with which he concludes are eloquent of the
+jejune insufficiency of the Marxist outlook in this direction.
+Marriage, which modern Socialism tends more and more to sustain, was
+to vanish--at least as a law-made bond; women were to count as men so
+far as the State is concerned....
+
+This disregard of the primary importance of births and upbringing in
+human affairs and this advocacy of mystical democracy alike contribute
+to blind the Marxist to the necessity of an educational process and of
+social discipline and to the more than personal importance of marriage
+in the Socialist scheme. He can say with a light and confident heart
+to untrained, ignorant, groping souls: "Destroy the Government;
+expropriate the rich, establish manhood suffrage, elect delegates
+strictly pledged--and you will be happy!"
+
+A few modern Marxists stipulate in addition for a Referendum, by which
+the acts of the elected delegates can be further checked by referring
+disputed matters to a general vote of all the adults in the
+community....
+
+
+§ 4.
+
+My memory, as I write these things of Marxism, carries me to the dusky
+largeness of a great meeting in Queen's Hall, and I see again the back
+of Mr. Hyndman's head moving quickly, as he receives and answers
+questions. It was really one of the strangest and most interesting
+meetings I have ever attended. It was a great rally of the Social
+Democratic Federation, and the place--floor, galleries and
+platform--was thick but by no means overcrowded with dingy, earnest
+people. There was a great display of red badges and red ties, and many
+white faces, and I was struck by the presence of girls and women with
+babies. It was more like the Socialist meetings of the popular novel
+than any I had ever seen before. In the chair that night was Lady
+Warwick, that remarkable intruder into the class conflict, a blond
+lady, rather expensively dressed, so far as I could judge, about whom
+the atmosphere of class consciousness seemed to thicken. Her fair
+hair, her floriferous hat, told out against the dim multitudinous
+values of the gathering unquenchably; there were moments when one
+might have fancied it was simply a gathering of village tradespeople
+about the lady patroness, and at the end of the proceedings, after the
+red flag had been waved, after the "Red Flag" had been sung by a choir
+and damply echoed by the audience, some one moved a vote of thanks to
+the Countess in terms of familiar respect that completed the illusion.
+
+Mr. Hyndman's lecture was entitled "In the Rapids of Revolution," and
+he had been explaining how inevitable the whole process was, how
+Russia drove ahead, and Germany and France and America, to the
+foretold crisis and the foretold millennium. But incidentally he also
+made a spirited exhortation for effort, for agitation, and he taunted
+England for lagging in the schemes of fate. Some one amidst the dim
+multitude discovered an inconsistency in that.
+
+Now the questions were being handed in, written on strips of paper,
+and at last that listener's difficulty cropped up.
+
+"What's this?" said Mr. Hyndman; unfolded the slip and read out: "Why
+trouble to agitate or work if the Trusts are going to do it all for
+us?"
+
+The veteran leader of the Social Democratic Federation paused only for
+a moment.
+
+"Well, we've got to get _ready_ for it, you know," he said, rustling
+briskly with the folds of the question to follow--and with these
+words, it seemed to me, that fatalistic Marxism crumbled down to dust.
+
+We _have_ got to get ready for it. Indeed, we have to make it--by
+education and intention and set resolve. Socialism is to be attained
+not by fate, but by will.
+
+
+§ 5.
+
+And here, as a sort of Eastern European gloss upon Marxist Socialism,
+as an extreme and indeed ultimate statement of this marriage of
+mystical democracy to Socialism, we may say a word of Anarchism.
+Anarchism carries the administrative _laissez faire_ of Marx to its
+logical extremity. "If the common, untutored man is right anyhow--why
+these ballot boxes; why these intermediaries in the shape of law and
+representative?"
+
+That is the perfectly logical outcome of ignoring administration and
+reconstruction. The extreme Social-Democrat and the extreme
+Individualist meet in a doctrine of non-resistance to the forces of
+Evolution--which in this connection they deify with a capital letter.
+Organization, control, design, the disciplined will, these are evil,
+they declare--_the_ evil of life. So you come at the end of the
+process, if you are active-minded, to the bomb as the instrument of
+man's release to unimpeded virtue, and if you are pacific in
+disposition to the Tolstoyan attitude of passive resistance to all
+rule and property.
+
+Anarchism, then, is as it were a final perversion of the Socialist
+stream, a last meandering of Socialist thought, released from
+vitalizing association with an active creative experience. Anarchism
+comes when the Socialist repudiation of property is dropped into the
+circles of thought of men habitually ruled and habitually
+irresponsible, men limited in action and temperamentally adverse to
+the toil, to the vexatious rebuffs and insufficiencies, the dusty
+effort, fatigue, and friction of the practical pursuit of a complex
+ideal. So that it most flourishes eastwardly, where men, it would
+seem, are least energetic and constructive, and it explodes or dies on
+American soil.
+
+Anarchism, with its knife and bomb, is a miscarriage of Socialism, an
+acephalous birth from that fruitful mother. It is an unnatural
+offspring, opposed in nature to its parent, for always from the
+beginning the constructive spirit, the ordering and organizing spirit
+has been strong among Socialists. It was by a fallacy, an oversight,
+that _laissez faire_ in politics crept into a movement that was before
+all things an organized denial of _laissez faire_ in economic and
+social life....
+
+I write this of the Anarchism that is opposed to contemporary
+Socialism, the political Anarchism. But there is also another sort of
+Anarchism, which the student of these schools of thought must keep
+clear in his mind from this, the Anarchism of Tolstoy and that other
+brand of William Morris, neither of which waves any flag of black, nor
+counsels violence; they present that conception of untrammelled and
+spontaneous rightness and goodness which is, indeed, I hazard, the
+moral ideal of all rightly-thinking men. It is worth while to define
+very clearly the relation of this second sort of Anarchism, the nobler
+Anarchism, to the toiling constructive Socialism which many of us now
+make our practical guide in life's activities, to say just where they
+touch and where they are apart.
+
+Now the ultimate ideal of human intercourse is surely not Socialism at
+all, but a way of life that is not litigious and not based upon
+jealously-guarded rights, which is free from property, free from
+jealousy, and "above the law." There, there shall not be "marriage or
+giving in marriage." The whole mass of Christian teaching points to
+such an ideal; Paul and Christ turn again and again to the ideal of a
+world of "just men made perfect," in which right and beauty come by
+instinct, in which just laws and regulations are unnecessary and
+unjust ones impossible. "Turn your attention," says my friend, the
+Rev. Stewart Headlam, in his admirable tract on Christian Socialism--
+
+    "Turn your attention to that series of teachings of Christ's
+    which we call parables--comparisons, that is to say, between
+    what Christ saw going on in the every-day world around Him and
+    the Kingdom of Heaven. If by the Kingdom of Heaven in these
+    parables is meant a place up in the clouds, or merely a state
+    in which people will be after death, then I challenge you to
+    get any kind of meaning out of them whatever. But if by the
+    Kingdom of Heaven is meant (as it is clear from other parts of
+    Christ's teaching is the case) the righteous society to be
+    established upon earth, then they all have a plain and
+    beautiful meaning; a meaning well summed up in that saying so
+    often quoted against us by the sceptic and the atheist, 'Seek
+    ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all
+    these things shall be added unto you;' or, in other words,
+    'Live,' Christ said, 'all of you together, not each of you by
+    himself; live as members of the righteous society which I have
+    come to found upon earth, and then you will be clothed as
+    beautifully as the Eastern lily and fed as surely as the
+    birds.'"
+
+And the Rev. R. J. Campbell, who comes to Socialism by way of
+Nonconformity, is equally convincing in support of this assertion that
+the "Kingdom of Heaven" was and is a terrestrial ideal.
+
+This is not simply the Christian ideal of society, it is the ideal of
+every right-thinking man, of every man with a full sense of beauty.
+You will find it rendered in two imperishably beautiful Utopias of our
+own time, both, I glory to write, by Englishmen, the _News from
+Nowhere_ of William Morris, and Hudson's exquisite _Crystal Age_. Both
+these present practically Anarchist States, both assume idealized
+human beings, beings finer, simpler, nobler than the heated, limited
+and striving poor souls who thrust and suffer among the stresses of
+this present life. And the present writer, too--I must mention him
+here to guard against a confusion in the future--when a little while
+ago he imagined humanity exalted morally and intellectually by the
+brush of a comet's tail,[20] was forced by the logic of his premises
+and even against his first intention to present not a Socialist State
+but a glorious anarchism as the outcome of that rejuvenescence of the
+world.
+
+   [20] _In the Days of the Comet._ (Macmillan & Co., 1906.)
+        Anti-Socialist speakers and writers are in the habit of
+        quoting passages of a review from the _Times Literary
+        Supplement_, published during the heat of the "Book War,"
+        and promptly controverted, as though they were quotations
+        from this book.
+
+But the business of Socialism lies at a lower level and concerns
+immediate things; our material is the world as it is, full of unjust
+laws, bad traditions, bad habits, inherited diseases and weaknesses,
+germs and poisons, filths and envies. We are not dealing with
+magnificent creatures such as one sees in ideal paintings and splendid
+sculpture, so beautiful they may face the world naked and unashamed;
+we are dealing with hot-eared, ill-kempt people, who are liable to
+indigestion, baldness, corpulence and fluctuating tempers; who wear
+top-hats and bowler hats or hats kept on by hat-pins (and so with all
+the other necessary clothing); who are pitiful and weak and vain and
+touchy almost beyond measure, and very naughty and intemperate; who
+have, alas! to be bound over to be in any degree faithful and just to
+one another. To strip such people suddenly of law and restraint would
+be as dreadful and ugly as stripping the clothes from their poor
+bodies....
+
+That Anarchist world, I admit, is our dream; we do believe--well, I,
+at any rate, believe this present world, this planet, will some day
+bear a race beyond our most exalted and temerarious dreams, a race
+begotten of our wills and the substance of our bodies, a race, so I
+have said it, "who will stand upon the earth as one stands upon a
+footstool, and laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars," but
+the way to that is through education and discipline and law. Socialism
+is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously
+we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust
+laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a
+system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and
+action. Socialism is the school-room of true and noble Anarchism,
+wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.
+
+There is a graceful and all too little known fable by Mr. Max
+Beerbohm, _The Happy Hypocrite_, which gives, I think, not only the
+relation of Socialism to philosophic Anarchism, but of all discipline
+to all idealism. It is the story of a beautiful mask that was worn by
+a man in love, until he tired even of that much of deceit and, a
+little desperately, threw it aside--to find his own face beneath
+changed to the likeness of the self he had desired. So would we veil
+the greed, the suspicion of the self-seeking scramble of to-day under
+institutions and laws that will cry "duty and service" in the ears and
+eyes of all mankind, keep down the evil so long and so effectually
+that at last law will be habit, and greed and self-seeking cease for
+ever, from being the ruling impulse of the world. Socialism is the
+mask that will mould the world to that better Anarchism of good men's
+dreams....
+
+But these are long views, glimpses beyond the Socialist horizon. The
+people who would set up Anarchism to-day are people without human
+experience or any tempering of humour, only one shade less impossible
+than the odd one-sided queer beings one meets, ridiculously
+inaccessible to laughter, who, caricaturing their Nietzsche and
+misunderstanding their Shaw, invite one to set up consciously with
+them in the business of being Overmen, to rule a world full of our
+betters, by fraud and force. It is a foolish teaching saved only from
+being horrible by being utterly ludicrous. For us the best is faith
+and humility, truth and service, our utmost glory is to have seen the
+vision and to have failed--not altogether.... For ourselves and such
+as we are, let us not "deal in pride," let us be glad to learn a
+little of this spirit of service, to achieve a little humility, to
+give ourselves to the making of Socialism and the civilized State
+without presumption--as children who are glad they may help in a work
+greater than themselves and the toys that have heretofore engaged them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+ADMINISTRATIVE SOCIALISM
+
+
+§ 1.
+
+Marx gave to Socialism a theory of world-wide social development, and
+rescued it altogether from the eccentric and localized associations of
+its earliest phases; he brought it so near to reality that it could
+appear as a force in politics, embodied first as the International
+Association of Working Men, and then as the Social Democratic movement
+of the continent of Europe that commands to-day over a third of the
+entire poll of German voters. So much Marx did for Socialism. But if
+he broadened its application to the world, he narrowed its range to
+only the economic aspect of life. He arrested for a time the
+discussion of its biological and moral aspects altogether. He left it
+an incomplete doctrine of merely economic reconstruction supplemented
+by mystical democracy, and both its mysticism and incompleteness,
+while they offered no difficulties to a labouring man ignorant of
+affairs, rendered it unsubstantial and unattractive to people who had
+any real knowledge of administration.
+
+It was left chiefly to the little group of English people who founded
+the Fabian Society to supply a third system of ideas to the amplifying
+conception of Socialism, to convert Revolutionary Socialism into
+Administrative Socialism.
+
+This new development was essentially the outcome of the reaction of
+its broad suggestions of economic reconstruction upon the circle of
+thought of one or two young officials of genius, and of one or two
+persons upon the fringe of that politic-social stratum of Society, the
+English "governing class." I make this statement, I may say, in the
+loosest possible spirit. The reaction is one that was not confined to
+England, it was to some extent inevitable wherever the new movement in
+thought became accessible to intelligent administrators and officials.
+But in the peculiar atmosphere of British public life, with its
+remarkable blend of individual initiative and a lively sense of the
+State, this reaction has had the freest development. There was,
+indeed, Fabianism before the Fabian Society; it would be ingratitude
+to some of the most fruitful social work of the middle Victorian
+period to ignore the way in which it has contributed in suggestion and
+justification to the Socialist synthesis. The city of Birmingham, for
+example, developed the most extensive process of municipalization as
+the mere common-sense of local patriotism. But the movement was
+without formulĉ and correlation until the Fabians came.
+
+That unorganized, unpaid public service of public-spirited
+aristocratic and wealthy financial and business people, the "governing
+class," which dominated the British Empire throughout the nineteenth
+century, has, through the absence of definite class boundaries in
+England and the readiness of each class to take its tone from the
+class above, that "Snobbishness" which is so often heedlessly
+dismissed as altogether evil, given a unique quality to British
+thought upon public questions and to British conceptions of Socialism.
+It has made the British mind as a whole "administrative." As compared
+with the American mind, for example, the British is State-conscious,
+the American State-blind. The American is no doubt intensely
+patriotic, but the nation and the State to which his patriotism points
+is something overhead and comprehensive like the sky, like a flag
+hoisted; something, indeed, that not only does not but must not
+interfere with his ordinary business occupations. To have public
+spirit, to be aware of the State as a whole and to have an
+administrative feeling towards it, is necessarily to be accessible to
+constructive ideas--that is to say, to Socialistic ideas. In the
+history of thought in Victorian Great Britain, one sees a constant
+conflict of this administrative disposition with the individualistic
+commercialism of the aggressively trading and manufacturing class, the
+class that in America reigns unchallenged to this day. In the latter
+country Individualism reigns unchallenged, it is assumed; in the
+former it has fought an uphill fight against the traditions of Church
+and State and has never absolutely prevailed. The political economists
+and Herbert Spencer were its prophets, and they never at any time held
+the public mind in any invincible grip. Since the eighties that grip
+has weakened more and more. Socialistic thought and legislation,
+therefore, was going on in Great Britain through all the Victorian
+period. Nevertheless, it was the Fabian Society that, in the eighties
+and through the intellectual impetus of at most four or five
+personalities, really brought this obstinately administrative spirit
+in British affairs into relation with Socialism as such.
+
+The dominant intelligence of this group was Mr. Sidney Webb, and as I
+think of him thus coming after Marx to develop the third phase of
+Socialism, I am struck by the contrast with the big-bearded Socialist
+leaders of the earlier school and this small, active, unpretending
+figure with the finely-shaped head, the little imperial under the lip,
+the glasses, the slightly lisping, insinuating voice. He emerged as a
+Colonial Office clerk of conspicuous energy and capacity, and he was
+already the leader and "idea factory" of the Fabian Society when he
+married Miss Beatrice Potter, the daughter of a Conservative Member of
+Parliament, a girl friend of Herbert Spencer, and already a brilliant
+student of sociological questions. Both he and she are devotees to
+social service, living laborious, ordered, austere, incessant lives,
+making the employment of secretaries their one extravagance, and
+alternations between research and affairs their change of occupation.
+A new type of personality altogether they were in the Socialist
+movement, which had hitherto been richer in eloquence than discipline.
+And during the past twenty years of the work of the Fabian Society
+through their influence, one dominant question has prevailed. Assuming
+the truth of the two main generalizations of Socialism, taking that
+statement of intention for granted, _how is the thing to be done_?
+They put aside the glib assurances of the revolutionary Socialists
+that everything would be all right when the People came to their own;
+and so earned for themselves the undying resentment of all those who
+believe the world is to be effectually mended by a liberal use of
+chest notes and red flags. They insisted that the administrative and
+economic methods of the future must be a secular development of
+existing institutions, and inaugurated a process of study--which has
+long passed beyond the range of the Fabian Society, broadening out
+with the organized work of the New University of London, with its
+special School of Economics and Political Science and of a growing
+volume of university study in England and America--to the end that
+this "_how?_" should be answered....
+
+The broad lines of the process of transition from the present state of
+affairs to the Socialist state of the future as they are developed by
+administrative Socialism lie along the following lines.
+
+1. The peaceful and systematic taking over from private enterprise, by
+purchase or otherwise, whether by the national or by the municipal
+authorities as may be most convenient, of the great common services of
+land control, mining, transit, food supply, the drink trade, lighting,
+force supply and the like.
+
+2. Systematic expropriation of private owners by death-duties and
+increased taxation.
+
+3. The building up of a great scientifically organized administrative
+machinery to carry on these enlarging public functions.
+
+4. A steady increase and expansion of public education, research,
+museums, libraries and all such public services. The systematic
+promotion of measures for raising the school-leaving age, for the
+public feeding of school children, for the provision of public baths,
+parks, playgrounds and the like.
+
+5. The systematic creation of a great service of public health to take
+over the disorganized confusion of hospitals and other charities,
+sanitary authorities, officers of health and private enterprise
+medical men.
+
+6. The recognition of the claim of every citizen to welfare by
+measures for the support of mothers and children and by the
+establishment of old-age pensions.
+
+7. The systematic raising of the minimum standard of life by factory
+and other labour legislation, and particularly by the establishment of
+a legal minimum wage....
+
+These are the broad forms of the Fabian Socialist's answer to the
+question of _how_, with which the revolutionary Socialists were
+confronted. The diligent student of Socialism will find all these
+proposals worked out to a very practicable-looking pitch indeed in
+that Bible of Administrative Socialism, the collected tracts of the
+Fabian Society,[21] and to that volume I must refer him. The theory of
+the minimum standard and the minimum wage is explained, moreover, with
+the utmost lucidity in that Socialist classic, _Industrial Democracy_,
+by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. It is a theory that must needs be
+mastered by every intelligent Socialist, but it is well to bear in
+mind that the method of the minimum wage is no integral part of the
+general Socialist proposition, and that it still lies open to
+discussion and modification.
+
+   [21] _Fabian Tracts._ (Fabian Society, 5_s._)
+
+
+§ 2.
+
+Every movement has the defects of its virtues, and it is not, perhaps,
+very remarkable that the Fabian Society of the eighties and nineties,
+having introduced the conception of the historical continuity of
+institutions into the Propaganda of Socialism, did certainly for a
+time greatly over-accentuate that conception and draw away attention
+from aspects that may be ultimately more essential.
+
+Beginning with the proposition that the institutions and formulĉ of
+the future must necessarily be developed from those of the present,
+that one cannot start _de novo_ even after a revolution; one may
+easily end in an attitude of excessive conservatism towards existing
+machinery. In spite of the presence of such fine and original
+intelligences as Mr. (now Sir) Sydney Olivier and Mr. Graham Wallas in
+the Fabian counsels, there can be no denial that for the first twenty
+years of its career, Mr. Webb was the prevailing Fabian. Now his is a
+mind legal as well as creative, and at times his legal side quite
+overcomes his constructive element; he is extraordinarily fertile in
+expedients and skilful in adaptation, and with a real horror of open
+destruction. This statement by no means exhausts him, but it does to a
+large extent convey the qualities that were uppermost in the earlier
+years, at any rate, of his influence. His insistence upon continuity
+pervaded the Society, was re-echoed and intensified by others, and
+developed into something like a mania for achieving Socialism without
+the overt change of any existing ruling body. His impetus carried this
+reaction against the crude democratic idea to its extremest opposite.
+Then arose Webbites to caricature Webb. From saying that the
+unorganized people cannot achieve Socialism, they passed to the
+implication that organization alone, without popular support, might
+achieve Socialism. Socialism was to arrive as it were insidiously.
+
+To some minds this new proposal had the charm of a school-boy's first
+dark-lantern. Socialism ceased to be an open revolution, and became a
+plot. Functions were to be shifted, quietly, unostentatiously, from
+the representative to the official he appointed; a bureaucracy was to
+slip into power through the mechanical difficulties of an
+administration by debating representatives; and since these officials
+would by the nature of their positions constitute a scientific
+bureaucracy, and since Socialism is essentially scientific government
+as distinguished from haphazard government, they would necessarily run
+the country on the lines of a pretty distinctly undemocratic
+Socialism.
+
+The process went even further than secretiveness in its reaction from
+the large rhetorical forms of revolutionary Socialism. There arose
+even a repudiation of "principles" of action, and a type of worker
+which proclaimed itself "Opportunist-Socialist." It was another
+instance of Socialism losing sight of itself, it was a process quite
+parallel at the other extreme with the self-contradiction of the
+Anarchist-Socialist. Socialism as distinguished from mere Liberalism,
+for example, is an organized plan for social reconstruction, while
+Liberalism relies upon certain vague "principles"; Socialism declares
+that good intentions and doing what comes first to hand will not
+suffice. Now Opportunism is essentially benevolent adventure and the
+doing of first-hand things.
+
+This conception of indifference to the forms of government, of
+accepting whatever governing bodies existed and using them to create
+officials and "_get something done_," was at once immediately fruitful
+in many directions, and presently productive of many very grave
+difficulties in the path of advancing Socialism. Webb himself devoted
+immense industry and capacity to the London County Council--it is
+impossible to measure the share he has had in securing such great
+public utilities as water supply, traction and electric supply, for
+example, from complete exploitation by private profit seekers, but
+certainly it is a huge one--and throughout England and presently in
+America, there went on a collateral activity of Fabian Socialists.
+They worked like a ferment in municipal politics, encouraging and
+developing local pride and local enterprise in public works. In the
+case of large public bodies, working in suitable areas and commanding
+the services of men of high quality, striking advances in Social
+organization were made, but in the case of smaller bodies in
+unsuitable districts and with no attractions for people of gifts and
+training, the influence of Fabianism did on the whole produce effects
+that have tended to discredit Socialism. Aggressive, ignorant and
+untrained men and women, usually neither inspired by Socialist faith
+nor clearly defining themselves as Socialists, persons too often of
+wavering purpose and doubtful honesty, got themselves elected in a
+state of enthusiasm to undertake public functions and challenge
+private enterprise under conditions that doomed them to waste and
+failure. This was the case in endless parish councils and urban
+districts; it was also the case in many London boroughs. It has to be
+admitted by Socialists with infinite regret that the common
+borough-council Socialist is too often a lamentable misrepresentative
+of the Socialist idea.
+
+The creation of the London Borough Councils found English Socialism
+unprepared. They were bodies doomed by their nature to incapacity and
+waste. They represented neither natural communities nor any
+practicable administrative unit of area. Their creation was the result
+of quite silly political considerations. The slowness with which
+Socialists have realized that for the larger duties that they wish to
+have done collectively, a new scheme of administration is necessary;
+that bodies created to sweep the streets and admirably adapted to that
+duty may be conspicuously not adapted to supply electric power or
+interfere with transit, is accountable for much disheartening
+bungling. Instead of taking a clear line from the outset, and
+denouncing these glorified vestries as useless, impossible and
+entirely unscientific organs, too many Socialists tried to claim
+Bumble as their friend and use him as their tool. And Bumble turned
+out to be a very bad friend and a very poor tool....
+
+In all these matters the real question at issue is one between the
+emergency and the implement. One may illustrate by a simple
+comparison. Suppose there is a need to dig a hole and that there is no
+spade available, a Fabian with Mr. Webb's gifts becomes invaluable. He
+seizes upon a broken old cricket-bat, let us say, uses it with
+admirable wit and skill, and presto! there is the hole made and the
+moral taught that one need not always wait for spades before digging
+holes. It is a lesson that Socialism stood in need of, and which
+henceforth it will always bear in mind. But suppose we want to dig a
+dozen holes, it may be worth while to spend a little time in going to
+beg, borrow or buy a spade. If we have to dig holes indefinitely, day
+after day, it will be sheer foolishness sticking to the bat. It will
+be worth while then not simply to get a spade, but to get just the
+right sort of spade in size and form that the soil requires, to get
+the proper means of sharpening and repairing the spade, to insure a
+proper supply. Or to point the comparison, the reconstruction of our
+legislative and local government machinery is a necessary preliminary
+to Socialization in many directions. Mr. Webb has very effectually
+admitted that, is in fact himself leading us away from that by taking
+up the study of local government as his principal occupation, but the
+typical "Webbite" of the Fabian Society, who is very much to Webb what
+the Marxist is to Marx, entranced by his leader's skill, still clings
+to a caricature distortion of this earlier Fabian ideal. He dreams of
+the most foxy and wonderful digging by means of box-lids,
+table-spoons, dish-covers--anything but spades designed and made for
+the job in hand--just as he dreams of an extensive expropriation of
+landlords by a legislature that includes the present unreformed House
+of Lords....
+
+
+§ 3.
+
+It was only at the very end of the nineteenth century that the Fabian
+Socialist movement was at all quickened to the need of political
+reconstruction as extensive as the economic changes it advocated, and
+it is still far from a complete apprehension of the importance of the
+political problem. To begin with, Mr. and Mrs. Webb, having completed
+their work on Labour Regulation, took up the study of local government
+and commenced that colossal task that still engages them, their book
+upon _English Local Government_, of which there has as yet appeared
+(1907) only one volume out of seven. (Immense as this service is, it
+is only one part of conjoint activities that will ultimately give
+constructive social conceptions an enormous armoury of scientifically
+arranged fact.)
+
+As the outcome of certain private experiences, the moral of which was
+pointed by discussion with Mr. and Mrs. Webb, the present writer in
+1902 put before the Fabian Society a paper on Administrative
+Areas,[22] in which he showed clearly that the character and
+efficiency and possibilities of a governing body depend almost
+entirely upon the suitability to its particular function of the size
+and quality of the constituency it represents and the area it
+administers. This may be stated with something approaching scientific
+confidence. A local governing body for too small an area or elected
+upon an unsound franchise _cannot_ be efficient. But obviously before
+you can transfer property from private to collective control you must
+have something in the way of a governing institution which has a
+reasonably good chance of developing into an efficient controlling
+body. The leading conception of this Administrative Area paper
+appeared subsequently running through a series of tracts, _The New
+Heptarchy Series_, in which one finds it applied first to this group
+of administrative problems and then to that.[23] These tracts are
+remarkable if only because they present the first systematic
+recognition on the part of any organized Socialist body of the fact
+that a scientific reconstruction of the methods of government
+constitutes not simply an incidental but a necessary part of the
+complete Socialist scheme, the first recognition of the widening scope
+of the Socialist design that makes it again a deliberately
+constructive project.[24]
+
+   [22] See Appendix to _Mankind in the Making_. (Chapman and
+        Hall, 1905.)
+
+   [23] 1. _Municipalization by Provinces._ 2. _On the Reform
+        of Municipal Service._ 3. _Public Control of Electric Power
+        and Transit._ 4. _The Revival of Agriculture: a National
+        Policy for Great Britain._ 5. _The Abolition of Poor Law
+        Guardians._ Others to follow. (Fabian Society, 1905-6.)
+
+   [24] This generalization is a sweeping one, and would need,
+        were one attempting to give more than a very broad
+        impression of the sequence of Socialist ideas, considerable
+        modification. Such earlier tracts as _The New Reform Bill_,
+        _Facts for Londoners_, _Facts for Bristol_, dealt mainly
+        with the question of machinery.
+
+It is only an initial recognition, a mere first raid into a great and
+largely unexplored province of study. This province is in the broadest
+terms, social psychology. A huge amount of thought, discussion,
+experiment, is to be done in this field--needs imperatively to be done
+before the process of the socialization of economic life can go very
+far beyond its present attainments. Except for these first admissions,
+Socialism has concerned itself only with the material reorganization
+of Society and its social consequences, with economic changes and the
+reaction of these changes on administrative work; it has either
+accepted existing intellectual conditions and political institutions
+as beyond its control or assumed that they will obediently modify as
+economic and administrative necessity dictates. Declare the Social
+revolution, we were told in a note of cheery optimism by the Marxist
+apostles, and political institutions will come like flowers in May!
+Achieve your expropriation, said the early Fabians, get your network
+of skilled experts spread over the country, and your political forms,
+your public opinion, your collective soul will not trouble you.
+
+The student of history knows better. These confident claims ignore the
+psychological factors in government and human association; they
+disregard a jungle of difficulties that lie directly in our way.
+Socialists have to face the facts; firstly, that the political and
+intellectual institutions of the present time belong to the present
+condition of things, and that the intellectual methods, machinery and
+political institutions of the better future must almost inevitably be of
+a very different type; secondly, that such institutions will not come
+about of themselves--which indeed is the old superstition of _laissez
+faire_ in a new form--but must be thought out, planned and organized
+just as completely as economic socialization has had to be planned and
+organized; and thirdly, that so far Socialism has evolved scarcely any
+generalizations even, that may be made the basis of new intellectual and
+governmental--as distinguished from administrative--methods. It has
+preached collective ownership and collective control, and it has only
+begun to recognize that this implies the necessity of a collective will
+and new means and methods altogether for the collective mind.
+
+The administrative Socialism which Mr. Webb and the Fabian Society
+developed upon a modification of the broad generalizations of the Marx
+phase, is as it were no more than the first courses above those
+foundations of Socialism. It supplies us with a conception of methods
+of transition and with a vision of a great and disciplined
+organization of officials, a scientific bureaucracy appointed by
+representative bodies of diminishing activity and importance, and
+coming to be at last the real working control of the Socialist State.
+But it says nothing of what is above the officials, what drives the
+officials. It is a palace without living rooms, with nothing but
+offices; a machine, as yet unprovided with a motor. No doubt we must
+have that organization of officials if we mean to bring about a
+Socialist State, but the mind recoils with something like terror from
+the conception of a State run and ruled by officials, terminating in
+officials, with an official as its highest expression. One has a
+vision of a community with blue-books instead of a literature, and
+inspectors instead of a conscience. The mystical democracy of the
+Marxist, though manifestly impossible, had in it something attractive,
+something humanly and desperately pugnacious and generous, something
+indeed heroic; the bureaucracy of the Webbite, though far more
+attainable, is infinitely less inspiring. But that may be because the
+inspiring elements remain to be stated rather than that these
+practical constructive projects are in their nature, and incurably,
+hard and narrow. Instead of a gorgeous flare in the darkness, we have
+the first cold onset of daylight heralding the sun. If the letter of
+the teaching of Mr. and Mrs. Webb is bureaucracy, that is certainly
+not the spirit of their lives.
+
+The earlier Socialists gave Socialism substance, _rudis indigestaque
+moles_, but noble stuff; Administrative Socialism gave it a physical
+structure and nerves, defined its organs and determined its functions;
+it remains for the Socialist of to-day to realize in this shaping body
+of the civilized State of the future the breath of life already
+unconfessedly there, to state in clear terms the reality for which our
+plans are made, by which alone they can be realized, that is to say,
+_the collective mind of humanity, the soul and moral being of
+mankind_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM
+
+
+§ 1.
+
+Such a group of ideas and motives as Socialism, fundamentally true as
+it is to the needs of life, and arising as it does from the inevitable
+suggestion of very widely dispersed evils and insufficiencies, does
+not spring from any one source, nor develop along any single line. It
+appears as a smouldering fire appears, first here, then there, first
+in one form of expression and then another, now under this name and
+now under that.
+
+The manifest new possibilities created by the progress of applied
+science, the inevitable change of scale and of the size and conception
+of a community that arises out of them, _necessitate_ at least the
+material form of Socialism--that is to say, the replacement of
+individual action by public organization, in spite of a hundred vested
+interests. The age that regarded Herbert Spencer as its greatest
+philosopher, for example, was urged nevertheless, unwillingly and
+protestingly but effectually, through phase after phase of more and
+more co-ordinated voluntary effort, until at last it had to undertake
+a complete system of organized free public primary education. There
+the moving finger of change halts not a moment; already it is going on
+to secondary education, to schemes for a complete public educational
+organization from reformatory school up to professorial chair. The
+practical logic of the case is invincible.
+
+So, too, the public organization of scientific research goes on
+steadily against all prejudices and social theories, and, in a very
+different field, the plain inconveniences of a private control of
+traffic in America and England alike, force the affected property
+owners whose businesses are hampered and damaged towards the
+realization that freedom of private property, in these services at
+least, is evil and must end. As the proofs of these pages pass through
+my hands comes the news of Mr. Lloyd George's settlement of the
+dispute between railway directors and _employés_ by the establishment
+of a method of compulsory arbitration. Then, again, the movement for
+public sanitation and hygiene spreads and broadens, and the natural
+alarm of even the most conservative at the falling birth-rate and the
+stationary infantile death-rate is evidently ripening for an advance
+towards public control and care even in the relation of child to
+parent, the most intimate of all personal affairs.
+
+Inevitably all such movements must coalesce--their spirit is one, the
+spirit of construction--and inevitably their coalescence will take the
+form of a wide and generous restatement of Socialism. Nothing but a
+broader understanding of the broadening propositions of Socialism is
+needed for that recognition now.
+
+Socialism, indeed, does not simply look, it appeals to the
+constructive professions at the present time, to the medical man, the
+engineer, the architect, the scientific agriculturist.
+
+Each of these sorts of men, in just so far as he is concerned with the
+reality of his profession, in just so far as he is worthy of his
+profession, must resent the considerations of private profit, of base
+economies, that constantly limit and spoil his work and services in
+the interests of a dividend or of some financial manoeuvre. So far they
+have been antagonized towards Socialism by the errors of its
+adherents, by the impression quite wantonly created, that Socialism
+meant either mob rule or the rule of pedantic, unsympathetic
+officials. They have heard too much of democracy, too much of
+bureaucracy, and not enough of construction. They have felt that on
+the whole the financial exploiter, detestable master as he often is,
+was better than the rule of either clamour on the one hand or red tape
+on the other. But, as I have been seeking to suggest, mob rule and
+official rule do not exhaust the possible alternatives. Neither
+ignorant democracy nor narrow bureaucracy can be the destined rulers
+of a Socialist State. The only conceivable rule in a Socialist
+civilization is through the operation of a collective mind that must
+be by its nature constructive and enterprising, because only through
+the creation of such a mind can Socialism be brought about. A
+Socialist State cannot exist without that mind existing also, and a
+collective mind can scarcely appear without some form of Socialism
+giving it a material body. Now it is only under an intelligent
+collective mind that any of the dreams of these constructive
+professions can attain an effective realization. Where will the
+private profit in a universal sanitation, for example, be found, in
+the abolition of diseases, in the planned control of the public
+health, in the abolition of children's deaths? What thought of private
+gain will ever scrap our obsolescent railroads and our stagnating
+industrial monopolies for new clean methods? So long as they pay a
+dividend they will keep on upon their present lines. The modern
+architect knows, the engineer knows we might build ourselves perfectly
+clean, smokeless magnificent cities to-day, as full of pure water as
+ancient Rome, as full of pure air as the Engadine, if private
+ownership did not block the way. Who can doubt it who understands what
+a doctor, or an electrical engineer, or a real architect understands?
+Surely all the best men in these professions are eager to get to work
+on the immense possibilities of life, possibilities of things cleared
+up, of things made anew, that their training has enabled them to
+visualize! What stands in their way, stands in our way; social
+disorganization, individualist self-seeking, narrowness of outlook,
+self-conceit, ignorance.
+
+With that conception they must surely turn in the end, as we
+Socialists turn, to the most creative profession of all, to that great
+calling which with each generation renews the world's "circle of
+ideas," the Teachers!
+
+The whole trend and purpose of this book from the outset has been to
+insist upon _the mental quality of Socialism_, to maintain that it is
+a business of conventions about property and plans of reorganization,
+that is to say, of changes and expansions of the ideas of men, changes
+and expansions of their spirit of action and their habitual circles of
+ideas. Unless you can change men's minds you cannot effect Socialism,
+and when you have made clear and universal certain broad
+understandings, Socialism becomes a mere matter of science and devices
+and applied intelligence. That is the constructive Socialist's
+position. Logically, therefore, he declares the teacher master of the
+situation. Ultimately the Socialist movement _is_ teaching, and the
+most important people in the world from the Socialist's point of view
+are those who teach--I mean of course not simply those who teach in
+schools, but those who teach in pulpits, in books, in the press, in
+universities and lecture-theatres, in parliaments and councils, in
+discussions and associations and experiments of every sort, and, last
+in my list but most important of all, those mothers and motherly women
+who teach little children in their earliest years. Every one, too, who
+enunciates a new and valid idea, or works out a new contrivance, is a
+teacher in this sense.
+
+And these Teachers collectively, perpetually renew the collective
+mind. In the measure that in each successive generation they apprehend
+Socialism and transmit its spirit, is Socialism nearer its goal.
+
+
+§ 2.
+
+At the present time in America and all the western European countries,
+there is a collective mind, a public opinion made up of the most
+adventitious and interesting elements. It is not even a national or a
+racial thing, it is curiously international, curiously responsive to
+thought from every quarter; a something, vague here, clear there, here
+diffused, there concentrated. It demands the closest attention from
+Socialists this something, this something which is so hard to define
+and so impossible to deny--civilized feeling, the thought of our age,
+the mind of the world. It has organs, it has media, yet it is as hard
+to locate as the soul of a man. We know that somewhere in the brain
+and body of a man lives his Self; that you must preserve that brain
+entire, aërate it, nourish it lest it die and his whole being die, and
+yet you cannot say it is in this cell--or in that. So with an equal
+mystery of diffusion the mind of mankind exists. No man, no
+organization, no authority, can be more than a part of it. Twice at
+least have there been attempts of parts to be the whole; the Catholic
+Church and the Chinese Academy have each in varying measure sought to
+play the part of a collective mind for all humanity and failed. All
+individual achievement, fine books, splendid poems, great discoveries,
+new generalizations, lives of thought, are no more than flashes in
+this huge moral and intellectual being which grows now self-conscious
+and purposeful, just as a child grows out of its early self-ignorance
+to an elusive, indefinable, indisputable sense of itself. This
+collective mind has to be filled and nourished with the Socialist
+purpose, to receive and assimilate our great idea. That is the true
+work of Socialism.
+
+Consider the organs and media of the collective mind as one finds them
+in England or America now, how hazardous they are and accidental! At
+the basis of this strange thought-process is the intelligence of the
+common man, once illiterate and accessible only to the crude,
+inarticulate influences of talk and rumour, now rapidly becoming
+educated, or at any rate educated to the level of a reader and writer,
+and responding more and more to literary influences. The great mass of
+the population is indeed at the present time like clay which has
+hitherto been a mere deadening influence underneath, but which this
+educational process, like some drying and heating influence upon that
+clay, is rendering resonant, capable of, in a dim answering way,
+_ringing_ to the appeals made upon it. Reaching through this mass,
+appealing to it in various degrees at various levels and to various
+ends, there are a number of systems of organizations of unknown value
+and power. Its response, such as it is, robbed by multitudinousness of
+any personality or articulation, is a broad emotional impulse.
+
+Above this fundamental mass is the growing moiety which has a
+conscious thought-process, of a sort. Its fundamental ideas, its
+preconceptions, are begotten of a mixture of social traditions learnt
+at home and in school and from the suggestions of contemporary customs
+and affairs. But it reads and listens more or less. And scattered
+through this, here and there, are people really learning, really
+increasing and accumulating knowledge, really thinking and
+conversing--the active mind-cells, as it were, of the world. Their
+ideas are conveyed into the mass much as impulses are conveyed into an
+imperfectly innervated tissue, they are conveyed by books and
+pamphlets, by lecturing, by magazine articles and newspaper articles,
+by the agency of the pulpit, by organized propaganda, by political
+display and campaigns. The gross effect is considerable, but it is
+just as well that the Socialist should look a little closely at the
+economic processes that underlie these intellectual activities at the
+present time. Except for the universities and much of the public
+educational organization, except for a few pulpits endowed for good
+under conditions that limit freedom of thought and expression, except
+for certain needy and impecunious propagandas, the whole of this
+apparatus of public thought and discussion to-day has been created and
+is sustained by commercial necessity.
+
+For example, consider what is I suppose by far the most important
+vehicle of ideas at the present time, which for a huge majority of
+adults is the sole vehicle of ideas, the newspaper. It is universal
+because it is cheap, and it is cheap because the cost of production is
+paid for by the advertisements of private enterprise. The newspaper is
+to a very large extent parasitic upon competition; its criticism, its
+discussion, its correspondence, are, from the business point of view,
+written on the backs of puffs of competing tobaccos, soaps, medicines
+and the like. No newspaper could pay upon its sales alone, and the
+same thing is true of most popular magazines and weekly publications.
+It is highly probable that whatever checks public advertisement in
+other directions, the prohibition of bill-posting upon hoardings, for
+example, the protection of scenery, railway carriages and architecture
+from the advertiser, stimulates the production of attractive
+literature. Necessarily what is published in newspapers and magazines
+must be acceptable to advertising businesses and not too openly
+contrary to their interests. With that limitation the newspapers
+provide a singularly free and various arena for discussion at the
+present time. It must, however, be obvious that to advance towards
+Socialism is, if not to undermine the newspaper altogether, at least
+to change very profoundly this material vehicle of popular thought....
+
+The newspaper disseminates ideas. So, too, does the book and the
+pamphlet, and so far as these latter are concerned, their distribution
+does not at present rest in the same degree upon their value as
+vehicles of advertisement. They are saleable things unaided. The
+average book of to-day at its nominal price of six shillings pays in
+itself and supports its producers. So in a lesser degree does the
+sixpenny pamphlet, but neither book nor pamphlet reach so wide a
+public as the halfpenny and penny press. The methods and media of the
+book trade have grown up, no man designing them; they change, and no
+one is able to foretell the effect of their changes. At present there
+is a great movement to cheapen new books, and it would seem the
+cheapening is partly to be made up for in enhanced sales and partly by
+an increased use of new books for advertisement. Many people consider
+this cheapening of new books as being detrimental to the interests of
+all but the most vulgarly popular authors. They believe it will
+increase the difficulty of new writers, and hopelessly impoverish just
+the finest element in our literary life, those original and
+exceptional minds who demand educated appreciation and do not appeal
+to the man in the street. This may or may not be true; the aspect of
+interest to Socialists is that here is a process going on which is
+likely to produce the most far-reaching results upon the collective
+mind, upon that thought-process of the whole community which is
+necessary for the progressive organization of Society. It is a process
+which is likely to spread one type of writer far and wide, which may
+silence or demoralize another, which may vulgarize and debase
+discussion, and which will certainly make literature far more
+dependent than it is at present upon the goodwill of advertising
+firms. Yet as Socialists they have no ideas whatever in this matter;
+their project of activities ignores it altogether....
+
+Books and newspapers constitute two among the chief mental organs of a
+modern community, but almost, if not equally important is that great
+apparatus for the dissemination of ideas made up of the pulpits and
+lecture halls of a thousand sects and societies. Towards all these
+things Socialism has hitherto maintained an absurd attitude of
+_laissez faire_....
+
+So far I have looked at the collective mind as a thought process only,
+but it has much graver and more immediate functions in a democratic
+State. It has, one must remember, to _will_ social order and
+development. In every country the machinery for determining and
+expressing this will is complex. The common method in the modern
+western State is through the voting of a numerous electorate, which
+tends, it would seem, to become more and more the entire manhood, if
+not the entire adult population of the country. It is a curious but
+perhaps inevitable method. Practically thought has to percolate down
+to the common man through all those strange and accidental channels,
+newspapers which are advertisement sheets, books which may be
+boycotted in a "Book War," pulpits pledged to doctrine and lecture
+halls kept open by rich people's subscriptions; it has to reach him,
+to mingle itself with generalized emotional forces in the heat of
+mysteriously subsidized election campaigns, and then return as a
+collective determination. For the Statesman and the Socialist there
+could hardly be any study more important, one might think, than the
+science of these processes and methods. Yet the world has still to
+produce even the rudimentary generalizations of this needed science of
+collective psychology.
+
+
+§ 3.
+
+Now, I ask the reader to consider very carefully how the Socialist
+movement, using that expression now in its wider sense, stands to this
+very vague and very real outcome of social evolution, the Collective
+Mind; what it is really aspiring to do in that Collective Mind.
+
+One has to recognize that this mind is at present a mind in a state of
+confusion, full of warring suggestions and warring impulses. It is
+like a very disturbed human mind, it is without a clear aim, it does
+not know except in the vaguest terms what it wants to do, it has
+impulses, it has fancies, it begins and forgets. In addition it is
+afflicted with a division within itself that is strictly analogous to
+that strange mental disorder, which is known to psychologists as
+multiple personality. It has no clear conception of the whole of
+itself, it goes about forgetting its proper name and address. Part of
+it thinks of itself as one great being, as, let us say, Germany;
+another thinks of itself as Catholicism, another as the White Race, or
+Judĉa. At times one might deem the whole confusion not so much a mind
+as incurable dementia, a chaos of mental elements, haunted by
+invincible and mutually incoherent fixed ideas. This you will remember
+is the gist of that melancholy torso of irony, Flaubert's _Bouvard et
+Pécuchet_.
+
+In its essence the Socialist movement amounts to this; it is an
+attempt in this warring chaos of a collective mind to pull itself
+together, to develop and establish a governing idea of itself. It is
+like a man saying to himself resolutely, "What am I? What am I doing
+with myself? Where am I drifting?" and making an answer, hesitating at
+first, crude at first, and presently clear and lucid.
+
+The Socialist movement is from this point of view, no less than the
+development of the collective self-consciousness of humanity.
+Necessarily, therefore, it must be international as well as outspoken,
+making no truce with prejudices against race and colour. These
+national and racial collective consciousnesses of to-day are things as
+vague, as fluctuating as mists or clouds, they melt, dissolve into one
+another, they coalesce, they split. No clear isolated national mind
+can ever maintain itself under modern conditions; even the mind of
+Japan now comes into the common melting-pot of thought. We Socialists
+take up to-day the assertion the early Christians were the first to
+make, that mankind is of one household and one substance; the
+Samaritan who stoops to the wounded stranger by the wayside our
+brother rather than that Levite....
+
+In a very different sense indeed the Socialist propaganda must be _the
+germ of the collective self-consciousness of mankind in the coming
+time_. If the purpose of Socialism is to prevail, its scattered
+writings, its dispersed, indistinct and confused utterances must
+increase in height and breadth and range, increase in power and
+service, gather to themselves every means of expression, grow into an
+ordered system of thought, art, literature and will. The Socialist
+Propaganda of to-day must beget the whole Public Opinion of to-morrow
+or fail, the Socialists must play the part of a little leaven to
+leaven the whole world. If they do not leaven it then they are
+altogether defeated....
+
+
+§ 4.
+
+Now, this conception of Socialism as being ultimately a moral and
+intellectual synthesis of mankind from which fresh growth may come,
+sets a fresh test of value upon all the activities of the
+Socialist--and opens up altogether new departments for research. Let
+us face the peculiar difficulty of the Socialist position. We propose
+to destroy the competitive capitalistic system that owns and sustains
+our present newspapers, gives and leaves money to universities, endows
+fresh pulpits, publishes, advertises, and buys books; we have to ask,
+as reasonable creatures, what new media we propose to give in the
+place of these accidental and unsatisfactory methods of distributing
+and exchanging thought. It would almost seem as though current
+Socialism breathes public opinion as the Middle Ages breathed air,
+without realizing that it existed, that it might be vitiated or
+withheld. And so we are beyond the range of prepared and digested
+Socialist proposals here altogether. It is still open to the
+Anti-Socialist to allege that Socialism may incidentally destroy
+itself by choking the channels of its own thinking, and the Socialist
+has still to reply in vague general terms.
+
+_We must insure the continuity of the collective mind_; that is
+manifestly a primary necessity for Socialism. The attempt to realize
+the Marxist idea of a democratic Socialism without that, might easily
+fail into the abortive birth of an acephalous monster, the secular
+development of administrative Socialism give the world over to a
+bureaucratic mandarinate, self-satisfied, interfering and unteachable,
+with whom wisdom would die. And yet we Socialists can produce in our
+plans no absolute bar to these possibilities. Here I can suggest only
+in the most general terms methods and certain principles. They need to
+be laid down as vitally necessary to Socialism, and so far they have
+not been so laid down. They have still to be incorporated in the
+Socialist creed. They are essentially principles of that Liberalism
+out of whose generous aspirations Socialism sprang, but they are
+principles that even to-day, unhappily, do not figure in the
+fundamental professions of any Socialist body.
+
+The first of these is the principle of _freedom of speech_; the
+second, _freedom of writing_; and the third, _universality of
+information_. In the civilized State every one must be free to know,
+knowledge must be patent and at hand, and any one must be free to
+discuss, write, suggest and persuade. These freedoms must be guarded
+as sacred things. It is not in the untutored nature of man to respect
+any of these freedoms; it is not in the bureaucratic habit of mind.
+Indeed, the desire to suppress opinions adverse to our own is almost
+instinctive in human nature. It is an instinct we have to conquer.
+Fair play in discussion is sustained by a cultivated respect, by a
+correction of natural instinct; men need to be _trained_ to be jealous
+of obscurantism, of unfair argument, of authoritative interference
+with opinion when that opinion is against them. In England such a
+jealousy does already largely exist, it has been cultivated with us
+since the seventeenth century at least; America, it seemed to me
+during my short visit to the States, has somewhat retrograded from its
+former British standard in this respect, there is a crude majority
+tyranny in the matter of publication, an un-English disposition to
+boycott libraries, books, authors and publications upon petty issues,
+a growing disposition to discriminate in the mails against unpopular
+views. These interferences with open statement and discussion are
+decivilizing forces.
+
+Given a clear public understanding of these necessities as primary,
+then one may point out that the next necessity for the mental
+existence of a Socialist State is an extension and cheapening of the
+impartial universal distributing activity of the public post so that
+it becomes not only the means of correspondence, but also of
+distributing books and newspapers, pamphlets and every form of printed
+matter. The post-office must become bookseller and newsagent. In
+France this is already the case with the press, and newspapers are
+handed in not by the newsboy but by the public mail. In England
+Messrs. Smith and Mudie, and so forth, may censor what they like among
+periodicals or books. The remedy is more toilsome and vexatious than
+the injury. Neither England nor America has any security against
+finding its public supply of magazines or literature suddenly choked
+by the manoeuvres of some blackmailing Book or News Trust squalidly
+"fighting" author or publisher for an increase in its proportion of
+profits, or interested in financial exploitations liable to exposure.
+Neither country is secure against the complete control of its channels
+of thought by some successful monopolistic adventurer....
+
+The Socialist State will not for a moment permit such risks as these;
+it must certainly be a ubiquitous newsvendor and bookseller; the
+ordinary newsvendor and bookseller must become an impartial State
+official, working for a sure and comfortable salary instead of for
+precarious profits. And this amplification of the book and news post
+and the book and news trades will need to be not simply a municipal
+but a State service of the widest range.
+
+Distribution, however, is only the beginning of the problem. There is
+the more difficult issue of getting books and papers printed and
+published. And here we come to an intricate puzzle in reconciling the
+indisputable need for untrammelled individual expression on the one
+hand with public ownership on the other, and also with the difficult
+riddle how authors may be supported under Socialist conditions. It is
+not within the design of this book to do more than indicate a possible
+solution. These are problems the Socialist has still to work out. At
+present authors with business shrewdness and the ability to be
+interesting get an income from the sale of their books, and it seems
+possible that they might continue to be paid in that way under
+Socialism. It is difficult outside the field of specialist work (which
+under any social system has to be endowed in relation to colleges and
+universities) to find any other just way of discriminating between the
+author who ought to get a living from writing, and the author who has
+no reasonable claim to do so. But under Socialism, in addition to the
+private publisher or altogether replacing him, there will have to be
+some sort of public publisher.
+
+Here again difficulties arise. It is difficult to see how, if there is
+only one general State publishing department, a sort of censorship can
+be altogether avoided, and even if, for example, one insists upon the
+right of every one who cares to pay for it to have matter printed,
+bound and issued by the public presses and binders, it still leaves a
+disagreeable possibility of uniformity haunting the mind. But the
+whole trend of administrative Socialism is towards a conception of
+great local governments, of land, elementary education,
+omnibus-transit, power distribution and the like, vesting in the hands
+of municipalities as great as mediĉval principalities; and it seems
+possible to look to these great bodies and to the municipal patriotism
+and inter-municipal rivalries that will develop about them, for just
+that spirited and competitive publishing that is desirable, just as
+one looks now to their rivalries as a stimulus for art and
+architecture and public dignity and display.[25] Already, as I have
+pointed out in a previous chapter (Chapter IX., § 5), the decorative
+arts had to be rescued from the degrading influence of private
+enterprise; no one wants to go back now to the early Victorian state
+of affairs, and so it is reasonable to hope that out of the municipal
+art and technical schools, which teach printing, binding and the like,
+public presses, public binderies and all the machinery of book
+production may be developed in a natural and convenient manner. So,
+too, the municipalities might publish, seek out, maintain and honour
+writers and sell the books they produced, against each other all over
+the world. It would be a matter of pride for authors still
+unrecognized to go forth to the world with the arms of some great city
+on their covers, and it would be a matter of pride for any city to
+have its arms upon work become classic and immortal. So at least one
+method of competition is possible in this matter....
+
+   [25] I visited Liverpool and Manchester the other day for
+        the first time in my life, and was delighted to find how the
+        inferiority of the local art galleries to those of Glasgow
+        rankled in people's minds.
+
+This, however, is but one passing suggestion out of many
+possibilities. But in all these issues of the intellectual life, it is
+manifest that public ownership must be so contrived, and can be so
+contrived as to avoid centralization and a control without
+alternatives. Moreover, whatever public publishing is done, it must be
+left open to any one to set up as an independent publisher or printer,
+and to sell and advertise through the impartial public book and news
+distributing organization.
+
+I lay some stress upon this matter of book issuing because I think it
+is a remarkable and regrettable thing about contemporary Socialist
+discussion that it does not seem to be in the least alive to the great
+public disadvantage of leaving this vitally important service to
+private gain getting. Municipal coal, municipal milk, municipal house
+owning, the Socialists seem prepared for, and even municipal theatres,
+but municipal publication they still do not take into consideration.
+They leave the capitalist free to contrive the control of their book
+supply and to check and determine all the provender of their minds....
+
+The problem of the press is perhaps to be solved by some parallel
+combination of individual enterprise and public resources. All sorts
+of things may happen to the newspaper of to-day even in the near
+future, it cannot but be felt that in its present form it is an
+extremely transitory phenomenon, that it no longer embodies and rules
+public thought as it did in the middle and later Victorian period, and
+that a separation of public discussion from the news sheet is already
+in progress. Both in England and America the popular magazine seems
+taking over an increasing share of the public thinking. The newspaper
+appears to be in the opening throes of a period of fundamental change.
+
+But I will not go into the future of the newspaper here. All these
+suggestions are merely thrown out in the most tentative way to
+indicate the nature of the field for study that lies open for any
+intelligent worker to cultivate, and that Socialists have so far been
+too busy to consider....
+
+The same truth that controls must be divided and a competition at
+least for honour and repute kept alive under Socialism, needs also to
+be applied to schools and colleges, and all the vast machinery of
+research. It is imperative that there should be overlapping and
+competing organizations. An educated and prosperous community such as
+we postulate for the Socialist State will necessarily be more alert
+for interest and intellectual quality than our present "driven"
+multitude; its ampler leisure, its wider horizons, will keep it
+critical and exacting of what claims its attention. The rivalries of
+institutions and municipalities will be part of the drama of life.
+Under Socialism, with the extension of the educational process it
+contemplates, universities and colleges must become the most prominent
+of facts; nearly every one will have that feeling for some such place
+which now one finds in a Trinity man for Trinity; the sort of feeling
+that sent the last thoughts of Cecil Rhodes back to Oriel. Everywhere,
+balanced against the Town Hall or the Parliament House, will be the
+great university buildings and art museums, the lecture halls open to
+all comers, the great noiseless libraries, the book exhibitions and
+book and pamphlet stores, keenly criticized, keenly used, will teem
+with unhurrying, incessant, creative activities.
+
+And all this immense publicly sustained organization will be doing
+greatly and finely what now our scattered line of Socialist
+propagandists is doing under every disadvantage, that is to say it
+will be developing and sustaining the social self-consciousness, the
+collective sense of the State.
+
+
+§ 5.
+
+I am naturally preoccupied with the Mind of that Civilized State we
+seek to make; because my work lies in this department. But while the
+writer, the publisher and printer, the bookseller and librarian, and
+teacher and preacher must chiefly direct himself to developing this
+great organized mind and intention in the world, other sorts of men
+will be concerned with parallel aspects of the Socialist synthesis.
+The medical worker or the medical investigator will be building up the
+body of a new generation, the Body of the Civilized State, and he will
+be doing all he can not simply as an individual, but as a citizen, to
+_organize_ his services of cure and prevention, of hygiene and
+selection. And the specialized man of science--he will be concerned
+with his own special synthesis, the Knowledge of the Civilized State,
+whether he measure crystals or stain microtome sections or count
+stars. A great and growing multitude of men will be working out the
+Apparatus of the Civilized State; the students of transit and housing,
+the engineers in their incessantly increasing variety, the miners and
+geologists estimating the world's resources in metals and minerals,
+the mechanical inventors perpetually economizing force. The scientific
+agriculturist, again, will be studying the food supply of the world as
+a whole, and how it may be increased and distributed and economized.
+And to the student of law comes the task of rephrasing his intricate
+and often quite beautiful science in relation to the new social
+assumptions we have laid down. All these and a hundred other aspects
+are integral to the wide project of Constructive Socialism as it
+shapes itself now.
+
+And to the man or woman who looks at these issues not as one
+specialized in relation to some constructive calling but as a common
+citizen, a mere human being eager to make and do from the standpoint
+of personal liberty and personal affections, the appeal of this great
+constructive project is equally strong. You want security and liberty!
+Here it is, safe from the greed of trust and landlord; here is
+investment with absolute assurance and trading with absolute justice;
+this is the only safe way to build your own house in perfect security,
+to make your own garden safe for yourself and for your children's
+children, the only way in which you can link a hundred million kindred
+wills in loyal co-operation with your own, and that is to do it not
+for yourself alone and for your children alone, but for all the
+world--all the world doing it also for you--to join yourself to this
+great making of a permanent well-being for mankind.
+
+And here, finally, let me set out a sort of programme of Constructive
+Socialism, as it seems to be shaping itself in the minds of
+contemporary Socialists out of the Fabianism of the eighties and
+nineties, in order that the reader may be able to measure this fuller
+and completer proposition against the earlier Administrative Socialism
+whose propositions are set out in Chapter XI., § 1. All those are
+incorporated in this that follows--there is no contradiction whatever
+between them, but there is amplification; new elements are taken into
+consideration, once disregarded difficulties have been faced and
+partially resolved.
+
+First, then, the Constructive Socialist has to do whatever lies in his
+power towards _the enrichment of the Socialist idea_. He has to give
+whatever gifts he has as artist, as writer, as maker of any sort to
+increasing and refining the conception of civilized life. He has to
+embody and make real the State and the City. And the Socialist idea,
+constantly restated, refreshed and elaborated, has to be made a part
+of the common circle of ideas; has to be grasped and felt and
+assimilated by the whole mass of mankind, has to be made the basis of
+each individual's private morality. That mental work is the primary,
+most essential function of Constructive Socialism.
+
+And next, Constructive Socialism has in every country to direct its
+energies and attention to _political reform_, to the scientific
+reconstruction of our representative and administrative machinery so
+as to give power and real expression to the developing collective mind
+of the community, and to remove the obstructions to Socialization that
+are inevitable where institutions stand for "interests" or have fallen
+under the sway of aggressive private property or of narrowly organized
+classes. Governing and representative bodies, advisory and
+investigatory organizations of a liberal and responsive type have to
+be built up, bodies that shall be really capable of the immense
+administrative duties the secular abolition of the great bulk of
+private ownership will devolve upon them.
+
+Thirdly, the constructive Socialist sets himself to forward _the
+resumption of the land by the community_, by increased control, by
+taxation, by death duties, by purchase and by partially compensated
+confiscation as circumstances may render advisable, and so to make the
+municipality the sole landlord in the reorganized world.
+
+And meanwhile the constructive Socialist goes on also with the work of
+_socializing the main public services_, by transferring them steadily
+from private enterprise to municipal and State control, by working
+steadily for such transfers and by opposing every party and every
+organization that does not set its face resolutely against the private
+exploitation of new needs and services.
+
+There are four distinct systems of public service which could very
+conveniently be organized under collective ownership and control now,
+and each can be attacked independently of the others. There is first
+the need of public educational machinery, and by education I mean not
+simply elementary education, but the equally vital need for great
+colleges not only to teach and study technical arts and useful
+sciences, but also to enlarge learning and sustain philosophical and
+literary work. A civilized community is impossible without great
+public libraries, public museums, public art schools, without public
+honour and support for contemporary thought and literature, and all
+these things the constructive Socialist may forward at a hundred
+points.
+
+Then next there is the need and opportunity of organizing the whole
+community in relation to health, the collective development of
+hospitals, medical aid, public sanitation, child welfare, into one
+great loyal and efficient public service. This, too, may be pushed
+forward either as part of the general Socialist movement or
+independently as a thing in itself by those who may find the whole
+Socialist proposition unacceptable or inconvenient.
+
+A third system of interests upon which practical work may be done at
+the present time lies in the complex interdependent developments of
+transit and housing, questions that lock up inextricably with the
+problem of re-planning our local government areas. Here, too, the
+whole world is beginning to realize more and more clearly that private
+enterprise is wasteful and socially disastrous, that collective
+control, collective management, and so on to collective enterprise and
+ownership of building-land, houses, railways, tramways and omnibuses,
+give the only way of escape from an endless drifting entanglement and
+congestion of our mobile modern population.
+
+The fourth department of economic activity in which collectivism is
+developing, and in which the constructive Socialist will find enormous
+scope for work, is in connection with the more generalized forms of
+public trading, and especially with the production, handling and
+supply of food and minerals. When the lagging enterprise of
+agriculture needs to be supplemented by endowed educational machinery,
+agricultural colleges and the like; when the feeble intellectual
+initiative of the private adventure miner and manufacturer
+necessitates a London "Charlottenburg," it must be manifest that State
+initiative has altogether out-distanced the possibilities of private
+effort, and that the next step to the public authority instructing men
+how to farm, prepare food, run dairies, manage mines and distribute
+minerals, is to cut out the pedagogic middleman and undertake the work
+itself. The State education of the expert for private consumption
+(such as we see at the Royal School of Mines) is surely too ridiculous
+a sacrifice of the community to private property to continue at that.
+The further inevitable line of advance is the transfer from private to
+public hands by purchase, by competing organizations or what not, of
+all those great services, just as rapidly as the increasing capacity
+and experience of the public authority permits.
+
+This briefly is the work and method of Constructive Socialism to-day.
+Under one or other head it can utilize almost every sort of capacity
+and every type of opportunity. It refuses no one who will serve it. It
+is no narrow doctrinaire cult. It does not seek the best of an
+argument, but the best of a world. Its worst enemies are those foolish
+and litigious advocates who antagonize and estrange every development
+of human Good Will that does not pay tribute to their vanity in open
+acquiescence. Its most loyal servants, its most effectual helpers on
+the side of art, invention and public organization and political
+reconstruction, may be men who will never adopt the Socialist name.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+SOME ARGUMENTS _AD HOMINEM_
+
+
+§ 1.
+
+Before I conclude this compact exposition of modern Socialism, it is
+reasonable that the reader should ask for some little help in figuring
+to himself this new world at which we Socialists aim.
+
+"I see the justice of much of the Socialist position," he will say,
+"and the soundness of many of your generalizations. But it still seems
+to remain--generalizations; and I feel the need of getting it into my
+mind as something concrete and real. What will the world be _like_
+when its state is really a Socialist one? That's my difficulty."
+
+The full answer to that would be another book. I myself have tried to
+render my own personal dream in a book called _A Modern Utopia_,[26]
+but that has not been so widely read as I could have wished, it does
+not appeal strongly enough, perhaps, to the practical every-day side
+of life, and here I may do my best to give very briefly some
+intimation of a few of the differences that would strike a
+contemporary if he or she could be transferred to the new order we are
+trying to evolve.
+
+   [26] Chapman & Hall.
+
+It would be a world and a life in no fundamental respect different
+from the world of to-day, made up of the same creatures as ourselves,
+as limited in capacity if not in outlook, as hasty, as quick to take
+offence, as egotistical essentially, as hungry for attention, as
+easily discouraged--they would indeed be better educated and better
+trained, less goaded and less exasperated, with ampler opportunities
+for their finer impulses and smaller scope for rage and secrecy, but
+they would still be human. At bottom it would still be a struggle for
+individual ends, albeit ennobled individual ends; for self-gratification
+and self-realization against external difficulty and internal
+weakness. Self-gratification would be sought more keenly in
+self-development and self-realization in service, but that is a change
+of tone and not of nature. We shall still be individuals. You might,
+indeed, were you suddenly flung into it, fail to note altogether for a
+long time the widest of the differences between the Socialist State
+and our present one--the absence of that worrying urgency to earn,
+that sense of constant economic insecurity, which afflicts all but the
+very careless or the very prosperous to-day. Painful things being
+absent are forgotten. On the same principle certain common objects of
+our daily life you might not miss at all. There would be no slums, no
+hundreds of miles of insanitary, ignoble homes, no ugly
+health-destroying cheap factories. If you were not in the habit of
+walking among slums and factories you would scarcely notice that. Din
+and stress would be enormously gone. But you would remark simply a
+change in the atmosphere about you and in your own contentment that
+would be as difficult to analyze as the calm of a Sunday morning in
+sunshine in a pleasant country.
+
+Let me put my conception of the Socialist world to a number of typical
+readers, as it were, so that they may see clearly just what difference
+in circumstances there would be for them if we Socialists could have
+our way now. Let me suppose them as far as possible exactly what they
+are now save for these differences.
+
+Then first let us take a sample case and suppose yourself to be an
+elementary teacher. So far as your work went you would be very much as
+you are to-day; you would have a finer and more beautiful school-room
+perhaps, better supplied with apparatus and diagrams; you would have
+cleaner and healthier, that is to say brighter and more responsive
+children, and you would have smaller and more manageable classes.
+Schools will be very important things in the Socialist State, and you
+will find outside your class-room a much ampler building with open
+corridors, a library, a bath, refectory for the children's midday
+meal, and gymnasium, and beyond the playground a garden. You will be
+an enlisted member of a public service, free under reasonable
+conditions to resign, liable under extreme circumstances to dismissal
+for misconduct, but entitled until you do so to a minimum salary, a
+maintenance allowance, that is, and to employment. You will have had a
+general education from the State up to the age of sixteen or
+seventeen, and then three or four years of sound technical training,
+so that you will know your work from top to bottom. You will have
+applied for your present position in the service, whatever it is, and
+have been accepted, much as you apply and are accepted for positions
+now, by the school managers, and you will have done so because it
+attracted you and they will have accepted you because your
+qualifications seemed adequate to them. You will draw a salary
+attached to the position, over and above that minimum maintenance
+salary to which I have already alluded. You will be working just as
+keenly as you are now, and better because of the better training you
+have had, and because of shorter hours and more invigorating
+conditions, and you will be working for much the same ends, that is to
+say for promotion to a larger salary and wider opportunities and for
+the interest and sake of the work. In your leisure you may be
+studying, writing, or doing some work of supererogation for the school
+or the State--because _under Socialist conditions it cannot be too
+clearly understood that all the reasons the contemporary Trade
+Unionist finds against extra work and unpaid work will have
+disappeared_! You will not in a Socialist State make life harder for
+others by working keenly and doing much if you are so disposed. You
+will be free to give yourself generously to your work. You will have
+no anxiety about sickness or old age, the State, the universal
+Friendly Society, will hold you secure against that; but if you like
+to provide extra luxury and dignity for your declining years, if you
+think you will be amused to collect prints or books, or travel then,
+or run a rose garden or grow chrysanthemums, the State will be quite
+ready for you to pay it an insurance premium in order that you may
+receive in due course an extra annuity to serve that end you
+contemplate.
+
+You will probably live as a tenant in a house which may either stand
+alone or be part of a terrace or collegiate building, but instead of
+having a private landlord, exacting of rent and reluctant of repairs,
+your house landlord will very probably be, and your ground landlord
+will certainly be, the municipality, the great Birmingham or London or
+Hampshire or Glasgow or such-like municipality; and your house will be
+built solidly and prettily instead of being jerry-built and
+mean-looking, and it will have bathroom, electric light, electrically
+equipped kitchen and so forth, as every modern civilized house might
+have and should have now. If your taste runs to a little close garden
+of your own, you will probably find plenty of houses with one; if that
+is not so, and you want it badly, you will get other people of like
+tastes to petition the municipality to provide some, and if that will
+not do, you will put yourself up as a candidate for the parish or
+municipal council to bring this about. You will pay very much the sort
+of rent you pay now, but you will not pay it to a private landlord to
+spend as he likes at Monte Carlo or upon foreign missions or in
+financing "Moderate" bill-posting or what not, but to the
+municipality, and you will pay no rates at all. The rent will do under
+Socialism what the rates do now. You cannot grasp too clearly that
+_Socialism will abolish rates_ absolutely. Rates for public purposes
+are necessary to-day because the landowners of the world evade the
+public obligations that should, in common sense, go with the rent.
+
+Light, heating, water and so on will either be covered by the rent or
+charged for separately, and they will be supplied just as near
+cost-price as possible. I don't think you will buy coals, because I
+think that in a few years' time it will be possible to heat every
+house adequately by electricity; but if I am wrong in that, then you
+will buy your coals just as you do now, except that you will have an
+honest coal merchant, the Public Coal Service, a merchant not greedy
+for profit nor short in the weight, calculating and foreseeing your
+needs, not that it may profit by them but in order to serve them,
+storing coal against a demand and so never raising the price in
+winter.
+
+I am assuming you are going to be a house occupier, but if you are a
+single man, you will probably live in pleasant apartments in an hotel
+or college and dine in a club, and perhaps keep no more than a couple
+of rooms, one for sleep and one for study and privacy of your own. But
+if you are a married man, then I must enlarge a little further upon
+your domestic details, because you will probably want a "home of your
+own."...
+
+
+§ 2.
+
+Now, just how a married couple lives in the Socialist State will
+depend very much, as indeed it does now, on the individual relations
+and individual taste and proclivities of the two people most
+concerned. Many couples are childless now, and indisposed for home and
+children, and such people will also be found in the Socialist State,
+and in their case the wife will probably have an occupation and be a
+teacher, a medical practitioner, a government clerk or official, an
+artist, a milliner, and earn her own living. In which case they will
+share apartments, perhaps, and dine in a club and go about together
+very much as a childless couple of journalists or artists or
+theatrical people do in London to-day. But of course if either of them
+chooses to idle more or less and live on the earnings of the other,
+that will be a matter quite between themselves. No one will ask who
+pays their rent and their bills; that will be for their own private
+arrangement.
+
+But if they are not childless people, but have children, things will
+be on a rather different footing. Then they will probably have a home
+all to themselves, and that will be the wife's chief affair; only
+incidentally will she attend to any other occupation. You will
+remember that the State is to be a sort of universal Friendly Society
+supplying good medical advice and so forth, and so soon as a woman is
+likely to become a mother, her medical adviser, man or woman as the
+case may be, will report this to the proper officials and her special
+income as a prospective mother in the State will begin. Then, when her
+child is born, there will begin an allowance for its support, and
+these payments will continue monthly or quarterly, and will be larger
+or smaller according first to the well-being of the child, and
+secondly to the need the State may have for children--so long as the
+children are in their mother's care. All this money for maternity will
+be the wife's independent income, and normally she will be the house
+ruler--just as she is now in most well-contrived households. Her
+personality will make the home atmosphere; that is the woman's gift
+and privilege, and she will be able to do it with a free hand. I
+suppose that for the husband's cost in the household the present
+custom of cultivated people of independent means will continue, and he
+will pay over to his wife his share of the household expenses....
+
+After the revenue in the domestic budget under Socialism one must
+consider the expenditure. I have already given an idea how the rent
+and rates, lighting and water are to be dealt with under Socialist
+conditions. For the rest, the housewife will be dealing on very
+similar lines to those she goes upon at present. She will buy what she
+wants and pay cash for it. The milkman will come in the morning and
+leave his "book" at the end of the week, but instead of coming from
+Mr. Watertap Jones' or the Twenty-per-cent. Dairy Company, he will
+come from the Municipal Dairy; he will have no interest in giving
+short measure, and all the science in the State will be behind him in
+keeping the milk clean and pure. If he is unpunctual or trying in any
+way, the lady will complain just as she does now, but to his official
+superiors instead of his employer; and if that does not do, she and
+her aggrieved neighbours (all voters, you will understand) will put
+the thing to their representative in the parish or municipal council.
+Then she will buy her meat and grocery and so on, not in one of a
+number of inefficient little shops with badly assorted goods under
+unknown brands as she does now if she lives in a minor neighbourhood,
+but in a branch of a big, well-organized business like Lipton's or
+Whiteley's or Harrod's. She may have to go to it on a municipal
+electric car, for which she will probably pay a fare just as she does
+now, unless, perhaps, her house rent includes a season ticket. The
+store will not belong to Mr. Lipton or Mr. Whiteley or Mr. Harrod, but
+to the public--that will be the chief difference--and if she does not
+like her service she will be able to criticize and remedy it, just as
+one can now criticize and remedy any inefficiency in one's local
+post-office. If she does not like the brands of goods supplied she
+will be able to insist upon others. There will be brands, too,
+different from the household names of to-day in the goods she will
+buy. The county arms of Devon will be on the butter paper, Hereford
+and Kent will guarantee her cider, Hampshire and Wiltshire answer for
+her bacon--just as now already Australia brands her wines and New
+Zealand protects her from deception (and insures clean, decent
+slaughtering) in the matter of Canterbury lamb. I rather like to think
+of the red dagger of London on the wholesome bottled ales of her great
+(municipalized) breweries, and Maidstone or Rochester, let us say,
+boasting a special reputation for jam or pickles. Good honest food all
+of it will be, made by honest unsweated women and men, with the pride
+of broad vales and uplands, counties, principalities and great cities
+behind it. Each county and municipality will be competing freely
+against its fellows, not in price but quality, the cheeses of Cheshire
+against the cheeses of France and Switzerland, the beer of Munich
+against the Kentish brew; bread from the bakeries of London and Paris,
+biscuits from Reading town, chocolates from Switzerland and
+Bourneville, side by side with butter from the meadows of Denmark and
+Russia.
+
+Then, when the provisions have been bought, she will go perhaps to the
+other departments of the great store and buy or order the fine linen
+and cotton of the Manchester men, the delicate woollens of the
+Bradford city looms, the silks of London or Mercia, Northampton or
+American boots, and so forth, just as she does now in any of the great
+stores. But, as I say, all these goods will be honest goods, made to
+wear as well as look well, and the shopman will have no "premiums" to
+tempt him to force rubbish upon her instead of worthy makes by
+specious "introduction."
+
+But suppose she wants a hat or a dress made. Then, probably, for all
+that the world is under Socialism she will have to go to private
+enterprise; a matter of taste and individuality such as dress cannot
+be managed in a wholesale way. She will probably find in the same
+building as the big department store, a number of little
+establishments, of Madame This, of Mrs. That, some perhaps with
+windows displaying a costume or so or a hat or so, and here she will
+choose her particular artiste and contrive the thing with her. I am
+inclined to think the dressmaker or milliner will charge a fee
+according to her skill and reputation for designing and cutting and so
+on, and that the customer will pay the store separately for material
+and the municipal workshop for the making under the artiste's
+direction. I don't think, that is, that the milliner or dressmaker
+will make a trading profit, but only an artiste's fee.
+
+And if the lady wants to buy books, music, artistic bric-a-brac, or
+what not, she will find the big store displaying and selling all these
+things on commission for the municipal or private producers all over
+the world....
+
+So much for the financial and economic position of an ordinary woman
+in a Socialist State. But management and economies are but the basal
+substance of a woman's life. She will be free not merely financially;
+the systematic development of the social organisation and of the
+mechanism of life will be constantly releasing her more and more from
+the irksome duties and drudgeries that have consumed so much of the
+energies of her sex in the past. She will be a citizen, and free as a
+man to read for herself, think for herself and seek expression. Under
+the law, in politics and all the affairs of life she will be the equal
+of a man. No one will control her movements or limit her actions or
+stand over her to make decisions for her. All these things are
+implicit in the fundamental generalization of Socialism, which denies
+property in human beings.
+
+
+§ 3.
+
+Perhaps now the reader will be able to figure a little better the
+common texture of the life of a teacher or a housewife under
+Socialism. And incidentally I have glanced at the position a clever
+milliner or dressmaker would probably have under the altered
+conditions. The great mass of the _employés_ in the distributing trade
+would obviously be living a sort of clarified, dignified version of
+their present existence, freed from their worst anxieties, the terror
+of the "swap," the hopeless approach of old age, and from the sweated
+food and accommodation of the living-in system. Under Socialism the
+"living-in" system would be incredible. Their conditions of life would
+approximate to those of the teacher. Like him they would be enrolled a
+part of a great public service, and like him entitled to a minimum
+wage, and over and above that they would draw salaries commensurate
+with the positions their energy and ability had won. The prosperous
+merchant of to-day would find himself somewhere high in the hierarchy
+of the distributing service. If, for example, you are a tea merchant
+or a provision broker, then probably if you like that calling, you
+would be handling the same kind of goods, not for profit but
+efficiency, "shipping into the Midlands" from Liverpool, let us say,
+much as you do now. You would be keener on quality and less keen on
+deals; that is all. You would not be trying to "skin" a business
+rival, but very probably you would be just as keen to beat the London
+distributers and distinguish yourself in that way. And you would get a
+pretty good salary; modern Socialism does not propose to maintain any
+dead-level to the detriment of able men. Modern Socialism has cleared
+itself of that jealous hatred of prosperity that was once a part of
+class-war Socialism. You would be, you see, far more than you are now,
+one of the pillars of your town's prosperity--and the Town Hall would
+be a place worth sitting in....
+
+So far as the rank and file of the distributing service is concerned
+the chief differences would be a better education, security for a
+minimum living, an assured old age, shorter hours, more private
+freedom and more opportunity. Since the whole business would be public
+and the customer would be one's indirect master through the polling
+booth, promotion would be far more by merit than it is now in private
+businesses, where irrelevant personal considerations are often
+overpowering, and it would be open to any one to apply for a transfer
+to some fresh position if he or she found insufficient scope in the
+old one. The staff of the stores will certainly "live out," and their
+homes and way of living will be closely parallel to that of the two
+people I have sketched in §§ 1 and 2.
+
+In the various municipal and State Transit Services, the condition of
+affairs would be even closer to a broadened and liberalized version of
+things as they are. The conductors and drivers will no doubt wear
+uniforms for convenience of recognition, but a uniform will carry with
+it no association with the idea of a livery as it does at the present
+time. Mostly this service will be run by young men, and each one, like
+the private of the democratic French Army, will feel that he has a
+marshal's _batôn_ in his knapsack. He will have had a good education;
+he will have short hours of duty and leisure for self-improvement or
+other pursuits, and if he remains a conductor or driver all his life
+he will have only his own unpretending qualities to thank for that. He
+will probably remain a conductor if he likes to remain a conductor,
+and go elsewhere if he does not. He is not obliged to take that
+_batôn_ out and bother with it if he has quiet tastes.
+
+The great organized industries, mining, cotton, iron, building and the
+like, would differ chiefly in the permanence of employment and the
+systematic evasion of the social hardship caused now-a-days by new
+inventions and economies in method. There will exist throughout the
+world an organized economic survey, which will continually prepare and
+revise estimates of the need of iron, coal, cloth and so forth in the
+coming months; the blind speculative production of our own times is
+due merely to the dark ignorance in which we work in these matters,
+and with such a survey, employment will lose much of the cruel
+intermittence it now displays. The men in these great productive
+services, quite equally with teachers and railwaymen, will be
+permanently employed. They will be no more taken on and turned off by
+the day or week than we should take on or turn off an extra policeman,
+or depend for our defence upon soldiers casually engaged upon the
+battlefield at sixpence an hour. And if by adopting some ingenious
+device we dispense suddenly with the labour of hundreds of men, the
+Socialist State will send them, not into the casual wards and colonies
+as our State does, to become a social burthen there, but into the
+technical schools to train for some fresh use of their energies. Taken
+all round, of course, these men, even the least enterprising or able,
+will be better off than they are now, with a fuller share of the
+product of their industry. Many will no doubt remain as they are,
+rather through want of ambition than want of push, because under
+Socialism life will be tolerable for a poor man. A man who chooses to
+do commonplace work and spend his leisure upon chess or billiards, or
+in gossip or eccentric studies, or amusing but ineffectual art, will
+remain a poor man indeed, but not be made a wretched one. Sheer toil
+of a mechanical sort there is little need of in the world now, it
+could be speedily dispensed with at a thousand points were human
+patience not cheaper than good machinery, but there will still remain
+ten thousand undistinguished sorts of work for unambitious men....
+
+If you are a farmer or any sort of horticulturist, a fruit or flower
+grower, let us say, or a seedsman, you will probably find yourself
+still farming under Socialism--that is to say, renting land and
+getting what you can out of it. Your rent will be fixed just as it is
+to-day by what people will give. But your landlord will be the
+Municipality or the County, and the rent you pay will largely come
+back to you in repairs, in the guiding reports and advice of the
+Agricultural Department, in improved roads, in subventions to a good
+electric car service to take your produce to market; in aids and
+education for your children. You will probably have a greater fixity
+of tenure and a clearer ownership in improvements than you have
+to-day. I am inclined to think that your dairying and milking and so
+forth will be done for you wholesale in big public dairies and mills
+because of the economy of that; you will send up the crude produce and
+sell it, perhaps, to the county association to brand and distribute.
+It is probable you will sell your crops standing, and the public
+authority will organize the harvesting and bring out an army of
+workers from the towns to gather your fruit, hops and corn. You will
+need, therefore, only a small permanent staff of labourers, and these
+are much more likely to be partners with you in the enterprise than
+wage workers needing to be watched and driven.
+
+In your leisure you will shoot, perhaps, or hunt, if your tastes
+incline that way--it is quite likely that scattered among the farms of
+the future countryside will be the cottages and homes of all sorts of
+people with open-air tastes who will share their sports with you. One
+need not dread the disappearance of sport with the disappearance of
+the great house.... In the dead winter-time you will probably like to
+run into the nearest big town with your wife and family, stay in an
+hotel for a few weeks to talk to people in your clubs, see what plays
+there are in the municipal theatres and so forth. And you will no
+doubt travel also in your holidays. All the world will know something
+of the pleasures and freedom of travel, of wandering and the enjoyment
+of unfamiliar atmospheres, of mountains and deserts and remote cities
+and deep forests, and the customs of alien peoples.
+
+
+§ 4.
+
+A medical man or woman, or a dentist or any such skilled professional,
+like the secondary school-master, will cease to be a private
+adventurer under Socialism, concerned chiefly with the taking of a
+showy house and the use of a showy conveyance; he or she will become
+part of one of the greatest of all the public services in the coming
+time, the service of public health. Either he--I use this pronoun and
+imply its feminine--will be on the staff of one of the main hospitals
+(which will not be charities, but amply endowed public institutions),
+or he will be a part of a district staff, working in conjunction with
+a nursing organization, a cottage hospital, an isolation hospital and
+so forth, or he will be an advising specialist, or mainly engaged in
+research or teaching and training a new generation in the profession.
+
+He must not judge his life and position quite by the lives and
+position of publicly endowed investigators and medical officers of
+health to-day. At present, because of the jealousy of the private
+owner who has, as he says, to "find the funds," almost all public
+employment is badly paid relatively to privately earned incomes. The
+same thing is true of all scientific investigators and of most public
+officials. The state of things to which Socialism points is a world
+that will necessarily be harmonious with these constructive
+conceptions and free from these jealousies. Whitehall and South
+Kensington have much to fear from the wanton columns of a vulgarized
+capitalistic press and from the greedy intrigues of syndicated
+capital, but nothing from a sane constructive Socialism. To the public
+official, therefore, of the present time, the Socialist has merely to
+say that he will probably be better paid, relatively, than he is now,
+and in the matter of his house rents and domestic marketing, _vide
+supra_....
+
+But now, suppose you are an artist--and I use the word to cover all
+sorts of art, literary, dramatic and musical, as well as painting,
+sculpture, design and architecture--you want before all things freedom
+for personal expression, and you probably have an idea that this is
+the last thing you will get in the Socialist State. But, indeed, you
+will get far more than you do now. You will begin as a student, no
+doubt, in your local Municipal Art Schools, and there you will win
+prizes and scholarships and get some glorious years of youth and work
+in Italy or Paris, or Germany or London, or Boston or New York, or
+wherever the great teachers and workers of your art gather thickest;
+and then you will compete, perhaps, for some public work, and have
+something printed or published or reproduced and sold for you by your
+school or city; or get a loan from your home municipality for
+material--if your material costs money--and set to work making that
+into some saleable beautiful thing. If you are at all distinguished in
+quality, you will have a competition among public authorities from the
+beginning, to act as sponsors and dealers for your work; benevolent
+dealers they will be, and content with a commission. And if you make
+things that make many people interested and happy, you may by that
+fortunate gift of yours, grow to be as rich and magnificent a person
+as any one in the Socialist State. But if you do not please people at
+all, either the connoisseurs of the municipal art collection or
+private associations of art patrons or the popular buyer, well, then
+your lot will be no harder than the lot of any unsuccessful artist
+now; you will have to do something else for a time and win leisure to
+try again.
+
+Theatrical productions will be run on a sort of improvement upon
+contemporary methods, but there will be no cornering of talent
+possible, no wild advertisement of favoured stars upon strictly
+commercial lines, no Theatrical Trust. The theatres will be municipal
+buildings, every theatre-going voter will be keen to see them
+comfortable and fine; they will, perhaps, be run in some cases by a
+public repertoire company and in another by a lessee, and this latter
+may be financed by his own private savings or by subscribers or
+partners, or by a loan from the public bank as the case may be. This
+latter method of exploitation by a lessee will probably also work best
+in the public Music Halls, but it is quite equally possible that these
+may be controlled by managers under partly elected and partly
+appointed public committees. In some cases the theatrical lessee might
+be a kind of stage society organized for the production of particular
+types of play. The spectators will pay for admission, of course, as
+they do now, but to the municipal box offices; and I suppose the
+lessee or the author and artists will divide up the surplus after the
+rent of the theatre has been deducted for the municipal treasury. In
+every town of any importance there will be many theatres, music halls
+and the like, perhaps under competing committees. In all these
+matters, as every intelligent person understands, one has to maintain
+variety of method, a choice of avenues, freedom from autocracies; and
+since the Socialist community will contain a great number of
+intelligent persons with leisure and opportunity for artistic
+appreciation, there is little chance of this important principle being
+forgotten, much less than there is in this world where a group of
+dealers can often make an absolute corner in this artistic market or
+that. You will not, under Socialism, see Sarah Bernhardt playing in a
+tent as she had to do in America, because all the theatres have been
+closed against her through some mean dispute with a Trust about the
+sharing of profits....
+
+And if it is not too sudden a transition, it seems most convenient in
+a Socialist State to leave religious worship entirely to the care of
+private people; to let them subscribe among themselves, subject, of
+course, to a reasonable statute of mortmain, to lease land, and build
+and endow and maintain churches and chapels, altars and holy places
+and meeting-houses, priests and devout ceremonies. This will be the
+more easily done since the heavy social burthens that oppress
+religious bodies at the present time will be altogether lifted from
+them; they will have no poor to support, no schools, no hospitals, no
+nursing sisters, the advance of civilization will have taken over
+these duties of education and humanity that Christianity first taught
+us to realize. So, too, there seems no objection and no obstacle in
+Socialism to religious houses, to nunneries, monasteries and the like,
+so far as these institutions are compatible with personal freedom and
+the public health, but of course factory laws and building laws will
+run through all these places, and the common laws and limitations of
+contract override their vows, if their devotees repent. So that you
+see Socialism will touch nothing living of religion, and if you are a
+religious minister, you will be very much as you are at the present
+time, but with lightened parochial duties. If you are an earnest woman
+and want to nurse the sick and comfort the afflicted, you will need
+only, in addition to your religious profession, to qualify as a nurse
+or medical practitioner. There will still be ample need of you.
+Socialism will not make an end of human trouble, either of the body or
+of the soul, albeit it will put these things into such comfort and
+safety as it may.
+
+
+§ 5.
+
+And now let me address a section to those particular social types
+whose method of living seems most threatened by the development of an
+organized civilization, who find it impossible to imagine lives at all
+like their own in the Socialist State....
+
+But first it may be well to remind them again of something I have
+already done my best to make clear, that the modern Socialist
+contemplates no swift change of conditions from those under which we
+live, to Socialism. There will be no wonderful Monday morning when the
+old order will give place to the new. Year by year the great change
+has to be brought about, now by this socialization of a service, now
+by an alteration in the incidence of taxation, now by a new device of
+public trading, now by an extension of education. This problem at the
+utmost is a problem of adaptation, and for most of those who would
+have no standing under the revised conceptions of social intercourse,
+it is no more than to ask whether it is wise they should prepare their
+sons or daughters to follow in their footsteps or consent to regard
+their callings as a terminating function.
+
+So far as many professions and callings go, this matter may be
+dismissed in a few words. Under Socialism, while the particular trade
+or profession might not exist, there would probably be ample scope in
+the public machine for the socially more profitable employment of the
+same energies. A family solicitor, such as we know now, would have a
+poor time in a Socialist State, but the same qualities of watchful
+discretion would be needed at a hundred new angles and friction
+surfaces of the State organization. In the same way the private
+shopkeeper, as I have already explained, would be replaced by the
+department managers and buyers of the public stores, the rent
+collector, the estate bailiff--one might make long lists of social
+types who would undergo a parallel transformation.
+
+But suppose now you are a servant, I mean a well-trained, expert,
+prosperous servant; would the world have no equivalent of you under
+the new order? I think probably it would. With a difference, there
+will be room for a vast body of servants in the Socialist State. But I
+think there will be very few servants to private people, and that the
+"menial" conception of a servant will have vanished in an entirely
+educated community. The domestic work of the ordinary home, one may
+prophesy confidently, will be very much reduced in the near future
+whether we move toward Socialism or no; all the dirt of coal, all the
+disagreeableness attendant upon lamps and candles, most of the heavy
+work of cooking will be obviated by electric lighting and heating, and
+much of the bedroom service dispensed with through the construction of
+properly equipped bath-dressing-rooms. In addition, it is highly
+probable that there will be a considerable extension of the club idea;
+ordinary people will dine more freely in public places, and
+conveniences for their doing so will increase. The single-handed
+servant will have disappeared, and if you are one of that class you
+must console yourself by thinking that under Socialism you would have
+been educated up to seventeen or eighteen and then equipped for some
+more interesting occupation. But there will remain much need of
+occasional help of a more skilled sort, in cleaning out the house
+thoroughly every now and then, probably with the help of mechanisms,
+in recovering and repairing furniture, and in all this sort of
+"helping" which will be done as between one social equal and another,
+many people who are now, through lack of opportunity and education,
+servants, will no doubt be employed. But where the better type of
+service will be found will probably be in the clubs and associated
+homes, where pleasant-mannered, highly-paid, skilful people will see
+to the ease and comfort of a considerable _clientèle_ without either
+offence or servility. There still remains, no doubt, a number of
+valets, footmen, maids and so on, who under Socialism would not be
+servants at all, but something far better, more interesting and more
+productive socially.
+
+But this writing of servants brings me now to another possibility, and
+that is that perhaps you are, dear reader, one of that small number of
+fortunate people, rich and well placed in the world, who even under
+existing conditions seem to possess all that life can offer a human
+being. You live beautifully in a great London house, waited upon by
+companies of servants, you have country seats with parks about them
+and fine gardens, you can travel luxuriously to any part of the
+civilized world and live sumptuously there. All things are done for
+you, all ways are made smooth for you. A skilled maid or valet saves
+you even the petty care of your person; skilled physicians, wonderful
+specialists intervene at any threat of illness or discomfort; you keep
+ten years younger in appearance than your poorer contemporaries and
+twice as splendid. And above all you have an immense sense of downward
+perspectives, of being special and apart and above the common herd of
+mankind.
+
+Now frankly Socialism will be incompatible with this patrician style.
+You must contemplate the end of all that. You may still be healthy,
+refined, free, beautifully clothed and housed; but you will not have
+either the space or the service or the sense of superiority you enjoy
+now, under Socialism. You would have to take your place among the
+multitude again. Only a moiety of your property will remain to your
+sort of person if any revolution is achieved. The rents upon which you
+live, the investments that yield the income that makes the employment
+of that army of butlers and footmen, estate workers and underlings
+possible, that buys your dresses, your jewels, your motorcars, your
+splendid furnishings and equipments, will for the most part be public
+property, yielding revenue to some national or municipal treasury. You
+will have to give up much of that. There is no way out of it, your way
+to Socialism is through "the needle's eye." From your rare class and
+from your class alone does Socialism require a real material
+sacrifice. You must indeed give up much coarse pride. There is no help
+for it, you must face that if you face Socialism at all. You must come
+down to a simpler and, in many material aspects, less distinguished
+way of living.
+
+This is so clearly evident that to any one who believes self-seeking
+is the ruling motive, the only possible motive in mankind, it seems
+incredible that your class ever will do anything than oppose to the
+last the advancement of Socialism. You will fight for what you have,
+and the Have-nots will fight to take it away. Therefore it is that the
+Socialists of the Social Democratic Federation preach a class war; to
+my mind a lurid, violent and distasteful prospect. We shall have to
+get out of the miseries and disorder of to-day, they think, if not by
+way of chateau-burning and tumbrils, at least by a mitigated
+equivalent of that. But I am not of that opinion. I have a lurking
+belief that you are not altogether eaten up by the claims of your own
+magnificence. While there are no doubt a number of people in your
+class who would fight like rats in a corner against, let us say, the
+feeding of poor people's starving children or the recovery of the land
+by the State to which it once belonged, I believe there is enough of
+nobility in your class as a whole to considerably damp their
+resistance. Because you have silver mirrors and silver hairbrushes, it
+does not follow that you have not a conscience. I am no believer in
+the theory that to be a _sans-culotte_ is to be morally impeccable, or
+that a man loses his soul because he possesses thirty pairs of
+trousers beautifully folded by a valet. I cherish the belief that your
+very refinement will turn--I have seen it in one or two fine minds
+visibly turning--against the social conditions that made it possible.
+All this space, all this splendour has its traceable connection with
+the insufficiencies and miseries from which you are so remote. Once
+that realization comes to you the world changes. In certain lights,
+correlated with that, your magnificence can look, you will
+discover--forgive the word!--a little _vulgar_....
+
+Once you have seen that you will continue to see it. The _nouveau
+riche_ of the new Plutocratic type comes thrusting among you,
+demonstrating that sometimes quite obtrusively. You begin by feeling
+sorry for his servants and then apologetic to your own. You cannot "go
+it" as the rich Americans and the rich South Africans, or prosperous
+book-makers or rich music-hall proprietors, "go it," their silver and
+ivory and diamonds throw light on your own. And among other things you
+discover you are not nearly so dependent on the numerous men in
+livery, the spaces and enrichments, for your pride and comfort, as
+these upstart people.
+
+I trust also to the appeal of the intervening spaces. You cannot so
+entirely close your world in from the greater world without that, in
+transit at least, the other aspects do not intrude. Every time you
+leave Charing Cross for the Continent, for example, there are all
+those horrible slums on either side of the line. These things _are_,
+you know, a part of your system, part of you; they are the reverse of
+that splendid fabric and no separate thing, the wide rich tapestry of
+your lives comes through on the other side, stitch for stitch in
+stunted bodies, in children's deaths, in privation and anger. Your
+grandmothers did not realize that. You do. You _know_. In that
+recognition and a certain nobility I find in you, I put my hope, much
+more than in any dreadful memories of 1789 and those vindictive pikes.
+Your class is a strangely mixed assembly of new and old, of base and
+fine. But through it all, in Great Britain and Western Europe
+generally, soaks a tradition truly aristocratic, a tradition that
+transcends property; you are aware, and at times uneasily aware, of
+duty and a sort of honour. You cannot bilk cabmen nor cheat at cards;
+there is something in your making forbids that as strongly as an
+instinct. But what if it is made clear to you (and it is being made
+clear to you) that the wealth you have is, all unwittingly on your
+part, the outcome of a colossal--if unpremeditated--social bilking?
+
+Moreover, though Socialism does ask you to abandon much space and
+service, it offers you certain austere yet not altogether inadequate
+compensations. If you will cease to have that admirable house in
+Mayfair and the park in Kent and the moorlands and the Welsh castle,
+yet you will have another ownership of a finer kind to replace those
+things. For all London will be yours, a city to serve indeed, and a
+sense of fellowship that is, if you could but realize it, better than
+respect. The common people will not be common under Socialism. That is
+a very important thing for you to remember. But better than those
+thoughts is this, that you will own yourself too, more than you do
+now. All that state, all that prominence of yours--do you never feel
+how it stands between you and life?
+
+So I appeal from your wealth to your nobility, to help us to
+impoverish your class a little relatively and make all the world
+infinitely richer by that impoverishment. And I am sure that to some
+of you I shall not appeal in vain....
+
+
+§ 6.
+
+And lastly, perhaps you are chiefly a patriot and you are concerned
+for the flag and country with which your emotions have interwoven. You
+find that the Socialist talks constantly of internationalism and the
+World State, and that presents itself to your imagination as a very
+vague and colourless substitute for a warm and living reality of
+England or "these States" or the Empire. Well, your patriotism will
+have suffered a change, but I do not think it need starve under
+Socialist conditions. It may be that war will have ceased, but the
+comparison and competition and pride of communities will not have
+ceased. Philadelphia and Chicago, Boston and New York are at peace, in
+all probability for ever at peace, so far as guns and slaughter go,
+but each perpetually criticizes, goads and tries to outshine the
+other. And the civic pride and rivalry of to-day will be nothing to
+that pride and rivalry when every man's business is the city and the
+city's honour and well-being is his own. You will have, therefore,
+first this civic patriotism, your ancient pride in your city, a city
+which will be like the city of the ancient Athenian's, or the mediĉval
+Italian's, the centre of a system of territories and the property and
+chief interest of its citizens. I, for instance, should love and
+serve, even as I love to-day, my London and my Cinque Ports, these
+Home Counties about London, the great lap of the Thames valley and the
+Weald and Downland, my own country in which all my life has been
+spent; for you the city may be Ulster or Northumbria, or Wales or East
+or West Belgium, or Finland or Burgundy, or Berne or Berlin, or
+Venetia, Pekin, Calcutta, Queensland or San Francisco. And keeping the
+immediate peace between these vigorous giant municipal states and
+holding them together there will still be in many cases the old
+national or Imperial government and the old flag, a means of joint
+action between associated and kindred municipalities with a common
+language and a common history and a common temper and race. The nation
+and the national government will be the custodian of the national
+literature and the common law, the controller and perhaps the vehicle
+of intermunicipal and international trade, and an intermediary between
+its municipal governments and that great Congress to which all things
+are making, that permanent international Congress which will be
+necessary to insure the peace of the world.
+
+That, at least, is my own dream of the order that may emerge from the
+confusion of distrusts and tentatives and dangerous absurdities, those
+reactions of fear and old traditional attitudes and racial
+misconceptions which one speaks of as international relations to-day.
+For I do not believe that war is a necessary condition to human
+existence and progress, that it is anything more than a confusion we
+inherit from the less organized phases of social development. I think
+but a little advancement in general intelligence will make it an
+impossible thing.
+
+But suppose after all that I am wrong in my estimate in this matter,
+and that war will still be possible in a Socialist or partly Socialist
+world; suppose that the Socialist State in which I am imagining you to
+live is threatened by some military power. Then I don't think the
+military power that threatens it need threaten very long. Because
+consider, here will be a State organized for collective action as
+never a State has been organized before, a State in which every man
+and woman will be a willing and conscious citizen saturated with the
+spirit of service, in which scientific research will be at a maximum
+of vigour and efficiency. What individualist or autocratic militarism
+will stand a chance against it? It goes quite without saying from the
+essential principles of Socialism that _if war is necessary_ then
+every citizen will, as a matter of course, take his part in that war.
+It is mere want of intellectual grasp that has made a few
+working-class Socialists in England and France oppose military
+service. Universal military service, given the need for it, is innate
+in the Socialist idea, just as it is blankly antagonistic to the
+"private individual" ideas of Eighteenth-Century Liberalism. It is
+innate in the Socialist idea, but equally innate in that is the
+conception of establishing and maintaining for ever a universal peace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE ADVANCEMENT OF SOCIALISM
+
+
+§ 1.
+
+And here my brief exposition of the ideals of Modern Socialism may
+fitly end.
+
+I have done my best to set out soberly and plainly this great idea of
+deliberately making a real civilization by the control and
+subordination of the instinct of property, and the systematic
+development of a state of consciousness out of the achievements and
+squalor, out of the fine forces and wasted opportunities of to-day. I
+may have an unconscious bias perhaps, but so far as I have been able I
+have been just and frank, concealing nothing of the doubts and
+difficulties of Socialism, nothing of the divergencies of opinion
+among its supporters, nothing of the generous demands it makes upon
+the social conscience, the Good Will in man. Its supporters are
+divergent upon a hundred points, but upon its fundamental
+generalizations they are all absolutely agreed, and some day the whole
+world will be agreed. Their common purport is the resumption by the
+community of all property that is not justly and obviously personal,
+and the substitution of the spirit of service for the spirit of gain
+in all human affairs.
+
+It must be clear to the reader who has followed my explanations
+continuously, that the present advancement of Socialism must lie now
+along three several lines.
+
+    FIRST, and most important, is the primary intellectual
+    process, the elaboration, criticism, discussion, enrichment
+    and enlargement of the project of Socialism. This includes all
+    sorts of sociological and economic research, the critical
+    literature of Socialism, and every possible way--the drama,
+    poetry, painting, music--of expressing and refining its
+    spirit, its attitudes and conceptions. It includes, too, all
+    sorts of experiments in living and association. In its widest
+    sense it includes all science, literature and invention.
+
+    SECONDLY, comes the propaganda; the publication, distribution,
+    repetition, discussion and explanation of this growing body of
+    ideas, until this conception of a real civilized State as
+    being in the making, becomes the common intellectual property
+    of all intelligent people in the world; until the laws and
+    social injustices that now seem, to the ordinary man, as much
+    parts of life as the east wind and influenza, will seem
+    irrational, unnatural and absurd. This educational task is at
+    the present time the main work that the mass of Socialists
+    have before them. Most other possibilities wait upon that
+    enlargement of the general circle of ideas. It is a work that
+    every one can help forward in some measure, by talk and
+    discussion, by the distribution of literature, by writing and
+    speaking in public, by subscribing to propagandist
+    organizations.
+
+    And THIRDLY, there is the actual changing of practical things
+    in the direction of the coming Socialized State, the actual
+    socialization, bit by bit and more and more completely, of the
+    land, of the means of production, of education and child
+    welfare, of insurance and the food supply, the realization, in
+    fact, of that great design which the intellectual process of
+    Socialism is continually making more beautiful, attractive and
+    worthy. Now this third group of activities is necessarily
+    various and divergent, and at every point the conscious and
+    confessed Socialist will find himself co-operating with
+    partial or unintentional Socialists, with statesmen and
+    officials, with opportunist philanthropists, with trade
+    unionists, with religious bodies and religious teachers, with
+    educationists, with scientific and medical specialists, with
+    every sort of public-spirited person. He should never lose an
+    opportunity of explaining to such people how necessarily they
+    are Socialists, but he should never hesitate to work with them
+    because they refuse the label. For in the house of Socialism
+    as in the house of God, there are many mansions.
+
+These are the three main channels for Socialist effort, thought,
+propaganda and practical social and political effort, and between them
+they afford opportunity for almost every type of intelligent human
+being. One may bring leisure, labour, gifts, money, reputation,
+influence to the service of Socialism; there is ample use for them
+all. There is work to be done for this idea, from taking tickets at a
+doorway and lending a drawing-room for a meeting, to facing death,
+impoverishment and sorrow for its sake.
+
+
+§ 2.
+
+Socialism is a moral and intellectual process, let me in conclusion
+reiterate that. Only secondarily and incidentally does it sway the
+world of politics. It is not a political movement; it may engender
+political movements, but it can never become a political movement; any
+political body, any organization whatever, that professes to stand for
+Socialism, makes an altogether too presumptuous claim. The whole is
+greater than the part, the will than the instrument. There can be no
+official nor pontifical Socialism; the theory lives and grows. It
+springs out of the common sanity of mankind. Constructive Socialism
+shapes into a great system of developments to be forwarded, points to
+a great number of systems of activity amidst which its adherents may
+choose their field for work. Parties and societies may come or go,
+parties and organizations and names may be used and abandoned;
+constructive Socialism lives and remains.
+
+There is a constantly recurring necessity to insist on the difference
+between two things, the larger and the lesser, the greater being the
+Socialist movement, the lesser the various organizations that come and
+go. There is this necessity because there is a sort of natural
+antagonism between the thinker and writer who stand by the scheme and
+seek to develop and expound it, and the politician who attempts to
+realize it. They are allies, but allies who often pull against each
+other, whom a little heat and thoughtlessness may precipitate into a
+wasteful conflict. The former is, perhaps, too apt to resent the
+expenditure of force in those conflicts of cliques and personal
+ambition that inevitably arise among men comparatively untrained for
+politics, those squabbles and intrigues, reservations and
+insincerities that precede the birth of a tradition of discipline; the
+latter is equally prone to think literature too broad-minded for daily
+life, and to associate all those aspects of the Socialist project
+which do not immediately win votes, with fads, kid gloves,
+"gentlemanliness," rose-water and such-like contemptible things. These
+squabbles of the engineer and the navigating officer must not be
+allowed to confuse the mind of the student of Socialism. They are
+quarrels of the mess-room, quarrels on board the ship and within
+limits, they have nothing to do with the general direction of
+Socialism. Like all indisciplines they hinder but they do not
+contradict the movement. Socialism, the politicians declare, can only
+be realized through politics. Socialism, I would answer, can never be
+narrowed down to politics. Your parties and groups may serve
+Socialism, but they can never be Socialism. Scientific progress,
+medical organization, the advancement of educational method, artistic
+production and literature are all aspects of Socialism, they are all
+interests and developments that lie apart from anything one may
+call--except by sheer violence to language--politics.
+
+And since Socialism is an intellectual as well as a moral thing, it
+will never tolerate in its adherents the abnegation of individual
+thought and intention. It demands devotion to an idea, not devotion to
+a leader. No addicted follower of so-and-so or of so-and-so can be a
+good Socialist any more than he can be a good scientific investigator.
+So far Socialism has produced no great leaders at all. Lassalle alone
+of all its prominent names was of that romantic type of personality
+which men follow with enthusiasm. The others, Owen, Saint Simon, and
+Fourier, Proudhon, Marx, and Engels, Bebel, Webb, J. S. Mill, Jaurès,
+contributed to a process they never seized hold upon, never made their
+own, they gave enrichment and enlargement and the movement passed on;
+passes on gathering as it goes. Kingsley, Morris, Ruskin--none are too
+great to serve this idea, and none so great they may control it or
+stand alone for it. So it will continue. Socialism under a great
+leader, or as a powerfully organized party would be the end of
+Socialism. No doubt it might also be its partial triumph; but the
+reality of the movement would need to take to itself another name; to
+call itself "constructive civilization" or some such synonym, in order
+to continue its undying work. Socialism no doubt will inspire great
+leaders in the future, and supply great parties with ideas; in itself
+it will still be greater than all such things.
+
+
+§ 3.
+
+But here, perhaps, before the finish, since the business of this book
+is explanation, it may be well to define a little the relation of
+Socialism to the political party that is most closely identified with
+it in the popular mind. This is the Labour Party. There can be no
+doubt of the practical association of aim and interest of the various
+Labour parties throughout modern civilized communities with the
+Socialist movement. The Social democrats of Germany are the Labour
+Party of that country, and wherever the old conception of Socialism
+prevails, those "class war" ideas of the Marxist that have been
+superseded in English Socialism for nearly a quarter of a century,
+there essentially the Socialist movement will take the form of a
+revolutionary attack upon the owning and governing sections of the
+community. But in Great Britain and America the Labour movement has
+never as a whole been revolutionary or insurrectionary in spirit, and
+in these countries Socialism has been affected from its very
+beginnings by constructive ideas. It has never starkly antagonized
+Labour on the one hand, and the other necessary elements in a
+civilized State on the other; it has never--I speak of the movement as
+a whole and not of individual utterances--contemplated a community
+made up wholly of "Labour" and emotionally democratic, such as the
+Marxist teaching suggests. The present labouring classes stand to gain
+enormously in education, dignity, leisure, efficiency and opportunity
+by the development of a Socialist State, and just in so far as they
+become intelligent will they become Socialist; but we all, all of us
+of Good Will, we and our children, of nearly every section of the
+community stand also to gain and have also our interest in this
+development. Great as the Labour movement is, the Socialist movement
+remains something greater. The one is the movement of a class, the
+other a movement of the best elements in every class.
+
+None the less it remains true that under existing political conditions
+it is to the Labour Party that the Socialist must look for the mass
+and emotion and driving force of political Socialism. Among the wage
+workers of the modern civilized community Socialists are to be counted
+now by the hundred thousand, and in those classes alone does an
+intelligent self-interest march clearly and continuously in the
+direction of constructive civilization. In the other classes the
+Socialists are dispersed and miscellaneous in training and spirit,
+hampered by personal and social associations, presenting an enormous
+variety of aspects and incapable, it would seem, of co-operation
+except in relation to the main Socialist body, the Labour mass.
+Through that, and in relation and service to that, they must, it would
+seem, spend their political activities (I am writing now only of
+political activities) if they are not to be spent very largely to
+waste. The two other traditional parties in British politics are no
+doubt undergoing remarkable changes and internal disruptions, and the
+constructive spirit of the time is at work within them; but it does
+not seem that either is likely to develop anything nearly so
+definitely a Socialist programme as the Labour Party. The old
+Conservative Party, in spite of its fine aristocratic traditions,
+tends more and more to become the party of the adventurous Plutocracy,
+of the aggressive _nouveau riche_, inclines more and more towards the
+inviting financial possibilities of modern "Imperialism" and "Tariff
+Reform." The old Liberal Party strains between these two antagonists
+and its own warring and conflicting traditions of Whiggery and
+Radicalism. There can be no denying the great quantity of "Good Will"
+and constructive intention that finds a place in its very
+miscellaneous ranks, but the strong strain of obstinate and
+irreconcilable individualism is equally indisputable.
+
+But the official Liberal attitude is one thing, and a very
+unsubstantial and transitory thing, and the great mass of Good Will
+and broad thinking in the ranks of Liberalism and the middle class
+quite another. Socialists are to be found not only in every class, but
+in every party. There can be no "Socialist" party as such. That is the
+misleading suggestion of irresponsible and destructive adventurers. It
+is impossible to estimate what forces of political synthesis may be at
+work at the present time, or what ruptures and coalitions may not
+occur in the course of a few years. These things belong to the drama
+of politics. They do not affect the fact that the chief Interest in
+the community on the side of Socialism is Labour; through intelligent
+Labour it is that Socialism becomes a political force and possibility,
+and it is to the Labour Party that the Socialist who wishes to engage
+in active political work may best give his means and time and energy
+and ability.
+
+I write "political work," and once more I would repeat that it is to
+the field of electioneering and parliamentary politics under present
+conditions that this section refers. The ultimate purpose of Socialism
+can rely upon no class because it aims to reconstitute all classes. In
+a Socialist State there will be no class doomed to mere "labour," no
+class privileged to rule and decide. For every child there will be
+fair opportunity and education and scope to the limit of its
+possibilities. To the best there will be given difficulty and
+responsibility, honour and particular rewards, but to all security and
+reasonable work and a tolerable life. The interests and class
+traditions upon which our party distinctions of to-day rely must
+necessarily undergo progressive modification with every step we take
+towards the realization of the Socialist ideal.
+
+
+§ 4.
+
+So this general account of Socialism concludes. I have tried to put it
+as what it is, as the imperfect and still growing development of the
+social idea, of the collective Good Will in man. I have tried to
+indicate its relation to politics, to religion, to art and literature,
+to the widest problems of life. Its broad generalizations are simple
+and I believe acceptable to all clear-thinking minds. And in a way
+they do greatly simplify life. Once they have been understood they
+render impossible a thousand confusions and errors of thought and
+practice. They are in the completest sense of the word, illumination.
+
+But Socialism is no panacea, no magic "Open Sesame" to the millennium.
+Socialism lights up certain once hopeless evils in human affairs and
+shows the path by which escape is possible, but it leaves that path
+rugged and difficult. Socialism is hope, but it is not assurance.
+Throughout this book I have tried to keep that before the reader.
+
+Directly one accepts those great generalizations one passes on to a
+jungle of incurably intricate problems, through which man has to make
+his way or fail, the riddles and inconsistencies of human character,
+the puzzles of collective action, the power and decay of traditions,
+the perpetually recurring tasks and problems of education. To have
+become a Socialist is to have learnt something, to have made an
+intellectual and a moral step, to have discovered a general purpose in
+life and a new meaning in duty and brotherhood. But to have become a
+Socialist is not, as many suppose, to have become generally wise.
+Rather in realizing the nature of the task that could be done, one
+realizes also one's insufficiencies, one's want of knowledge, one's
+need of force and training. Here and in this manner, says Socialism, a
+palace and safety and great happiness may be made for mankind. But it
+seems to me the Socialist as he turns his hand and way of living
+towards that common end knows little of the nature of his task if he
+does so with any but a lively sense of his individual weakness and the
+need of charity for all that he achieves.
+
+In that spirit, and with no presumption of finality, this little book
+of explanations is given to the world.
+
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
+
+BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E.,
+
+AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
+
+
+
+
+SYNDICALISM
+
+A CRITICAL EXAMINATION
+
+BY
+
+J. RAMSAY MACDONALD. M.P.
+
+_Cloth, 1s. net._
+
+_A clear and concise explanation of what Syndicalism means, with a
+Critical Examination of its Aims and Principles_
+
+CONTENTS
+
+   I Trade Unionism, Socialism, and Syndicalism
+  II Political Action and the General Strike
+ III The Philosophy of Sorel
+  IV The Programme of Direct Action
+   V Syndicalism in Europe and America
+  VI Syndicalism in Great Britain
+ VII An Examination of Syndicalist Principles
+VIII The Programme of Syndicalism
+  IX Conclusion
+
+"Mr. Ramsay Macdonald has done a genuine service in writing this
+little book."--_Westminster Gazette_.
+
+"A lucid and accurate account of the ideas behind a movement which is
+much talked about, but little understood."--_Daily Chronicle_.
+
+"A clever and creditable piece of work."--_Western Morning News_.
+
+"Tells everything that need be known in regard to
+Syndicalism."--_Yorkshire Observer_.
+
+
+London: CONSTABLE & COMPANY Ltd.
+
+
+
+
+A HISTORY OF LABOUR REPRESENTATION
+
+By A. W. HUMPHREY
+
+With an Introduction by GILBERT SLATER, Principal of Ruskin College,
+Oxford
+
+_Crown 8vo, 2s. 6d. net._
+
+The objects of this book are to present a record of the movement for
+labour representation in the United Kingdom from its first beginning
+in 1857 to the end of 1911, and the arguments for and against class
+representation. Professor Gilbert Slater in his introduction writes:
+"Mr. Humphrey has earned the gratitude of students by the striking and
+straightforward narrative he has put together."
+
+"A clear business-like and detailed history of the rise of the labour
+representation."--_Times_.
+
+"A well-studied and interesting account."--_Scotsman_.
+
+"Mr. Humphrey has earned the gratitude of all earnest students of
+sociology."--_Western Mail_.
+
+
+THE CHILD AND THE PARENT
+
+By DOUGLAS PEPLER
+
+_Crown 8vo, 2s. 6d. net._
+
+A small volume containing the history of the provision of meals to the
+children of poor parents, and an account of children's care
+committees, their work and organization, with particular reference to
+the place of the voluntary worker and the duties of an official.
+
+"The history of the origin and work of the Care Committee is dealt
+with by Mr. Douglas Pepler in an interesting way, and he writes
+suggestively of the great problems with which its workers are brought
+into contact."--_Nation_.
+
+"It would be impossible to put the conditions of the problem in
+clearer or better words."--_Evening News_.
+
+
+London: CONSTABLE & COMPANY Ltd.
+
+
+
+
+THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE
+
+By HAVELOCK ELLIS
+
+Author of "The World of Dreams," "The Soul of Spain," etc.
+
+_Large Crown 8vo, 8s. 6d. net._
+
+CONTENTS
+
+Introduction--The Changing Status of Women--The New Aspect of the
+Woman's Movement--The Emancipation of Women in relation to Romantic
+Love--The Significance of a Falling Birth-rate--Eugenics and
+Love--Religion and the Child--The Problem of Sexual
+Hygiene--Immorality and Law--The War against War--The Problem of an
+International Language--Individualism and Socialism--Index.
+
+"A singularly powerful book."--_Daily Graphic_.
+
+"The work of one who thinks of, and fearlessly looks to, the
+future."--_The Times_.
+
+"Should be read by our legislators, philanthropists, and
+reformers."--_Daily News_.
+
+"Those who like to have their thoughts stimulated will find his book
+delightful."--_Observer_.
+
+"A most interesting and suggestive book."--_Scotsman_.
+
+
+RATIONALISM
+
+By Rt. Hon. J. M. ROBERTSON. M.P.
+
+_Cloth - 1s. net._
+
+CONTENTS
+
+The Term--The Practical Position--The Religious Challenge--The
+Philosophical Challenge--The Skeptical Religious Challenge--The
+Meaning of Reason--The Test of Truth--Ultimate Problems--Ideals.
+
+
+London: CONSTABLE & COMPANY Ltd.
+
+
+
+
+MAN AND SUPERMAN
+
+A COMEDY AND A PHILOSOPHY
+
+BY
+
+BERNARD SHAW
+
+_Paper, 6d._
+
+"Of extraordinary brilliance and suggestiveness."--_Vanity Fair_.
+
+"From first to last it is a royal feast of witticisms."--_Yorkshire
+Daily Observer_.
+
+"This is his masterpiece."--_Saturday Review_.
+
+
+JOHN BULL'S OTHER ISLAND
+
+BY
+
+BERNARD SHAW
+
+_New Edition in Paper, with a new Preface, 6d._
+
+"The cleverest play Mr. Shaw has written."--_Evening Standard_.
+
+"John Bull's 'Other Island' is so far the author's
+masterpiece."--_Glasgow Herald_.
+
+"One of the choicest and most stimulating of all the author's
+plays."--_Yorkshire Post_.
+
+
+London: CONSTABLE & COMPANY Ltd.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's New Worlds For Old, by Herbert George Wells
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