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DUKE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 FRIENDS OF 
 
 nUKE UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 Joha...L.i..eysay 
 
Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive 
 in 2010 witii funding from 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 littp://www.arcliive.org/details/newworldsforoldOOwell 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 SHORT STORIES 
 
 Thirty Strange Stories 
 Tales of Space and Time 
 Twelve Stories and a Dream 
 
 ROMANCES 
 
 The Time Machine 
 
 The Wonderful Visit 
 
 The Island of Dr. Moreau 
 
 The War of the Worlds 
 
 The Invisible Man 
 
 The First Men in the Moon 
 
 The Sea Lady 
 
 Whe}i the Sleeper Wakes 
 
 In the Days of the Comet 
 
 NOVELS 
 
 The Wheels of Chance 
 Love and Mr. Lewisham 
 Kipps 
 
 SOCIOLOGICAL ESSAYS 
 Anticipations 
 Mankind in the Making 
 A Modern Utopia 
 The Future in America 
 
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK ■ BOSTON • CHICAGO 
 ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 BY 
 
 H. G. WELLS 
 
 AUTHOR OF "ANTICIPATIONS," "A MODERN UTOPIA," 
 AND SUNDRY ROMANCES AND NOVELS 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1908 
 
 AU rigkU reterved 
 
COPYBIGHT, 1907, 
 
 By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1908. 
 
 NorfBooti ?3te80 
 
 J. 8. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 
 

 CONTENTS 
 
 OEUIPTKR 
 
 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 Prop- 
 erty? 
 
 VIII. The Middle-Class Man and Socialism 
 
 IX. Some 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 . 
 
 PAOK 
 1 
 
 21 
 
 27 
 
 56 
 
 88 
 
 114 
 
 137 
 
 162 
 177 
 205 
 219 
 243 
 261 
 291 
 325 
 
 \ii 
 
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE GOOD WILL IN MAN 
 §1 
 
 The present writer has long been 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 pre- 
 sents itself as a very noble but a very human and fallible 
 system of ideas. He does in all sincerity regard its 
 spirit, its intimate substance, as the most hopeful thing 
 in human affairs at the present time, but he does also 
 
2 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 find it shares with all mundane concerns the qualities of 
 inadequacy and error. It suffers from the common pen- 
 alty of noble propositions ; it is hampered by the insuffi- 
 ciency 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 encoun- 
 ter 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 in the hands of inquiring youth and say, 
 "There! that will tell you precisely the broad facts 
 
GOOD WILL IN MAN 3 
 
 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. 
 
 Socialism, then, as he understands it, is a great intel- 
 lectual 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 Socialism claims to be. This book 
 seeks to expand and establish that proposition and to 
 define the principles upon which a Socialist believes 
 this reconstruction of society should go. The particu- 
 lars 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 unattain- 
 able and much to regret, yet life presents itself to him, 
 more and more with every year, as a spectacle of inex- 
 haustible interest, of unfolding and intensifying beauty, 
 
4 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 ex- 
 alted 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 per- 
 ceptions ; 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 compo- 
 sition. 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 pros- 
 pects, 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 generaliza- 
 
GOOD WILL IN MAN 5 
 
 tion — 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 one's self 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 much more than lust, hunger, avarice, 
 vanity, and more or less intelligent fear, 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 con- 
 fusions 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 nowadays 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. 
 
6 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 de- 
 liberate idealization of particular ages, — the thirteenth 
 century in England, for example, or the age of the 
 Antonines. The former is presented with the bright- 
 ness 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 falsities of mediaeval law or the slums 
 and hunger and cruelty of Imperial Rome. 
 
 But quite apart from such unsound devices, it is, we 
 may admit, possible to make a very excellent case 
 against our general assertion of progress. One can in- 
 stance a great number of things, big and little, that have 
 been better in past times than they are now. For exam- 
 ple, they dressed more sumptuously and delightfully in 
 mediaeval 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 Peri- 
 
GOOD WILL IN MAN 7 
 
 cles; 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 to the very climax of its extinction bolder, 
 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 goon in regard to a vast number of things, 
 petty things and large matters 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 
 during the last thousand years 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 
 
8 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 forever many of the 
 evils that now darken the world, who look to the reser- 
 voirs of human possibility, as as yet a scarcely touched 
 supply, who make of all the splendour and superiorities of 
 the past no more than a bright promise and suggestion 
 for the unworn 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 compara- 
 tively 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 un- 
 happily trained type of mind which cannot appreciate 
 without invidious comparison, so poor in praise that it 
 
GOOD WILL IN MAN 9 
 
 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 caught in the rush from a London Board 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 can- 
 not now imagine ourselves subjected to them; the cruel- 
 ties 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 
 pestilences come no more. No doubt it is still an un- 
 satisfactory 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. 
 
10 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 
 simply that we have this increasing sea of mediocre 
 well-being in which the realities of the future are en- 
 gendering, 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's a cry that I hate and 
 deny. When the dross has been cleared away and com- 
 parison 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 inven- 
 tion, in state-craft, humanity and valiant deeds, the 
 last thirty years of man's endeavours will bear com- 
 parison with any other period of thirty years whatever in 
 his history. 
 
 And this is the result of effort; things get better be- 
 cause men mean them to get better and try to bring 
 
GOOD WILL IN MAN 11 
 
 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, fcr 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 tires 
 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 
 
12 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 sig- 
 nificance 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 
 
GOOD WILL IN MAN 13 
 
 it ; and boots either absent or represented by a mass of 
 rags tied upon the feet"; of 34.8 per cent whose "cloth- 
 ing was insufficient to retain animal heat and needed ur- 
 gent 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 flannel- 
 ette" ; 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 in- 
 dication 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 henhouse 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. 
 
14 
 
 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 
 Departments 
 
 Number of 
 Children 
 Examined 
 
 Clean 
 
 Partially 
 Cleansed 
 
 Verminous 
 
 Boys . . . 
 Girls . . . 
 Infants . . 
 Mixed . . . 
 Special . . 
 
 34,345 
 
 36,445 
 
 42,140 
 
 5,855 
 
 977 
 
 32,726 
 
 22,476 
 
 6,675 
 
 4,886 
 
 624 
 
 847 
 
 4,426 
 
 2,661 
 
 298 
 
 133 
 
 1,139 
 12,003 
 
 29,675 
 897 
 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 preventible suffering ? And these figures of filth and 
 bad clothing are paralleled by others at least equally 
 impressive, displaying emaciation, under-nutrition, ane- 
 mia, 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 gray, 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 
 
GOOD WILL IN MAN 15 
 
 cottage, damp and windowless, the filth-strewn, plague- 
 stricken, mediaeval 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, paint- 
 ings; but there comes, too, much evidence of harsh whip- 
 pings, dark imprisonments, and never 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 
 
16 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 at- 
 titude not simply of the Socialist but of every sane 
 reformer toward these questions, was summarized in a 
 walk I had a little while ago with a friend along the 
 Thames Embankment, from Blackfriars Bridge to West- 
 minster. 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 build- 
 ings 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 
 
GOOD WILL IN MAN 17 
 
 hotels were very fine, huge swelHng shapes of dun dark- 
 gray and brown, huge shapes seamed and bursting and 
 fenestrated with illumination, tattered at a thousand 
 windows with light and the indistinct glowing sugges- 
 tions 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 
 
18 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 insistmg with 
 a silent, irresistible gesture that this waste and failure 
 of fife should cease, and cease forever." 
 
 " But it does cease ! Each year in its proportions it 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." 
 
GOOD WILL IN MAN 19 
 
 "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 dark- 
 nesses. 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 
 
20 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 regen- 
 erate 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 in the water. Even that whiskey dealer's adver- 
 tisement 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 mere- 
 tricious splendours, beyond her throned presence, jew- 
 elled 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 Sociahsm 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 ma- 
 terial 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 coopera- 
 tion 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 for all the social activities of man of a 
 comprehensive design. While science gathers knowl- 
 
 21 
 
22 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 edge, Socialism, in an entirely harmonious spirit, criti- 
 cises 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 calcu- 
 lated quantity is ever exact, no outline without a fog- 
 ging 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 So- 
 cialism that it has grown out of men's courageous con- 
 fidence 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 whole 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 ex- 
 plained. In a sense scientific research is a triumph 
 
THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEA OF SOCIALISM 23 
 
 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 il- 
 literate 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 
 Oberlandof 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 
 
24 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 common, — their conquest over the meanness of conceal- 
 ment, their systematic application of energy to other 
 than personal ends ! 
 
 And that, too, Socialism preeminently demands. It 
 applies to social and economic relationships the same 
 high rule of frankness and veracity, the same subordina- 
 tion of purely personal considerations to a common end 
 that science demands in the field of thought and knowl- 
 edge. 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, sub- 
 terfuge and the private gain: these are the enemies 
 of SociaHsm and the adversaries of science. At times, 
 I will admit, both Socialist and scientific man forget this 
 essential sympathy. You will find specialized scien- 
 tific 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 correlations of the two 
 systems of ideas. 
 
 Now the Socialist, inspired by this conception of a 
 possible, frank and comprehensive social order to 
 
THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEA OF SOCIALISM 25 
 
 which mean and narrow things must be sacrificed, at- 
 tacks and criticises 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 per- 
 mitting 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 de- 
 clares that for these collective purposes, in the satisfac- 
 tion 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 dis- 
 orderly 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 wil- 
 derness of human effort. 
 
26 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 im- 
 possible 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, for all 
 that, 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 OP SOCIALISM 
 §1 
 
 The first — the chief aspect of social hfe 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 toward children, their begetting and up- 
 bringing, 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 moral coordination, 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 
 
 27 
 
28 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 kilo- 
 gram. 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. 
 
FIRST MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 29 
 
 And it happens that the entire working-class population 
 of one typical English town, York, has been exhaus- 
 tively 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 investi- 
 gator 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 under- 
 feeding and neglect. 
 
 "The numbers classified under the various heads were as fol- 
 lows : — 
 
 BOYS 
 
 
 Very Good 
 per cent. 
 
 Good 
 per cent. 
 
 Fair 
 per cent. 
 
 Bad 
 per cent 
 
 Section 1. 
 
 (poorest) 
 
 Section 2. 
 
 (middle) 
 
 Section 3. 
 
 (highest) 
 
 2.8 
 
 7.4 
 
 27.4 
 
 14.6 
 20.1 
 33.8 
 
 31. 
 
 53.7 
 
 27.4 
 
 51.6 
 18.8 
 11.4 
 
 GIRLS 
 
 Section 1. 
 (poorest) 
 Section 2. 
 (middle) 
 Section 3. 
 (highest) 
 
 2.1 
 
 7.5 
 
 27.2 
 
 14.6 
 
 31. 
 
 21.2 
 
 50.4 
 
 38. 
 
 23.1 
 
 52.3 
 20.9 
 11.7 
 
30 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 "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 in- 
 sufficient 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 con- 
 dition of the children in Section 2 (middle-class labour) comes 
 about halfway 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 deteriora- 
 tion 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 1400 chil- 
 dren in one of the Edinburgh Elementary Schools, 
 selected because it represented a fair mixture of pros- 
 perous and unprosperous people. I take the first 10 
 entries of this list just as they come, representing 38 
 children, and they are a fair sample of the whole list. 
 No amount of writing could make these little thumb-nail 
 
FIRST MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 31 
 
 sketches of the reality of domestic life among our popu- 
 lation to-day more impressive than they are, thus bar- 
 renly 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 charring, as she lives in so bad a neighbourhood, 
 so means to move ; at present she keeps other women's babies at 
 6d. 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 Pohce, 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 pneu- 
 monia, and died since of the effects. The eldest child has ade- 
 noids; the second, uticaria; lice, bad; clothes full of pediculi. 
 
32 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 Housing : six in two rooms. Mother hardworking, does her best, 
 but has chronic bronchitis ; does not keep house overtidy. 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 hardworking, 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 schoolboy 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, en- 
 larged 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 charring now and then, but has too many babies 
 now. Parents married at 21 and 18 respectively; two children 
 
FIRST MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 33 
 
 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 Schoolmaster, Police, 
 Parish Sister, Club, Army Charity, Charity School, Pawnbroker, 
 and Doctors. 
 
 6. Father works in one 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 
 Schoolmaster, 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 
 
 D 
 
84 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 char- 
 acter. The eldest child has eustacian catarrh and naso-pharyn- 
 gitis; glands. The second, enlarged uvula. Housing: four in 
 two very small rooms. Evidence from Schoolmaster, 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. Evi- 
 dence 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 pre- 
 sent themselves simply as an atrocious failure of states- 
 
FIRST MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 35 
 
 manship. 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 hu- 
 man 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 popu- 
 lation has gathered, must be due to more than individual 
 inadequacy; it must be due to some general and essen- 
 tial 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 proxi- 
 mate causes one might work back to more general ones, 
 to the necessity of controlling the drink traffic, of abol- 
 ishing sweating, of shortening women's hours of labour, 
 
36 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 analy- 
 sis it is sufficient to say that one more general malad- 
 justment 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 civiUzed citizen. We have de- 
 manded too much from the parent, materially and 
 morally, and the 10 cases we have quoted are just 10 
 out of 10,000,000 of the replies to that demand. Of 
 52 children born, 14 are dead; and of the remainder 
 we can hardly regard more than 13 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 rela- 
 tions of parent to child on some securer and more whole- 
 some 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 reheve them 
 by supplementing their efforts. 
 
 The first course, the Socialist holds, is not only cruel 
 and unjust to the innocent child, but an entirely bar- 
 baric and retrogressive thing to do. It is a frank aban- 
 
FIRST MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 37 
 
 donment 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 the child's destiny — short only of direct 
 murder. Parents were held responsible for their chil- 
 dren'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 acqui- 
 esced. 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 
 chance 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 
 
38 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 toward 
 a constructive and organizing ; that is to say, toward 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 for- 
 bids 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 or- 
 ganizations 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- 
 
FIRST MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 39 
 
 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 inspector 
 and the sanitary officer. Then there are, in the London 
 City Council area, the '' Ringworm " nurses who examine 
 the children systematically, and by means of certain 
 white and red cards of remonstrance and warning, in- 
 timidate the parent into good behaviour or pave the way 
 for a prosecution, and there is the factory inspector — 
 and in certain cases the police. All these functionaries 
 and "accessory consciences" have been thrust in be- 
 tween 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 or- 
 ganized 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 
 
40 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 in- 
 crease 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 comple- 
 tion 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 in- 
 valid or out of work. Consider such a woman on the 
 verge of motherhood. Either she must work in a fac- 
 tory right up to the birth of her child — and so damage 
 
FIRST MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 41 
 
 its health through her strain and fatigue/ — or she must 
 give up her work, lose money, and go short of food and 
 necessities and so damage the coming citizen. More- 
 over, after the child is born, either she must feed it ar- 
 tificially 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 ! 
 
 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 Social- 
 ists 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 gen- 
 eral 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 
 
 * The hard facts of the case are put very clearly and quite in- 
 vincibly, by Miss Margaret Macmillan in Infant Mortality. See 
 also The Babies' Tribute to the Modern Moloch, by F. Victor Fisher. 
 (Twentieth Century Press. Id.) 
 
42 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 people's children are almost as much their private con- 
 cern as their cats, and as little entitled to public pro- 
 tection and assistance. The right view, he maintains, 
 is altogether opposed to this ; parentage is a public ser- 
 vice and a public duty ; a good mother is the most precious 
 type of connnon 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 im- 
 poverish 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 civiliza- 
 tion 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 principles that England, for example, tacitly ad- 
 mitted 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 
 
FIRST MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 43 
 
 other hand, the parents who do their duty well are as 
 much entitled to payment 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 re- 
 garded as the Over-Parent and for the payment and 
 financial support of parents is based simply upon the 
 consideration of neglected, underfed, under-educated, 
 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 mul- 
 titude 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 com- 
 fortable 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 
 trades upon their instincts, their affections, their sense 
 
44 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 in- 
 spectors, and the baser sort of parent has all sorts of pub- 
 lic 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 ablo 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 efTectual 
 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 the great Friendly Societies upon 
 which the scanty security of so many working-class 
 
FIRST MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 45 
 
 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 is there security, not even in the gilt-edged 
 respectability of Consols which in the last ten years have 
 fallen from 114 to under 85. 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 financiers' 
 power and get real security for his home or his children's 
 upbringing. 
 
46 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 dis- 
 couraged. If he has no children, he will have all his 
 income to spend on his own pleasure ; he needs 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 nowadays 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 there is built for his 
 class a sufficiency of comfortable, sanitary homes ; if he 
 wants the elementary convenience of a bathroom, he 
 must pay extra toll to the water shareholder; his gas 
 
FIRST MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 47 
 
 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 midwinter 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 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 chil- 
 dren, 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 
 
48 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 Britain they are still, as a class, extraordinarily ill- 
 educated — many of them still go to incompetent, under- 
 staffed, and ill-equipped private adventure schools; 
 they are sent into business prematurely, often at four- 
 teen 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 con- 
 tinue to have many children who die or grow up under- 
 sized, crippled, or half-civihzed, 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 
 
FIRST MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 49 
 
 young, manifests a diminishing spirit for parentage, its 
 families fall to four, to three, to two, and in an increas- 
 ing 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 ridicu- 
 lous that in a world of limitless resources, of vast ex- 
 penditure, 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 
 
50 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 handicaps at every other social level upon efficient paren- 
 tage, 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 responsi- 
 bilities 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, dis- 
 tinction, or relaxation to the devoted parent. The typi- 
 cal 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 cap- 
 able 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 ap- 
 parent in the American plutocracy, where perhaps half 
 the women appear to be artificially sterilized spenders 
 of money upon frivolous ends. 
 
 No doubt there is in the richer strata of the com- 
 munity a certain proportion of families with a real tra- 
 dition 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 
 
FIRST MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 51 
 
 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 con- 
 tinue 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 wan- 
 tonly 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 pros- 
 perous 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 diffi- 
 culties and discouragements. 
 
 This state of affairs, says the Socialist, is chaotic and 
 socially wasteful. It means a world-wide 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 in jus- 
 
52 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 tice ; such happiness, a happiness that can only continue 
 so long as it remains blind or indifferent to a sea of 
 wretchednesses 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 harm- 
 fully 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 altogether too mux^h a 
 matter of private adventure, and the individual family is 
 altogether too irresponsible. As a consequence there is a 
 huge amount of avoidable privation, suffering, and sorroiv, 
 and a large proportion of the generation tJiat 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, 
 
FIRST MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 53 
 
 married or single, parent or childless, should he responsible, 
 for the welfare and upbringing of every child born into that 
 community. This responsibility may be delegated 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 com- 
 munity — 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 paid 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 rnaintain 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 imme- 
 diately 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 ha.ve broached, as if it 
 was to happen in a world that otherwise was to remain 
 
54 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 Social- 
 ism. The reader will see very speedily that this great 
 social revolution we propose necessarily involves a revo- 
 lution 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 pri- 
 vate proprietors, the parents. When the parents fail. 
 
FIRST MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 55 
 
 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 these ''pieces" 
 from the 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 will 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 SociaHst criticism of the pres- 
 ent state of affairs in relation to the most important of all 
 public questions, the question of the welfare and up- 
 bringing 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 wretched- 
 ness of vast myriads of the poorer sort ? 
 
 56 
 
SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 57 
 
 The Socialist says, No ! He asserts that our economic 
 system is as chaotic and wasteful as our system of rear- 
 ing children — is only another aspect of the same plan- 
 lessness — that it does its work with a needless excess 
 of friction, that it might be far simpler and almost in- 
 finitely 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 to con- 
 sider 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 popula- 
 tion, and do our best to criticise it in this spirit of per- 
 sonal aloofness. In order to do that, let us try to de- 
 tach 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. 
 
58 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 sumptu- 
 ousness, 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 bath- 
 rooms, 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 toler- 
 ably 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 extraordi- 
 narily crowded, ramshackle, and unclean; in the 
 country he would be amazed to find still denser con- 
 gestion, sometimes a dozen people in one miserable, 
 tumbledown, outwardly picturesque and inwardly abom- 
 inable two-roomed cottage, — people living up against 
 
SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 59 
 
 pigstyes 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 &ce all this dis- 
 order working out in mortality, disease, misery, and in- 
 tellectual 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 exam- 
 ple. 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 exist all that is needed to house the whole popula- 
 tion admirably : the building material, the room, the un- 
 occupied hands. Why is it not being done? 
 
60 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 Our answer would be, of course, that he did not un- 
 derstand 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 nif^iey we could not produce for it; that 
 equally the material was not ours, but belonged to cer- 
 tain other Owners, and that, thirdly, the community had 
 insufficient money or credit to pay the wages and main- 
 tenance 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 fore- 
 
SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 61 
 
 shores, 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. Ob- 
 viously 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, te- 
 dious, and wasteful way. Why should they? They're 
 very well satisfied as they are ! But if the community 
 
62 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 claim 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 hfe, — 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 against the veto of the 
 private ownier 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 ^ ; 
 
 * This Misery of Boots. It is intended as an introductory- 
 tract explaining the central idea of Socialism for propaganda pur- 
 
SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 63 
 
 and I will not apologize for repeating here a passage 
 from that. To begin with, this tract pointed out the 
 badness, unhealthfulness, and discomfort of people's 
 footwear as one saw it in every poor quarter, and asked 
 why it was things were in so disagreeable a state. There 
 was plenty of leather in the world, plenty of labour. 
 
 " Here on the one hand — you can see for yourself in any un- 
 fashionable part of Great Britain — are people badly, uncom- 
 fortably, painfully shod, in old boots, rotten boots, sham boots; 
 and on the other great stretches of land in the world, with un- 
 limited 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 
 
 poses, and it is published by the Fabian Society of 3 Clements Inn, 
 London, W.C., at 3d. That together with my tract Socialism and 
 the Family (A. C. Fifield, 44 Fleet Street, E.C. 6d.), gives the 
 whole broad outline of the Socialist attitude pretty completely. 
 
64 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 dis- 
 position, 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 i)rofit ?' 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 thump- 
 ing 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 owner or owners; you 
 would find the ship was private property, with an owner or 
 
SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 65 
 
 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 
 that the profit squeezed out of your poor people's boots at this 
 stage went to fill the pockets of old ladies at Torquay, spend- 
 thrifts 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 popula- 
 tion, 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 work- 
 ers all round you, you find, cannot get house room until they too 
 have paid rent — every inch of the country is somebody's prop- 
 erty, 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 landowners, 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 institu- 
 tion 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 
 
66 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 the 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 landowners, 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 obstruc- 
 tion of our social activities through our 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 — all 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, milli- 
 ners, 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 pros- 
 
SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 67 
 
 perous 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 ^ to quote ? 
 
 "Observe how private enterprise supplies the street 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 the street 
 and then on that, until seven houses have been supplied, and 
 then he departs. During the next three hours four other milk 
 carts put in an appearance at varying intervals, supplying a 
 house here and another there, until finally, as it draws toward 
 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 min- 
 utes, 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 
 
 ' Elihu's tracts are published by the I.L.P., 23 Bride Lane, 
 Fleet Street, London, E.G., 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. 
 
68 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 argu- 
 ment. 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 prod- 
 uct of the mortal mind ; children develop it in the nur- 
 sery, 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 com- 
 munity could not have understood. For all its faults our 
 
SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 69 
 
 present individualistic order, compared not simply with 
 the communism of primitive tribes, but even with the 
 personal and largely illiterate control of the mediseval 
 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 ^) 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 West- 
 ern Europe has passed out of the phases of slavery and 
 of autocracy (which is national slavery) into constitu- 
 tionalism, 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. 
 There the anti-Socialist would join issue with a lesser 
 
 ' Pure Sociology, pp. 271-272, by Lester F. Ward. (The Mac- 
 millan Company, New York.) 
 
70 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 advantage. He would have to show not only that Pri- 
 vate Ownership has been serviceable and justifiable in 
 the past, — which manySociahsts admit quite cheerfully, 
 — but that it is the crown and perfection of human 
 method, which the Socialists flatly deny. Universal 
 Private Ownership, an extreme development of the sen- 
 timent of individual autonomy and of the limitation of 
 the state to the merest police functions, were a necessary 
 outcome of the breakdown of the unprogressive authori- 
 tative 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 al- 
 leges, a mere phase of that breaking-up of the old social 
 edifice, a wrecking 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. 
 
SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 71 
 
 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 in- 
 creasing 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 for- 
 bidden 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 
 
72 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 an increasing number of cases by public bodies who 
 retain them for the pubHc good. Nobody who travels 
 to London as I do regularly in the dirty, overcrowded 
 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 commonweal. 
 
 All these things, the Socialists insist, are but a begin- 
 ning. 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, enter- 
 prises, with a growing confidence that must end finally 
 in the substitution of collective for private ownership 
 and enterprise throughout the whole area of the com- 
 mon business of life. 
 
 §5 
 
 In relation to quite a number of large public services 
 it can be shown that even under contemporary condi- 
 tions 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, 
 
SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 73 
 
 grinding out an uncertain dividend by clipping ex- 
 penditure. 
 
 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 (January 15, 1907) the price of the ordinary 
 South Eastern stock is 86 and its deferred stock 48; of 
 the London, Chatham, and Dover ordinary stock 15^; 
 an eloquent testimony to the disheartened state of the 
 owners who now cling reluctantly to this disappointing 
 monopoly. Spite of this impoverishment of the ordi- 
 nary shareholder, this railway system has evidently 
 paid too much profit in the past for efficiency ; the rolling- 
 stock is old and aging, much of it is by modern stand- 
 ards abominable; the trains are infrequent and the 
 shunting operations at local stations, with insufficient 
 sidings and insufficient staffs, produce a chronic dis- 
 location and unpunctuality in the traffic that is exag- 
 gerated by the defects of direction evident even in the 
 very time-tables. The trains are not well planned, the 
 
74 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 manage- 
 ment 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 two years ago. But manifestly there is nothing 
 better to be done under private ownership conditions. 
 The common shareholders are scattered and practi- 
 cally powerless, and their collective aim is, at any ex- 
 pense 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 
 
SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 75 
 
 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 cor- 
 porations make any attempt to keep pace with inven- 
 tion. It is remarkable now in an epoch of almost 
 universal progress how stagnant the British privately 
 owned railways are. One travels nowadays 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 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 
 
76 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 popu- 
 lation, 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 rail- 
 ways a hopeless discredit to private owTiership. 
 
 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 money with their stock at the prices I 
 have quoted, and how can they do anything without 
 money? The conception of profit-raising that rules 
 our railways takes rather an altogether different direc- 
 tion ; 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 
 
SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 77 
 
 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 
 aging stations and bridges, and the ever more per- 
 ceptible checking of British economic development due 
 to this clogging of the circulatory sytem, will be of im- 
 mense 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 
 
78 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 inspec- 
 tors, to look after the public welfare. 
 
 In this country also, slaughtering is a private enter- 
 prise 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 
 
SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 79 
 
 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 in 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 
 
80 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 of the private milk trade reflects itself in infant mor- 
 tality ; 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 cock- 
 roaches, and the ordinary baker's bread is so insipid 
 and unnutritious that a great number of more prosperous 
 people nowadays find it advantageous to health and 
 pocket alike to bake at home. A considerable amount 
 of physical degeneration may be connected with the gen- 
 eral 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 
 
SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 81 
 
 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 straight- 
 forwardly 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, either in Great Britain or America, a 
 manipulation of the coal market and a more or less 
 severe coal famine. Coal is jerked up to unprece- 
 dented 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 imbecil- 
 ity 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 
 
82 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 ? ^ 
 
 Another great branch of trade in which private 
 ownership and private freedom is manifestly antago- 
 nistic 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 whiskey; whiskey 
 begins to be blended and doctored before it leaves the 
 distillery. And we allow the production and dis- 
 tribution 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 ? 
 
 1 In Dakota, 1906-1907, 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. 
 
SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 83 
 
 "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 absti- 
 nence ? 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 ini- 
 tial ideas of freedom, and to see how inevitably the most 
 reluctant and unlikely people have been forced to recog- 
 nize private ownership in this trade and for profit as the 
 ultimate evil. I am delighted to have at hand an excel- 
 lent little tract by "A Ratepayer," National Efficiency 
 and the Drink Traffic. It has a preface by Mr. Haldane, 
 — who as one of our clearest-thinking statesmen must 
 come to outright Socialism sooner or later in spite of 
 his recent repudiations, and it is as satisfactory a 
 demonstration of the absolute necessity of thorough- 
 going 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 impossi- 
 
84 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 bility 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 bookselling.^ 
 
 §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 Rate- 
 payer" 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 
 
 * 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. 
 
SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 85 
 
 in waste, unserviceableness, cramped lives, and suffering 
 and death. Each man is for himself, that is this mis- 
 leading idea, seeking, perforce, ends discordant with 
 the general welfare. Who serves the community with- 
 out 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 Christian 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 differ- 
 ently. 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 rela- 
 tion 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 exag- 
 gerated until it obsesses the world ; that the freedom we 
 have given men to claim and own and hold the land upon 
 
86 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 which we must Hve; 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 impoverish- 
 ment 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 ovmership of things and the rights 
 of owners is enormously and mischievously exaggerated in 
 the contemporary world. The conception of private prop- 
 erty 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 an enormous obstruction and 
 waste of human energy and an entire loss of opportunity 
 and freedom for the mass of mankind; progress is re- 
 tarded; 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 all raw materials, of all values and resources ac- 
 cumulated from the past, and that all 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 
 
SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM 87 
 
 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 in- 
 dividual motive to the happiness and welfare of the 
 species. 
 
 §8 
 
 But now the reader unaccustomed to Socialist dis- 
 cussion 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 landowners, no private bank- 
 ers and lenders of money, no private insurance adven- 
 turers, 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 de- 
 voted 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, de- 
 velop fresh resources, plant, plan, beautify and recon- 
 struct 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 in his wife and children, how it would secure 
 their material welfare, — leaving, however, all his other 
 relations with them intact, — 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 
 
 88 
 
THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND OF SERVICE 89 
 
 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 en- 
 noble the intimate personal life, by checking and dis- 
 couraging passions that now run rampart, and by giving 
 wider scope for passions that are now thwarted and sub- 
 dued. 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 tolera- 
 tion; 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 cre- 
 ative passion, the love of beauty, the passion for truth 
 and research, and it stimulates avarice, parsimony, over- 
 reaching, usury, falsehood, and secrecy, by making 
 money-getting its criterion of intercourse. 
 
 Whether we like it or not, we who live in this world 
 
90 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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, what- 
 ever 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 salable thing or get some prop- 
 ertied 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 whole- 
 some man to want constantly to own. People talk of 
 Socialism as being a proposal "against human nature," 
 and they would have us believe this life of anxiety, of 
 parsimony and speculation, of mercenary considerations 
 and forced toil we all lead, is the complete and final ex- 
 pression of the social possibilities of the human soul. 
 But, indeed, it is only quite abnormal people, people of a 
 narrow, limited, specialized intelligence, Rockefellers^ 
 
THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND OF SERVICE 91 
 
 Morgans, and the like, people neither great nor beautiful, 
 mere financial monomaniacs, who can keep themselves 
 devoted to and concentrated upon gain. To the major- 
 ity of capable good human stuff, buying and selling, sav- 
 ing and investing, insuring one's self and managing prop- 
 erty, 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 remain poor, they 
 cannot urge themselves to this irksome cunning game of 
 besting the world. 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 invest- 
 ment as incalculable as a kite in a gale; just a small 
 minority have and get — for the most part either inheri- 
 tors 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 accu- 
 mulation. 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 en- 
 couraged and stimulated avarice comes good, and that 
 
92 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 this peculiar meanly greedy type that predominates in 
 the individualist world to-day, the Rockefeller-Harriman 
 type, "creates" great businesses, exploits the possibili- 
 ties of nature, gives mankind railways, power, com- 
 modities. 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, con- 
 sumes 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 for- 
 tunes of the modern world have been built up by pro- 
 ceedings 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 
 
THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND OF SERVICE 93 
 
 making of "corners" in such commodities as corn, 
 nitrates, borax, and the Hke ; then there is the capture 
 of what Americans call "franchises," securing at low 
 terms by expedients that usually will not bear examina- 
 tion, 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 com- 
 plex financial operations, watering stock, "recon- 
 structing," "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 products dear ; 
 but even in these cases the social advantage of the new 
 product is often largely discounted by the labour con- 
 ditions. 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 
 
94 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 affairs to this spirit of gain places our world in the hands 
 of a peculiar, acquisitive, uncreative, wary type of per- 
 son, 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. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND OF SERVICE 95 
 
 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 mis- 
 representation 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, al- 
 most 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 
 
96 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 in- 
 terested in laying bricks. One knows whenever a do- 
 mestic 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 main- 
 tain 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 
 
THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND OF SERVICE 97 
 
 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 cer- 
 tain 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 ones that 
 have to 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 
 
98 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 
 aesthetic duty and the search for beauty on the one hand 
 and the " salable " 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 lead work; 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 the facts clear as day before any ob- 
 servant person, we are content to live on in an economic 
 system that raises every man who subordinates these 
 
THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND OF SERVICE 99 
 
 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 success- 
 ful getters; that subordinates art, direction, wisdom, 
 and labour to these inferior narrow noien, these men who 
 clutch and keep. 
 
 Our social system, based on Private Ownership, en- 
 courages 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 neces- 
 sity 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 deter- 
 mining 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 
 
100 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 inventing with that profusion which is so remarkable a 
 trait of the Anti-Sociahst 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 com- 
 mon services of life, so also it taints and thwarts the 
 emotions, and degrades the intimate physical and emo- 
 tional existence of an innumerable multitude of people. 
 
 All this amounts to a huge impoverishment of life, a 
 loss of existence and discrimination of rich and subtle 
 values. Human existence to-day is a mere tantalizing 
 intimation of what it might be. It is frost-bitten 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. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND OF SERVICE 101 
 
 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's 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 condi- 
 tion, 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 "inhu- 
 manity" in the very first line, and in much subsequent 
 press comment there was the same note. Apparently 
 
102 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 everyone 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 Hfe-long 
 perpetual war against pain and disease, just as a cam- 
 paigning soldier is continually alert and serving. But 
 existing conditions will not permit that. Existing con- 
 ditions 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 green grocer 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 
 
THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND OF SERVICE 103 
 
 in Eastbourne? One never reads this sort of para- 
 graph : — 
 
 "A case of commercial inhumanity is reported from Birming- 
 ham. 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 Socialists' remedy for this squalid state of affairs 
 is plain and simple. Medicine is a public service, an hon- 
 ourable 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 organiza- 
 tion of a civihzed state to have a public health service of 
 
104 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 them- 
 selves for honour and social necessity as soldiers or sail- 
 ors. 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 pri- 
 vate 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 
 
THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND OF SERVICE 105 
 
 may submit unreservedly to the guidance of "self- 
 interest." Self-interest never took a man or a com- 
 munity to any other end than damnation. For all ser- 
 vices 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 be- 
 tween 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 impera- 
 tives, a scorn of shams and plagiarism that triumphs again 
 and again over economic laws. The public services of 
 
106 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 in- 
 dividualist system wages pitiless warfare ; says in effect : 
 " Fools you are ! Look at Rockefeller ! Look at Pier- 
 pont Morgan ! Look at Astor ! 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 h 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 
 dependents for these children of these men? Make 
 things beautiful, make things abundant, make life glo- 
 rious ! 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 child- 
 less, and let your life-work gild the palace of the mil- 
 lionaire's still more acquisitive descendants!" 
 
 Who can ignore the base scramble for money under 
 these alternatives ? 
 
THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND OF SERVICE 107 
 
 §4 
 But let me here insert a very brief paragraph to 
 point out one particular thing and that is that Social- 
 ism 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 looks to 
 competition, looks to competition for the service and 
 improvement of the world. And in order that compe- 
 tition between man and man may have free play, So- 
 cialism seeks to abolish one particular form of competi- 
 tion, the competition to get and hold 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 
 
 But now let me take up certain difhculties 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 edu- 
 cated by the state and insured of a decent and com- 
 fortable care and subsistence during youth and old age. 
 He then begins to think of how all this vast organization 
 
108 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 con- 
 temporary Socialist controversialist meets all this sys- 
 tem 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 ob- 
 ject in raising them now is not to dispose of them, but to 
 give them the fullest recognition — and to ask the stu- 
 
THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND OF SERVICE 109 
 
 dent to read on. In all these matters the world is im- 
 perfect 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 jus- 
 tification for things as they are. All the difficulties that 
 the ordinary exposition of Socialism seems to leave un- 
 solved are at least equally not solved now. Only rarely 
 does the right man seem to struggle to his place of ade- 
 quate opportunity. Men and women get their chance 
 in various ways: some of implacable temper and ver- 
 satile gifts thrust themselves to the position they need 
 for the exercise of their powers ; others display an aston- 
 ishing 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 man- 
 aged either directly by an owner or by directors or 
 managers acting for directors. The quality of promo- 
 tion 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 ad- 
 ministration is keenest it must be remembered it is not 
 
110 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 capac- 
 ity 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 appren- 
 tice in a chemist's shop, and also once in a draper's, — 
 I was a difficult son to " place " ; two of my brothers have 
 been shop assistants, and so I am still able to talk un- 
 derstandingly 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'ner" 
 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 criticised public ser- 
 vice 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 in- 
 ferior in personal quality to the staffs of the great private 
 business organizations. My own impression is that, 
 
THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND OF SERVICE 111 
 
 considering the salaries paid, they are, so far as Federal 
 concerns go, immeasurably superior. In state and 
 municipal affairs, American conditions offer no satisfac- 
 tory criterion; the Americans are, for reasons I have 
 discussed elsewhere,^ a "state-blind" people concen- 
 trated 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 unfortunate 
 traditions have evolved. In England, too, public ser- 
 vants 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 flim- 
 siest imputations upon the breach of the 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 
 
 ' The Future in America, Ch. IX. (Chapman and Hall, 1906.) 
 
112 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 build- 
 ing 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. 
 
 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 in- 
 competent and wrong. 
 
 The gist of this matter seems to be that where you have 
 honourable political institutions, free speech and a gen- 
 eral 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 
 
THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND OF SERVICE 113 
 
 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 So- 
 cialism 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 gen- 
 eral 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 sav- 
 age 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 
 Creeches and — institutions generally. 
 
 It isn't so. 
 
 But before we come to what modern Socialists do de- 
 sire in these matters, it may be well to consider some- 
 thing 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 cham- 
 pions of a bad cause — probably do, of a beautiful 
 world of homes, orderly, virtuous, each a little human 
 
 114 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM DESTROY THE HOME? 115 
 
 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 So- 
 cialism 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 insur- 
 ance; 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, 
 
116 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 finger 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 : — 
 
 19L 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 fieabitten. 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 work if she did not drink. The children at school get free 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM DESTROY THE HOME? 117 
 
 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 Coun- 
 cil, 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 all together 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 Pohce. 
 
 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, Schoolmistress, and Factor. 
 
118 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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, Schoolmistress, and School Officer, 
 
 197. The parents are thoroughly drunken and dissolute. 
 They have sunk almost to the lowest depths of social degrada- 
 tion. 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 ricketts, bronchitis, slight glands, and is bow- 
 legged. Two children have died. Housing : seven in two 
 rooms. Evidence from Police, Parish Sister, Employer, and 
 Schoolmistress. 
 
 198. This house is fairly comfortable, and there is no evi- 
 dence 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 all together. 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 Schoolmistress. 
 
 199. The house was fairly comfortable, and the man appeared 
 to be intelligent and the wife hardworking, but the police re- 
 ports are very bad; there are several convictions against the 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM DESTROY THE HOME? 119 
 
 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 char- 
 ity from school, church, and private generosity keeps the family 
 going. The children are fearfully verminous. There is a sug- 
 gestion that some baby farming is done, so many are about. 
 Eldest child, anaemic ; 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, 
 Cooperative, Employer, Parish Sister, PoUce, and Schoolmis- 
 tress. 
 
 Total of children still living, 39. 
 
 Total of children dead, 27. 
 
 Need I go on ? They are all after this fashion, 800 of 
 them. 
 
 And if you turn from the congested town to the 
 wholesome, simple country, here is the sort of home you 
 have going on. This passage is a cutting from the Daily 
 News of January 1, 1907, and its assertions have never 
 been contradicted. It fills one with only the mildest 
 
120 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 consump- 
 tion ; 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 land- 
 lord 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, in the Times, by no means a Sociahst 
 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 by-laws, and 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM DESTROY THE HOME? 121 
 
 an inadequate supervision by officials who are frequently incom- 
 petent; 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 insuffi- 
 ciency. In 1891-1895 more than a quarter of the 
 deaths in London occurred in workhouses and other 
 charitable institutions.* Now, suppose the modern So- 
 cialist did want to destroy the home ; suppose that some 
 Socialists have in the past really wanted to do so, re- 
 member that that is the reality they wanted to destroy. 
 
 But does the modern Socialist want to destroy the 
 home ? Rather, I hold he wants to save it from a de- 
 struction 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 happi- 
 ness 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 modem Socialist to this question. 
 
 » Studies, Scientific and Social, VoL II, Ch. XXIV, by Dr. Alfred 
 Russel Wallace. (Macmillan and Co. 1900.) 
 
122 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 §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 Berhn, in every great city of 
 Europe or America, thousands ; in the whole of Christen- 
 dom there cannot be less than a million of these ultimate 
 instances of our civilization. They are the logical ex- 
 tremity 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 sterihzation; 
 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 vir- 
 tuous people do not begin to understand the things they 
 endure. But it pays to be a prostitute, it does not pay 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM DESTROY THE HOME? 123 
 
 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 prac- 
 tically no prospect whatever of marrying and experienc- 
 ing 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 at- 
 mosphere of love and domestic exaltation ? As a matter 
 of fact she is a conspicuously devoted woman if she gives 
 them an hour a day of her time ; 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 par- 
 ticularly scathing denunciation of Socialists as home- 
 destroyers, as people who want to snatch the tender child 
 
124 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 from the weeping mother to immure it in some terrible 
 wholesale institution, I am apt to walk out into my gar- 
 den, 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. Social- 
 ism 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, Sociahsm comes not to 
 destroy but to save. 
 
 And how will the endowment be done? Very prob- 
 ably it will be found that the most convenient and best 
 method of doing this will be to pay 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 pay for that child so long as it is 
 kept clean in a tolerable home, in good health, well 
 taught, and properly clad. Frankly it will say to the 
 sound mothering women, not typewriting, nor shirt- 
 sewing, nor charring is your business, these children are. 
 Neglect them, iU-treat them, prove incompetent, and 
 your pay will cease, and we shall take them away from 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM DESTROY THE HOME? 125 
 
 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 in- 
 telligent state would willingly endow the homes of hope- 
 lessly diseased parents, of imbecile fathers or mothers, of 
 obstinately criminal persons or people incapable of edu- 
 cation. 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 hfe 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 
 
126 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 and child as completely as he owned horse or hut. 
 He was its 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 fal- 
 tered from the rigours of this position, but which still 
 clings to its sentimental consequences. The wife nowa- 
 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 miti- 
 gated 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 edu- 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM DESTROY THE HOME? 127 
 
 cation so far as his religious eccentricities go, and be gen- 
 erous 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, sus- 
 tained by the growing reasonableness of the world, in- 
 tervenes more and more between him and the wife and 
 children who were once powerless in his hands. 
 
 The Socialist would end that old predominance alto- 
 gether. 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 private property in a group of 
 related human beings vesting in one of them, the head 
 of the family. Socialism repudiates it altogether as un- 
 just and uncivilized; but so far as the family is a group- 
 ing of children with their parents, in love and respect and 
 mutual help, 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 else- 
 
128 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 where/ this putting of the home upon a public basis de- 
 stroys its autonomy. Just as the Socialist and all who 
 have the cause of civihzation 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 pri- 
 vate enterprise or the old gas company." ^ 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 respon- 
 sibility. 
 
 §4 
 
 And here we may give a few words to certain questions 
 that are in reality outside the scope of Socialists al- 
 together, special questions involving the most subtle 
 ethical and psychological decisions. Upon them So- 
 
 * Socialism and the Family. (A. C. Fifield. 6d.) 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM DESTROY THE HOME? 129 
 
 cialists 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 Social- 
 ists, 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, honour- 
 able, or intolerable ? Upon all these matters individual 
 Socialists, hke 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 wor- 
 
130 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 shippers 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 cul- 
 tivation of private vermin, because of the condition of 
 Saint Thomas a Becket's hair shirt. ^ To argue in that 
 way is to give up one's birthright as a reasonable being. 
 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 delib- 
 eration in begetting children, marriage under conditions. 
 And there Socialism stops. 
 
 1 " 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 un- 
 known 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 Penryn Stanley, D.D. 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM DESTROY THE HOME? 131 
 
 Socialism has not even worked out what are the reason- 
 able 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, forever, 
 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. 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 chil- 
 dren, are satisfied. That certainly would be the mini- 
 mum 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, Sociahst teaching — 
 
132 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 are for a looser tie. Let us clearly understand that we 
 are here talking of the legal marriage only — the state's 
 share. What was needed more than that minimum 
 would be provided, I believe, — always has been pro- 
 vided 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 pre- 
 scribing the conditions of the marriage contract, penal- 
 ties 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 scientifi- 
 cally 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 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM DESTROY THE HOME? 133 
 
 and baseness as open as anything can be. The real con- 
 trolhng force in these matters is social influence, pubhc 
 opinion, a sort of conscience and feeling for the judg- 
 ment of others that is part of the normal human equip- 
 ment. 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 or- 
 ganization 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 sensitive- 
 ness of man, 
 
 I do not deny the intense human interest of these open 
 questions, the imperative need there is to get the truth, 
 whether it be one's own truth or the universal truth, 
 upon them. But my point is that they are to be dis- 
 cussed apart from Socialist theory. It is no doubt in- 
 teresting 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 vege- 
 table 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 So- 
 
134 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 cialism. 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 So- 
 cialism 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 per- 
 sonal heaven is sui'ely 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 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM DESTROY THE HOME? 135 
 
 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 general- 
 izations 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 as- 
 tronomy and geology, and astronomers and geologists 
 went on with their own business. Both religion and as- 
 tronomy are still alive and in the same world together. 
 And the Vatican observatory, by the bye, is honourably 
 distinguished for its excellent stellar photographs. Per- 
 haps, after all, the church does not mean by Socialismus 
 Socialism as it is understood in English; perhaps it 
 simply means the openly 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 
 
136 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 
 
 And having in the previous chapter cleared up a con- 
 siderable mass of misconception and possibility of mis- 
 representation 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 per- 
 sonality 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 
 
 137 
 
138 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 in- 
 stance, and Sir Thomas More, did very roundly abolish 
 private property altogether. They were extreme Com- 
 munists, 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 in- 
 sisted overmuch. The early Christians, one gathers, were 
 almost completely communistic, and that interesting 
 experiment in Christian Socialism (of a rather unortho- 
 dox type of Christianity), the American Oneida com- 
 munity, was successfully communistic in every respect 
 for many years. But the modern Socialist is not a Com- 
 munist ; 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 ; 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM ABOLISH PROPERTY? 139 
 
 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 prop- 
 erty exempt from taxation. Even now property is a 
 limited thing, and it is well to bear that much in mind. 
 It can only be defined as something one may do "what 
 one hkes 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 hu- 
 manity in its use. 
 
 In that sense every adult nowadays has private prop- 
 erty 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 
 
140 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 con- 
 firming 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 ex- 
 treme Socialist theorists did in their communism find no 
 use for money, but I do not think there are any repre- 
 sentative Socialists now who do not agree that the state 
 must pay and receive in money, that money is indis- 
 pensable 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 aesthetic satisfaction, in furnishing, in the apartments 
 or dwelling-house a man or woman occupies and in their 
 household implements. It will sustain far more prop- 
 erty 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 workaday needs of the world 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM ABOLISH PROPERTY? 141 
 
 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 en- 
 tirely proper manner. But whether there should be de- 
 bentures and mortgages or preference shares or such like 
 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 Chi'istianity, 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 enter- 
 
142 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 prise, 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 be- 
 queath 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 heir- 
 looms, 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 de- 
 scendant 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 homelike things. 
 Now in nine cases out of ten we do in effect bundle the 
 widow out; she remains nominally owner of the former 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM ABOLISH PROPERTY? 143 
 
 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 ques- 
 tions 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 most 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 those realities of property 
 that we object to this monstrous property of a compara- 
 tively small body of individuals expropriating the world. 
 
144 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 §2 
 
 I am inclined to think — but here I speak beyond the 
 text of contemporary Socialist literatm'e — 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 uni- 
 versal 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 poUcy 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. 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM ABOLISH PROPERTY? 145 
 
 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. Nowadays such 
 people are housed in the exploits of the jerry builder — 
 aU England is unsightly with their meagre pretentious 
 villas and miserable cottages and tenement houses. 
 Such homes in the Socialist future will certainly be sup- 
 plied 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 be- 
 quest, 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 
 
146 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 genera- 
 tion 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 ques- 
 tion 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 identific&,tion 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 disre- 
 garded. 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. 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM ABOLISH PROPERTY? 147 
 
 Then again, consider the case of the artist and the in- 
 ventor who are too often forced by poverty now to sell 
 their early inventions for the barest immediate sub- 
 sistence. Speculators secure these initial efforts — some- 
 times 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 recogni- 
 tion 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 appre- 
 ciation 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 mortgager, the landlord, and usurer, the forestaller, 
 gambUng speculator, monopohzer, 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. 
 
148 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 §3 
 
 And now we are discussing the truth about the Socialist 
 attitude toward 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 dis- 
 tressing 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 ! 
 
 Well, I think there are assurances in the previous sec- 
 tion 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 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM ABOLISH PROPERTY? 149 
 
 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, credu- 
 lous, 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 holders 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 
 
150 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 with ordinary shares at ten, which clambered to above 
 twenty-one (21|), which is now (March, 1907) fluctuat- 
 ing about three and a half. Its six per cent preference 
 shares have moved between fourteen and seven 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 cham- 
 pions of private finance against the municipalities and 
 Socialists. One wonders why. 
 
 One can 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 Interstate Commerce 
 Commission (March, 1907), it says: — 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM ABOLISH PROPERTY? 151 
 
 "On his own admission he was one of a 'combine' of four 
 who got possession of the Chicago and Alton Railroad, and im- 
 mediately 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 com- 
 panies 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 perform- 
 ance. 
 
 "Besides this, the Chicago and Alton Railroad was trans- 
 formed 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 $60,000,000 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 intrusted to the directors and officers of corpora- 
 tions. It is a simple and elementary principle that all values are 
 created by the productive activity of capital, labour, and abil- 
 ity 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 
 intrusted with their direction come out of the general body of 
 
152 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 butch- 
 ering thrift! Simple people believe the great finan- 
 ciers 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, compe- 
 tent 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 pleas- 
 ures, 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 
 bv no means confident of the future. 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM ABOLISH PROPERTY? 153 
 
 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 cruellest gulfs into which 
 small savings have gone, in the case of the British public, 
 has been the trap of Consols which pay even 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 (March, 1907) lost a quarter of their money. 
 
 It is scarcely too much to say that a very large pro- 
 portion of our modern great properties, tramway systems, 
 railways, gasworks, 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 insur- 
 ance company for his old age and against aU sorts of 
 misadventures, and because of the government inter- 
 ference with "private enterprise" in that sort of business 
 
154 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 be reasonably secure ; but under Socialism he would be 
 able to do that with absolute security in the State Insur- 
 ance Office if the universal old-age pension did not 
 satisfy him. That, however, is beside our present dis- 
 cussion. 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 cruellest 
 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 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM ABOLISH PROPERTY? 155 
 
 couple of old servants opening a ''fancy" shop or a to- 
 bacco 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 proce sion 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 im- 
 possible 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 respect- 
 ably, 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 
 
156 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 tightening. The proprietor no longer comes to the door, 
 and his first bright confidence is gone. He regards one 
 now through the darkhng panes with a gloomy animosity. 
 He suspects one all too truly of dealing with the 
 "Stores." . . . Then suddenly he has gone; the sav- 
 ings 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 cu- 
 rious 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 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM ABOLISH PROPERTY? 157 
 
 people gain money, none of them ever recover the capital 
 they sink, they are happy if they die before their inevi- 
 table 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, relent- 
 lessly, 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 
 rate-payers. 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 
 
158 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 intel- 
 ligent 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 integral in 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 expropria- 
 tion. Even in the case of those sorts of property that 
 Socialism repudiates, property in land, natural produc- 
 tions, 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. 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM ABOLISH PROPERTY? 159 
 
 "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 So- 
 ciety framed so lately as 1884 repudiates '' compensation" 
 — even a partial compensation of property-owners — 
 though in its practical proposals the Fabian Society has 
 always been saner than its creed. 
 
 Now property is not robbery. It may be a mistake, 
 it may be unjust and socially disadvantageous to recog- 
 nize private property in these great common interests; 
 but every one concerned, and the majority of the prop- 
 erty-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 rightful- 
 ness 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. 
 
160 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 ter- 
 minating rights of user. It has no intention of obliterat- 
 ing him nor the things he cares for. It wants not only 
 to socialize his possessions, but to socialize his achieve- 
 ment in culture and all that leisure has taught him of the 
 possibilities of life. It wants aU 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 repu- 
 diates 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 So- 
 cialism 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 govern- 
 ment, must be the steady, orderly resumption by the 
 
WOULD SOCIALISM ABOLISH PROPERTY? 161 
 
 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 gen- 
 eration in their collective use and in more civilized 
 conceptions of living. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE MIDDLE-CLASS MAN AND SOCIALISM 
 
 And let me here insert a few remarks upon a question 
 that arises naturally out of the preceding sections, 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 special 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. No- 
 body 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 ques- 
 
 162 
 
THE MIDDLE-CLASS MAN AND SOCIALISM 163 
 
 tion hangs over many hundreds of thousands of house- 
 holds 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 and 
 such-like who find themselves growing old and their value 
 depreciated by the competition of a new, better-educated 
 generation, of private schoolmasters, 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 mill- 
 stones ? If we can, ought we to do so ? And if we can- 
 not, 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 
 
164 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 elec- 
 torate 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 every- 
 where. 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 inde- 
 pendent men. The labourers and poor 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 
 
THE MIDDLE-CLASS MAN AND SOCIALISM 165 
 
 by small people employing a few hands, master and 
 apprentice worked together ; in every town you found a 
 parish 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 coun- 
 try 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 separa- 
 tion of master and man and an ever enlarging organiza- 
 tion 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 
 toward 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 
 
166 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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. Shop- 
 keeping, 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 schoolmaster 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 an- 
 other 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 
 
THE MIDDLE-CLASS MAN AND SOCL\LISM 167 
 
 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, pro- 
 vision-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 effec- 
 tually 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" schoolmaster 
 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 play- 
 ing havoc with their practices. And while the small men 
 are more and more distressed, the great organizations of 
 trade, of production, of pubhc 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 gath- 
 ered into a few hands. All through the trades and pro- 
 fessions 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 
 
168 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 satis- 
 fying 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 despera- 
 tion from the advance of the big competitor who is con- 
 suming 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 de- 
 mands. The burden of taxation certainly falls upon 
 
THE MIDDLE-CLASS MAN AND SOCIALISM 169 
 
 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 
 
170 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 or- 
 ganized 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 
 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 manu- 
 facturer, of a builder, of a hundred and one other trades. 
 They are bound to be incorporated in a larger organiza- 
 tion; they are bound to become salaried men where for- 
 merly 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, 
 
THE MIDDLE-CLASS MAN ALD SOCIALISM 171 
 
 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 alter- 
 natives are Plutocracy or Socialism, and between these 
 the middle-class man remains weakly undecided and 
 ineffectual, lending no weight to and getting small con- 
 sideration 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 im- 
 possible 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 will- 
 ing 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 
 
172 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 indepen- 
 dence 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, 
 
THE MIDDLE-CLASS MAN AND SOCIALISM 173 
 
 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 spa- 
 cious 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 aero- 
 planes, 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 contempo- 
 rary 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 fives of 
 comfortable dependence, a fink between class and class, 
 the lowest of the rich man's guests, the highest of his 
 servants. As for the masses, they wifi 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 
 wiU be organized industriaUy and carefuUy controUed. 
 
174 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 Their spiritual needs will be provided for by churches 
 endowed by the wealthy, their physical distresses allevi- 
 ated 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 
 bright 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 part- 
 ner, 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 pos- 
 sibilities. 
 
 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. Mal- 
 lock. 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 toward Csesarism, The latter was the fate 
 of the Roman Republic, and may perhaps be the destiny 
 
THE MIDDLE-CLASS MAN AND SOCIALISM 175 
 
 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 
 toward 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 com- 
 munity. If there is not that effort, if things go on as 
 they are going now, the coming of a Plutocracy is inevi- 
 table. That effort, I am convinced, cannot be success- 
 fully made by the lower-class man alone ; from him, un- 
 aided 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 Re- 
 public in Rome), lead ultimately to a Napoleon or a 
 Caesar, But our contemporary civilization is unprece- 
 dented in the fact that the whole population now reads, 
 and that intelligence and free discussion saturate the 
 
176 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 in- 
 telligent and decisive between these millstones of the 
 organized property and the organizing state, between 
 Plutocracy and Socialism, whose opposition is the su- 
 preme social and political fact in the world at the present 
 time? 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 
 §1 
 
 In the preceding eight chapters I have sought to 
 give as plain and full an account of the great generaliza- 
 tions 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 Social- 
 ist 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.^ The queer old scholastic logic 
 still prevails remarkably in our modern world; you 
 find Mr. Mallock, for example, going about arranging 
 
 ' See Scepticism of the Instrument, the Appendix to A Modern 
 Utopia. (Chapman and Hall.) 
 
 N 177 
 
178 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 his syllogisms, extracting his opponent's "self-contra- 
 dictions," and disposing with stupendous self-satisfac- 
 tion of Socialism in all the magazines. He disposes 
 of Socialism quite in the spirit of the young mediaeval 
 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. Un- 
 thinking 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 rab- 
 bits 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. 
 
 For example, the anti-Socialist declares that Socialism 
 "abolishes property." He makes believe there is a hard 
 
SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 179 
 
 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 educa- 
 tion 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 no money of his own, no 
 home of his own, no wife of his own, no children of his 
 own ! It's effective nonsense in its way — but non- 
 sense 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 in- 
 stinct 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 commonweal. 
 
 Or again, the opponent has it that Socialism "abolishes 
 the family," and with it, of course, "every sacred and 
 tender association," etc. To that also I have given a 
 chapter. 
 
180 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 I do not think much Anti-Socialism is dishonest in 
 these matters. 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 ex- 
 ample, 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 danc- 
 ing, 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 over- 
 state 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 pre- 
 ceding chapters should know exactly how Socialism 
 stands to the family relations, the things it urges, the 
 things it regards with impartiality or patient toleration, 
 
SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 181 
 
 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 eques- 
 trian. "Human stud-farm" was another of his ex- 
 pressions.^ 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 women in haras. His 
 thick-headedness had, indeed, a touch of the heroic. 
 
 Then a certain Father Phelan of St. Louis, no doubt 
 in a state of mental exaltation as honest as it was in- 
 discriminating, told the world through the columns of 
 an American magazine that I wanted to tear the babe 
 
 * 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 (Chapter 2) 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. 
 
182 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 from the mother's breast and thrust it into an "In- 
 stitution." 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 So- 
 cialism a very wide berth indeed. Honi soil 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 overstate- 
 ment, of getting into a condition of confused intellectual 
 excitement, and because a critic declares your window 
 curtains too blue, saying therefore and usually with pas- 
 sion that he wants the whole universe, sky and sea in- 
 cluded, 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 Beer- 
 bohm, those brilliant ornaments of our age, when they 
 chance to write about Socialism, confess this universal 
 
SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 183 
 
 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 vis- 
 ion 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 advance- 
 ment of Socialism reveals. Mr. G. K. Chesterton mocks 
 valiantly and passionately, I know, against an oppres- 
 sive 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 night- 
 mare, a hopeless, horrid, frozen flight from the pursuit 
 of Mr. Sidney Webb and myself, both of us, short, in- 
 elegant men, but for all that terribly resolute, inde- 
 fatigable, 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, and 
 
184 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 of 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 pic- 
 ture 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 es- 
 sentials, 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 
 
SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 185 
 
 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 im- 
 mense 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 sec- 
 tion which was to contain a list of the chief objections to 
 Socialism other than mere misrepresentations, which are 
 current nowadays. I had meant at first to answer 
 each one fully and gravely, to clear them all up ex- 
 haustively 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 
 Socialism teaching, that Socialism is contrary to Chris- 
 
186 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 tianity. I would urge that this is the absolute inver- 
 sion of the truth. Christianity involves, I am con- 
 vinced, 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. It is said that 
 a good Catholic of the Roman Communion cannot also be 
 a Socialist. Even this very general persuasion may not 
 be correct. I believe the papal prohibition was aimed 
 entirely at a specific form of Socialism, the Socialism 
 of Marx, Engels, and Bebel, which is, I must admit, un- 
 fortunately 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 Amer- 
 ica, but in Great Britain, where Mr. Robert Blatchford 
 of the Clarion, for example, has also carried on a cam- 
 paign against Christianity. But this is only the inevi- 
 table throwing together of two sets of ideas because 
 they have this in common, that they run counter to gen- 
 erally received opinions; there is no necessary connec- 
 tion. Secularists and Socialists get thrown together 
 
SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 187 
 
 and classed together as early Christians and criminals and 
 rebels against the emperor were no doubt thrown to- 
 gether in the Roman jails. 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 and the other destructive, 
 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 physi- 
 cal 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 al- 
 ready 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. 
 
188 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 §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 employees in this branch of the public service or that, 
 
SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 189 
 
 seeking some advantage for their own service. This is 
 Lord Avebury's bogey/ Frankly, such voting by ser- 
 vices 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 the 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 regime. The landowners of Great Britain, 
 for example, are organized in the most formidable man- 
 ner against the general interests of the community, and 
 constantly subordinate the interests of the commonweal 
 to their conception of justice to their class; the big 
 railways are equally potent, and so are the legal profes- 
 sion and the brewers. But to-day these political in- 
 terventions of great organized services athwart the 
 path of statesmanship are sustained by enormous finan- 
 cial resources. The state employees 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 re- 
 quirements of the public paymaster, and travelling in 
 the trams to and from his work; there will be close 
 
 • On Municipal and National Trading, by Lord Avebury. 
 (MacmUlan and Co., 1907.) 
 
190 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 mutual observation and criticism therefore, and a 
 strong community of spirit, and that will put very defi- 
 nite limits indeed upon the possibly evil influence of class 
 and service interests in politics. 
 
 Socialism would destroy incentive and efficiency. This 
 is dealt with in Chapter V on the Spirit of Gain and the 
 Spirit of Service. 
 
 §4 
 
 Socialism would destroy freedom. This is a more con- 
 siderable difficulty. To begin with, it may be necessary 
 to remind the reader that absolute freedom is an im- 
 possibility. 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 en- 
 tirely separable from liberty, and as being altogether more 
 important things. But the modern view, with its deepening in- 
 sistence 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 abso- 
 
SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 191 
 
 lutely and universally obeyed. Then to will would be to com- 
 mand 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 mathemati- 
 cians 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 individuali- 
 ties, 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 accu- 
 sation. 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 uni- 
 
192 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 versal 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 free- 
 dom 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 stand- 
 ard. 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 conceiv- 
 ably exist without much freedom, with hardly more free- 
 dom 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 con- 
 ceivably 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 formulce of Socialism if we 
 are to be safeguarded effectually from the official. We 
 
SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 193 
 
 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 
 employees 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 
 Hving. . . . 
 
 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 in- 
 tellectual 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 propo- 
 
194 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 sitions. But to admit that Socialism does not guarantee 
 freedom, is not to admit that Sociahsm will destroy it. 
 It is possible, given certain conditions, for men to be nearly 
 absolutely free in speech, in movement, in conduct, enor- 
 mously free, that is, as compared with our present con- 
 ditions, 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 gen- 
 eral 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 
 
SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 195 
 
 and architecture, sown and reaped by a mercantile plu- 
 tocracy. But then in Rome, in Athens, you will find an 
 equal accumulation made under very different condi- 
 tions. 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 aesthetic 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 litera- 
 ture of power. If the coming of Socialism destroys art, 
 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 develop- 
 ment of public buildings ; the Sargents of Socialism will 
 paint famous people instead of milhonaires' wives; 
 
196 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 poetry and popular romantic literature will revive. For 
 my own part I have no doubt where the balance of ad- 
 vantage 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 \ATiters, 
 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. 
 
 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 Teach- 
 ing, that has, in spite of its many defects, revolutionized 
 the aesthetic 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 and Co. The out- 
 come of his experience as an individualist financier was 
 to convince him that the only way to raise the standard 
 
SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 197 
 
 of technical science in England was by the endowment 
 of public teaching, and the huge "London Charlotten- 
 burg" rises out of his conviction. Even Messrs. 
 Rockefeller and Carnegie admit the failure of Indi- 
 vidualism in this matter by pouring money into public 
 universities and public libraries. All these heads 
 of the commercial process confess by these acts what 
 this objection of the inexperienced denies, 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 aesthetic 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 en- 
 couragements for aesthetic 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 aesthetic difficulties, but 
 this is the difficulty of the mind that realizes clearly the 
 nature of the biological process, the secular change in 
 
198 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 individu- 
 als survive to reproduce themselves who are fairly well 
 adjusted to the conditions of life; so that in each genera- 
 tion 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 believes 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 appe- 
 tite of the vulture, the unpleasing personality of the 
 common hyena, — all that less charming side of Mother 
 Nature that her scandalized children may read of in 
 
SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 199 
 
 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. Aggres- 
 sive, intensely acquisitive, reproductive people — the 
 ignoble sort of Jew is the very type of it — are the peo- 
 ple 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 deathrate 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 head- 
 master of one school in a poor neighbourhood. 
 
200 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 "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 con- 
 dition of the teeth, and a general estimate of the personal clean- 
 liness 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 arrangement 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 chil- 
 dren 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 ab- 
 solute correspondence is to be observed. The children born in 
 a year when infantile mortality is low show an increased phy- 
 sique, rising nearest to the normal in the extraordinary good year 
 1892; and those born in the years of high mortality show a de- 
 creased 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 horn in periods of low infan- 
 tile mortality, that is the essential point. 
 
SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 201 
 
 So that anyhow, since the fittest under present con- 
 ditions is manifestly the ratlike, the survival of the fit- 
 test 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 incidence of selec- 
 tion and rejection to a new set of qualities. I think 
 I have already hinted (Chapter VI, § 2) that a state that 
 pays for the children born into it will do its best to secure 
 good births. That implies a distinct bar to the mar- 
 riage 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 wiU prefer promi- 
 nent men, able men, fine, vigorous and attractive per- 
 sons. 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, 
 in intellectual and physical activity and in the capa- 
 
202 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 city of the race, than our present haphazard mer- 
 cenariness. 
 
 The science student will be interested to read in this 
 connection The Ethic of Free Thought, Socialism in 
 Theory and Practice, and The Chances of Death and other 
 Studies in Evolution, by Karl Pearson. 
 
 §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 edu- 
 cational process and a moral discipline are not only a nec- 
 essary part, but the most fundamental part of any com- 
 plete 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, in- 
 decency, 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 
 
SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 203 
 
 against human nature. For human nature is in a per- 
 petual 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 essen- 
 tial constructive task of which the two primary gener- 
 alizations of Socialism we have so far been developing 
 are but the outward and visible forms. There is no 
 naturalness in Socialism, no uneducated pristine force on 
 our side. 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 prac- 
 ticality, I do also recognize quite clearly that with people 
 just as they are now, with their prejudices, their ig- 
 norances, their misapprehensions, their unchecked vani- 
 ties and greeds and jealousies, their untutored and mis- 
 guided 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 in ideas. Upon this plastic, uncertain, 
 teachable thing human nature, within us and without, 
 
204 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 we have if we really contemplate Socialism as our achieve- 
 ment, to impose guiding ideas and guiding habits, we 
 have to coordinate all the Good Will that is active or la- 
 tent 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 busi- 
 ness is to develop the human spirit. It is in the enlarge- 
 ment 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 SociaHsm. As we have dealt 
 with them, they amount to little more than a sketch of 
 the foundation for a great scheme of social reconstruc- 
 tion. 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 
 
 205 
 
206 . NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 detract nothing from the fact that Socialism is the 
 most inspiring, creative scheme that ever came into the 
 chaos of human affairs. The fact that it is not cut and 
 dried, that the scheme Hves 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 cut 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 im- 
 mense amount of intellectual work remains to be done 
 for Socialism. The battle of 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 Sociahsm to-day is one of confessed 
 inquiring imperfection.^ It would indeed be very re- 
 markable if a proposition for changes so vast and com- 
 
 ' The student will find very clear, informing, and suggestive 
 reading in Kirkup's History of Socialism. (A. and C. Black, 1906.) 
 A fine impartial account of these developments which may be used 
 as a correction (or confirmation) for this book. 
 
SOCIALISM A DEVELOPING DOCTRINE 207 
 
 prehensive as Socialism advances was in any different 
 state at this present time. 
 
 It is so recently as 1835 that the world first heard the 
 word SociaHsm. It appeared then, with the vaguest im- 
 plications and the most fluctuating definition, as a general 
 term for a disconnected series of protests against the ex- 
 treme 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 ex- 
 periments. 
 
 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 human 
 equality the French Revolution had formulated, and that 
 
208 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 was its clear indication of the evil of unrestricted private 
 property and of the necessary antagonism of the interests 
 of the individual to the commonweal 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 en- 
 tirely sketchy and experimental. It was wild as the 
 talk of schoolboys. It disregarded the most obvious 
 needs. It did not provide for any principle of govern- 
 ment, 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 not-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 revolutionary. 
 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. 
 
SOCIALISM A DEVELOPING DOCTRINE 209 
 
 Our present generation is less buoyant, perhaps, but 
 wiser. However young you may be as a reformer, you 
 know you must face certain facts these 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 philoso- 
 pher 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. 
 
210 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 The early Socialists, arriving at last at their Great 
 Idea, after toilsome questionings, after debates, dispu- 
 tations, 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. Prou- 
 dhon, perceiving that the world was obsessed by a mis- 
 conception 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 exag- 
 geration 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 
 
SOCIALISM A DEVELOPING DOCTRINE 211 
 
 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, sugges- 
 tive schemes. It has the fertility, the confusion, the hope- 
 fulness, the promise of glowing youth. It is a quarry of 
 ideas, a mine of crude expedients, a fountain of emo- 
 tions. 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 hun- 
 dred 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 imagi- 
 native, 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 
 
212 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 Social- 
 ism'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 jails. 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 essen- 
 tial 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 limi- 
 tations which is called "free love," and there is that 
 
SOCIALISM A DEVELOPING DOCTRINE 213 
 
 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 ortho- 
 dox clothing, and their women made short hair and 
 bloomers the outward and visible associations of the 
 communistic idea. 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 inevi- 
 table 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 schoolmaster, the judge, and the police- 
 man, as the amateur architect of the anecdote left out 
 the staircase. They set out to contrive a better indus- 
 trial organization, or a better social atmosphere within 
 the present scheme of things. They wished to reform 
 what they understood, and what was outside their 
 
214 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 di- 
 rection of Utopian experiments equally limited and iso- 
 lated. 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 speci- 
 mens" of human welfare of the utmost value to 
 promoters. They made factory legislation possible; 
 they initiated the now immense cooperative movement ; 
 they stirred commonplace imaginations as only achieve- 
 ment can stir them ; they initiated a process of ameliora- 
 tion in industrial conditions that will never, I beheve, 
 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. Essen- 
 tially, Socialism is a project for the species, but these 
 communities made it a system of relationships within a 
 
SOCIALISM A DEVELOPING DOCTRINE 215 
 
 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 them- 
 selves landlords, employers, no more and no less than 
 a corporate individualism. I have described elsewhere ^ 
 the fate of the celebrated Oneida Community of New 
 York State, and how it is now converted into an aggres- 
 sive, wealthy, fighting corporation of the most modern 
 type, employing immigrant labour. 
 
 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 la- 
 belled fruits were a series of futile "communities" — 
 Noyes's 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 mak- 
 * The Future in America. (Chapman and Hall, 1906.) 
 
216 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 ing 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 be- 
 ginnings of public education, adulteration acts, and 
 similar checks upon the extremities of private enterprise, 
 the great successful experiments of cooperative distribu- 
 tion, and the first appearance of what has now become 
 a quasi-official representation of labour in the state 
 through the trades unions. Two great writers, Car- 
 lyle 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 supersti- 
 tions of political economy that barred the way to any 
 effectual constructive scheme. An enormous work was 
 done throughout the whole Victorian period by Social- 
 ists and Socialistic writers, in criticising 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 prac- 
 ticality. 
 
SOCIALISM A DEVELOPING DOCTRINE 217 
 
 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 strug- 
 ghng 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 unmis- 
 takably, authoritative. 
 
 While the experimental Utopian Socialisms gave a sort 
 of variegated and conflicting pattern of a reorganized 
 
218 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 farther 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 
 
 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 toward new things. But Marx had visions. 
 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 pro- 
 ducing 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 possible 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. 
 
 219 
 
220 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 The last thing men contrive to discern in every ques- 
 tion 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 im- 
 mense concentration of wealth, a differentiation of a spe- 
 cial wealthy class of landholder and capitalist, a diminu- 
 tion of small property owners and the development of 
 a great and growing class of landless, nearly property- 
 less men, the ^proletariat. Marx showed — he showed 
 so clearly that to-day it is recognized by every intelli- 
 gent 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 accept a middle class of educated pro- 
 fessionals 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-con- 
 scious owner, and they will be at war. And with a 
 broad intellectual sweep he flung the light of this con- 
 ception upon the whole contemporary history of man- 
 kind. His Capital has no sketch of Utopias, no limita- 
 tion to the conditions or possibilities of this country or 
 
REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM 221 
 
 that. "Here," he says in the widest way, "is what is 
 going on all over the world. So long as practically un- 
 trammelled private property, such as you conceive it 
 to-day, endures, this must go on. The worker gravi- 
 tates steadily everywhere to a bare subsistence ; the rest 
 of the proceeds of his labour swells the power of the own- 
 ers. 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 books are 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 mis- 
 
222 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 chief 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 ab- 
 stract 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 
 criticised 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 litera- 
 ture 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 ex- 
 pected that the bulk of this economic literature resolves 
 upon analysis into a ponderous, intricate, often aston- 
 ishingly able and foolish wrangling about terminology. 
 Now in the early Victorian period in which Marx 
 
REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM 223 
 
 planned his theorizing, political economy ruled the edu- 
 cated world. Ruskin had still to attack the primary 
 assumptions of that tyrannous and dogmatic edifice. 
 The duller sort of educated people talked of the "im- 
 mutable 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 con- 
 demned by these mystical formulae. Political economy 
 traded on the splendid achievements of physics and 
 chemistry and pretended to an equally inexorable author- 
 ity. Only a man of supreme courage, 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 pre- 
 sented scientific truth, and to cast that jargon side. 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 
 reclassify and redefine them at his need. So that he has 
 become already difficult to follow, and his more special- 
 ized 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, 
 
224 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 as one hears less and less of Ricardo's theory of Rent. 
 It may crop up in the inquiries of some intelligent 
 mechanic seeking knowledge among the obsolescent ac- 
 cumulations 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 im- 
 portance 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 contempo- 
 rary phraseology, and revision in the light of contempo- 
 rary 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 tri- 
 umphant 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 this 
 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 toward an inevitable destiny. 
 His followers are too apt to regard that as an absolutely 
 
REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM 225 
 
 inevitable destiny, but the fault of that lies not at his 
 door. He saw that destiny 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 aristoc- 
 racy culminating in Imperialism and ending in social 
 disintegration. From his study, from the studious ro- 
 tunda 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 generalizations of economic develop- 
 ment go, 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 prop- 
 erty 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 conscious- 
 ness of the workers, and the promise — and when strikers 
 take to rifles and explosives, as they do in Pennsylvania 
 
226 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 and Colorado, something more than the promise of the 
 class war. 
 
 But the modern Socialist considers that this generali- 
 zation is a little too confident and comprehensive; he 
 perceives that a change in custom, law, or public opin- 
 ion may delay, arrest, or invert the economic process, 
 that Socialism may arrive after all, not by a social convul- 
 sion, 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 procession 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 dis- 
 cussion, and the class war come disguised beyond recog- 
 nition, 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. 
 
REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM 227 
 
 §2 
 
 The circle of ideas in which Marx moved was that of 
 a student deeply tinged with the idealism of the re- 
 nascent 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 govern- 
 ment. Only in England and in the eighties did the 
 expanding propositions of Socialism come under the 
 influence of men essentially administrative. As a con- 
 sequence 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. 
 
228 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 admi- 
 rably 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 afTairs 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 
 
REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM 229 
 
 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 Chris- 
 tians 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 develop- 
 ment to the pitch of fatalism; it declares, with all the 
 solemnity of popular "science," that Sociahsm must 
 prevail. Such a fatalism is morally bad for the adherent : 
 it releases him from the inspiring sense of uncertain vic- 
 tory, 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 efTort therefore and intolerant — preaching pre- 
 destination and salvation without works. 
 
 By a circuitous route, indeed, the Marxist reaches a 
 moral position curiously analogous to that of the disciple 
 
230 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 exaspera- 
 tion, 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 re- 
 form. 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 fatal- 
 ism 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 everji,hing, 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- 
 
REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM 231 
 
 war is over is equally antagonistic to intelligent con- 
 structive effort. It faces that Future, utters the word 
 "democracy," and veils its eyes. 
 
 The conception of democracy to which the Marxist ad- 
 heres is that same mystical democracy that was evolved 
 at the first French Revolution ; it will sanction no analy- 
 sis 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 gro- 
 tesque 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 intellec- 
 
232 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 tually, 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 So- 
 cialist 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 be- 
 come 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 tem- 
 pered its severely "economic" tendencies. Indeed it 
 so over-accentuates the economic side of life that at 
 
REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM 233 
 
 moments one might imagine it dealt solely with some 
 world of purely ''productive" immortals, who were 
 never born and never aged, but only warred forever 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 commu- 
 nity. Herr Bebel's book. Woman, is an ample state- 
 ment of the evils of woman's lot under the existing 
 regime, but the few pages upon the future of woman 
 with which he concludes are eloquent of the jejune 
 insufficiency of the Marxite outlook in this direction. 
 Marriage as a social fact is to vanish; women are 
 to count as men so far as the state is concerned. 
 That is all. . . . 
 
 This disregard of the primary importance of births 
 and upbringing in human affairs and this advocacy of 
 
234 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 mystical democracy alike contribute to blind the Marxist 
 to the necessity of an educational process and of discipline 
 in the Socialist scheme. He can say with a light and 
 confident heart to untrained, ignorant, groping souls, 
 " destroy the government ; expropriate the rich ; estab- 
 lish manhood suffrage; elect delegates, strictly pledged, 
 — and you will be happy !" 
 
 A few modern Marxists stipulate in addition for a 
 referendum, by which the activities of the elected dele- 
 gates can be further checked by referring disputed 
 matters to a general vote of all the adults in the com- 
 munity. , . . 
 
 §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. Hynd- 
 man'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 
 
REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM 235 
 
 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 con- 
 flict; a blond lady rather expensively dressed, I should 
 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 "In the Rapids of Revo- 
 lution," 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 in- 
 consistency in that. 
 
 Now the questions were being handed in, wTitten on 
 strips of paper, and at last that listener's difficulty 
 
236 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 cropped up. "What's this?" said Mr. Hyndman, un- 
 folded the sHp 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 federa- 
 tion 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 fatahstic 
 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. Anar- 
 chism 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 — 
 
REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM 237 
 
 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 un- 
 impeded 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 SociaHst 
 thought, released from vitalizing association with an 
 active, creative experience. Anarchism comes when the 
 SociaHst repudiation of property is dropped into the 
 circles of thought of men habitually ruled and habitually 
 irresponsible, men limited in action and temperamen- 
 tally 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 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 con- 
 structive spirit, the ordering and organizing spirit, has 
 
238 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 been strong among Socialists. It was by a fallacy, an 
 oversight, that laissez-faire in politics crept into a move- 
 ment 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 con- 
 temporary Socialism, the political Anarchism. But 
 there is also another sort of Anarchism, which the stu- 
 ent of these schools of thought must keep clear in his 
 mind from this, the Anarchism of Tolstoy and William 
 Morris, which waves no flag of black, and counsels no 
 violence; which is indeed, I hazard, the moral ideal of 
 all right-thinking men. It is worth while to define very 
 clearly the relation of the 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 
 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 regula- 
 
REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM 239 
 
 tions are unnecessary and unjust ones impossible. " Turn 
 your attention," says my friend, the Rev. Stewart Head- 
 lam, 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 everyday 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." 
 
 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, 
 
240 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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,^ pre- 
 sented not a Socialist state, but a glorious Anar- 
 chism, as the outcome of that rejuvenescence of the 
 world. 
 
 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 magnifi- 
 cent 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 hatpins (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 
 * In the Days of the Comet. (Macmillan and Co., 1906.) 
 
REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM 241 
 
 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 be- 
 lieve — 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 preju- 
 dices, create a system of social right-dealing and a 
 tradition of right feeling and acting. Socialism is the 
 schoolroom 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 
 
242 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 forever 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 inacces- 
 sible to laughter, who 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 
 vile teaching saved only from being horrible by being 
 utterly asinine. 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 mak- 
 ing of Socialism and the civilized State without pre- 
 sumption — 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 eccen- 
 tric 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 nar- 
 rowed 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 supple- 
 mented by mystical democracy, and both its mysti- 
 cism and incompleteness, while they offered no diffi- 
 culties to a labouring man ignorant of affairs, rendered 
 
 243 
 
244 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 recon- 
 struction upon the circle of thought of one or two young 
 officials of genius and of one or two members of that 
 politic-social stratum of society, the English "gov- 
 erning 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 ac- 
 cessible 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 devel- 
 opment. There was, indeed, Fabianism before the Fa- 
 bian 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 exten- 
 
ADMINISTRATIVE SOCIALISM 245 
 
 sive process of municipalization as the mere common- 
 sense of local patriotism. But the movement was with- 
 out formulae and correlation until the Fabians came. 
 
 That unorganized, unpaid public service of public- 
 spirited aristocrats 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, 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-con- 
 scious, 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 Hke the sky, like a flag hoisted, some- 
 thing, indeed, that not only does not but must not inter- 
 fere with his ordinary business occupations. To have 
 public spirit, to be aware of the state as a whole, and to 
 have an administrative feeling toward 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 ad- 
 ministrative disposition with the individualistic com- 
 
246 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 mercialism 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 altogether. Socialistic thought 
 and legislation, therefore, was going on in Great 
 Britain through all the Victorian period. Neverthe- 
 less, 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. Sid- 
 ney 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 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 J and he was already the leader and "idea 
 
ADMINISTRATIVE SOCIALISM 247 
 
 factory" of the Fabian Society when he married Miss 
 Beatrice Potter, a briUiant student of sociological ques- 
 tions. 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 pre- 
 vailed. Assuming the truth of the two main generali- 
 zations of Socialism, taking that statement of inten- 
 tion for granted, how is the thing to be done? They 
 put aside the glib assurances of the revolutionary Social- 
 ists that everything would be all right when the People 
 came to their own and so earned for themselves the un- 
 dying 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 school of economics and of a grow- 
 
248 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 ing volume of university study in England and America, 
 — to the end that this "howf" 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, either 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. Secular expropriation of private owners by death- 
 duties and increased taxation. 
 
 3. The exploitation of all new social services by the 
 public authorities and not by private enterprise, the pre- 
 vention, that is to say, of any additions to the present 
 bulk of privately owned property. 
 
 4. The building up of a great scientifically organized 
 administrative machinery to carry on these enlarging 
 public functions. 
 
 5. A steady increase and expansion of public edu- 
 cation, 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. 
 
ADMINISTRATIVE SOCIALISM 249 
 
 6. The systematic creation of a great service of public 
 health to take over the disorganized confusion of hospi- 
 tals and other charities, sanitary authorities, officers of 
 health and private enterprise medical men. 
 
 7. The recognition of the claim of every citizen to 
 welfare by measures for the support of mothers and chil- 
 dren, and by the establishment of old-age pensions. 
 
 8. The systematic raising of the minimum standard of 
 life by factory and labour legislation, and particularly 
 by the establishment of a minimum wage. . . . 
 
 These are the broad forms of the Fabian Socialist's 
 answer to the question of how, with which the revolu- 
 tionary Socialist's were confronted. The diligent stu- 
 dent of Socialism will find all these proposals worked out 
 to a very practicable-looking pitch, indeed, in that 
 Bible of Progressive Socialism, the collected tracts of 
 the Fabian Society,^ 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. 
 
 §2 
 
 Every movement has the defects of its virtues, and 
 it is not perhaps very remarkable that the Fabian Society 
 » Fabian Tracts. (Fabian Society, 4/6.) 
 
250 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 of the eighties and nineties, having introduced the con- 
 ception of the historical continuity of institutions into the 
 propaganda of Sociahsm, did certainly for a time greatly 
 overaccentuate that conception and draw away atten- 
 tion from aspects that may be ultimately more essential. 
 Beginning with the proposition that the institu- 
 tions and formulae 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 toward 
 existing machinery. In spite of the presence of such 
 fine and original intelligences as Mr. Sydney Olivier and 
 Mr. Graham Wallas in the Fabian counsels, there can be 
 no denial that for the first twenty years of the society's 
 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 adap- 
 tation, and with a real dread 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 
 reechoed and intensified by others, and developed into 
 something like a mania for achieving Socialism without 
 the overt change of any existing ruling body. His im- 
 
ADMINISTRATIVE SOCIALISM 251 
 
 petus carried this reaction against the crude democratic 
 idea to its extremest opposite. There arose Webbites 
 more Webbish than Webb. From saying that the un- 
 organized 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 has the charm of a 
 schoolboy'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 bureau- 
 cracy was to slip into power through the mechanical 
 difficulties of an administration by debating represen- 
 tatives ; 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 dis- 
 tinctly undemocratic Socialism. 
 
 The process went even further than secretiveness in 
 its reaction from the large rhetorical forms of revolution- 
 ary Socialism. There arose even a repudiation of " prin- 
 ciples" 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 
 
252 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 parallel at the other extreme with the self-contradiction 
 of the Anarchist-Socialist. Socialism as distinguished 
 from a mere Liberalism, for example, is an organized plan 
 for social reconstruction, while Liberalism relies upon 
 certain vague "principles"; it declares that good in- 
 tentions and doing first-hand things and obvious things 
 will not suffice. Now Opportunism is essentially benevo- 
 lent adventure and the doing of first-hand things. 
 
 This conception of indifference to the forms of govern- 
 ment, 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. Mr. Webb, himself, de- 
 voted 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 cer- 
 tainly 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 
 
ADMINISTRATIVE SOCIALISM 253 
 
 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, 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 com- 
 mon 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 
 
254 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 electric power or administer education, is accountable 
 for much disheartening bungling. Instead of taking 
 a clear line from the outset, and denouncing these glori- 
 fied vestries as useless, impossible, and entirely unscien- 
 tific organs, the Socialists under the influence of the earlier 
 Fabianism 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 hence- 
 forth 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 
 
ADMINISTRATIVE SOCIALISM 255 
 
 repairing the spade, to insure a proper supply. Or to 
 point the comparison, the reconstruction of our legisla- 
 tive and local government machinery is a necessary pre- 
 liminary 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, en- 
 tranced by his leader's skill, still clings to the earlier 
 Fabian ideal. He dreams of the most foxy and won- 
 derful digging by means of box-lids, tablespoons, 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 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 (receding 
 a little from Fabian Society affairs and becoming more 
 
256 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 and more purely scientific in spirit) 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 ul- 
 timately give constructive social conceptions an enor- 
 mous 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 ^ in 
 which he showed clearly that the character and efficiency 
 and possibilities of a governing body depend almost en- 
 tirely upon 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 ob- 
 viously before you can transfer property from private 
 to collective control you must have something in the 
 way of a governing institution with a reasonably good 
 chance of developing into an efficient controlling body. 
 The leading conception of this Administrative Area 
 
 * See Appendix to Mankind in the Making. (Chapman and Hall, 
 1903.) 
 
ADMINISTRATIVE SOCIALISM 257 
 
 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/ These tracts are remarkable if only be- 
 cause 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 
 constitute 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. 
 
 It is only an initial recognition, a mere first raid into 
 a great new unexplored province of study. This prov- 
 ince 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. Ex- 
 cept 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; 
 
 ' 1. Municipalization by Provinces. 2. On the Reform of 
 Municipal Service. 3. Public Control of Electric Power and Tran- 
 sit. 4. The Revival of Agriculture ; a National Policy for Great 
 Britain. 5. The Abolition of Poor Law Guardians. Others to fol- 
 low. (Fabian Society, 1905-1906.) 
 
258 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 it has either accepted existing intellectual conditions and 
 political institutions as beyond its control, or assumed 
 that they will obediently modify as economic and ad- 
 ministrative 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 
 network of difhcultics that lie directly in our way. 
 SociaHsts 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 intel- 
 lectual methods, machinery, and political institutions of 
 the better future must almost inevitably be of a very 
 difTerent 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 or- 
 ganized; and thirdly, that so far Socialism has evolved 
 scarcely any generalizations even, that may be made the 
 
ADMINISTRATIVE SOCIALISM 259 
 
 basis of new intellectual and governmental — as dis- 
 tinguished from administrative — methods. It has 
 preached collective ownership and collective control, and 
 it has only begun to recognize that this implies the neces- 
 sity 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 bureau- 
 cracy appointed by representative bodies of dimin- 
 ishing 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 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 
 conceptions of a state run and ruled by officials, terminat- 
 ing in officials, with an official as its highest expression. 
 One has a vision of a community with blue-books in- 
 stead of a literature, and inspectors instead of a con- 
 
260 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 science. The mystical democracy of the Marxist, 
 though manifestly impossible, had in it something 
 attractive, something humanly and desperately pug- 
 nacious, 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 reahzed; 
 that is to say, the collective mind of humxinity, the soul 
 and moral being of mankind. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM 
 §1 
 
 Such an idea as Socialism, fundamentally true to the 
 needs of life and arising as it does from the inevitable 
 suggestion of very widely dispersed evils and insufficien- 
 cies, does not spring from any one source, nor develop 
 along any single line. It breaks out like a smouldering 
 fire, first taking on 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, first here, then there, in 
 spite of a hundred vested interests. The age that re- 
 garded Herbert Spencer as its greatest philosopher, for 
 example, was urged nevertheless, unwillingly and pro- 
 testingly, but effectually, through phase after phase 
 of more and more coordinated voluntary effort, until 
 at last it had to undertake a complete system of or- 
 
 261 
 
262 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 ganized free public primary education. There the mov- 
 ing finger of change halts not a moment; already it is 
 going on to secondary education, to schemes for a com- 
 plete 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 difTerent field, the plain inconveniences of 
 a private control of traffic in America and England 
 alike, force the affected property-owners whose busi- 
 nesses are hampered and damaged toward the realization 
 that freedom of private property, in these services at 
 least, is evil, and must end. 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 toward 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 gener- 
 ous restatement of Socialism. Nothing but a broader 
 understanding of the broadening propositions of So- 
 cialism is needed for that recognition now. 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM 263 
 
 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 con- 
 cerned with the reality of his profession, in just so far 
 as he is worthy of his profession, must resent the con- 
 siderations 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 toward Socialism by 
 the errors of its adherents, by the impression quite wan- 
 tonly created, that Socialism meant either mob rule or 
 the rule of pedantic, unsympathetic officials. They 
 have heard too much of democracy, too much of bureau- 
 cracy, 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 conceiv- 
 able rule in a Socialist civilization is through the opera- 
 tion of a collective mind that must be by its nature con- 
 structive and enterprising, because only through the 
 
264 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 creation of such a mind can Socialism be brought about. 
 A Sociahst 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 pub- 
 lic 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 ow^nership 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 pro- 
 fessions are eager to get to work on the immense possibili- 
 ties 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, narrow- 
 ness of outlook, self-conceit, ignorance. 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM 265 
 
 With that conception they must surely turn in the end, 
 as we SociaHsts turn, to the most creative profession of 
 all, to that great calling which with each generation re- 
 news the world's "circle of ideas," — the Teachers! 
 
 The whole trend and purpose of this book from the out- 
 set 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 apphed intelligence. That is the constructive So- 
 cialist's position. Logically, therefore, he declares the 
 teacher master of the situation. Ultimately, the Social- 
 ist 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. 
 
266 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 interest- 
 ing 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, aerate 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 man- 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM 267 
 
 kind 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 discov- 
 eries, 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 popu- 
 lation is indeed at the present time like clay, which has 
 hitherto been a mere deadening influence underneath, 
 
268 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 re- 
 sponse, 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 con- 
 veyed 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 pul- 
 pit, 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 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM 269 
 
 at the economic processes that underlie these intellectual 
 activities at the present time. Except for the universi- 
 ties and much of the public educational organization, 
 except for a few pulpits endowed for good under condi- 
 tions that limit freedom of thought and expression^ ex- 
 cept for certain needy and impecunious propagandas, 
 the whole of this apparatus of public thought and dis- 
 cussion 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 what- 
 ever 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 pro- 
 
270 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 duction of attractive literature. Necessarily what is 
 published in newspapers and magazines must be ac- 
 ceptable 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 toward Socialism is, if not to un- 
 dermine 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 salable things unaided. The 
 average book of to-day, at its nominal price of six shil- 
 lings, 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 the 
 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 books for advertisement. Many 
 people consider this cheapening of new books as being 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM 271 
 
 detrimental to the interests of all but the most vulgarly 
 popular authors. They believe it will increase the diffi- 
 culty 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 de- 
 moralize another, which may vulgarize and debase dis- 
 cussion. 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 dis- 
 semination of ideas made up of the pulpits and lecture 
 halls of a thousand sects and societies. Toward 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 im- 
 
272 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 mediate 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 be- 
 come 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 
 these strange and accidental channels, — newspapers 
 which are advertisement sheets, books which may be 
 boycotted in a "Book War," pulpits pledged to doc- 
 trine, and lecture halls kept open by rich people's sub- 
 scriptions; 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 col- 
 lective determination. For the Statesman and the So- 
 cialist 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 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM 273 
 
 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 analo- 
 gous 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 Judea. 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 in- 
 coherent fixed ideas. This, you will remember, is the 
 gist of that melancholy giant torso of irony, Flaubert's 
 Bouvard et Pecuchet. 
 
 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 gov- 
 erning idea of itself. It is like a man saying to himself 
 
274 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 resolutely, "What am I? What am I doing with my- 
 self? 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-conscious- 
 ness 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 propa- 
 ganda must be the germ of the collective self-conscious- 
 ness of mankind in the coming time. If the purpose of 
 Socialism is to prevail, its scattered writings, its dis- 
 persed, indistinct, and confused utterances, must in- 
 crease in height and breadth and range, increase in power 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM 275 
 
 and service, gather to themselves every means of ex- 
 pression, 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 
 an intellectual synthesis of mankind, sets a fresh test 
 of value upon all the activities of the Socialist, and opens 
 up altogether new departments for research. We pro- 
 pose 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 Sociahst proposals here altogether. It is 
 
276 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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. 
 The attempt to realize the Marxist idea of a demo- 
 cratic 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, in- 
 terfering, and unteachable, with whom wisdom would 
 die. Here I can now suggest methods only in the most 
 general terms, and even before methods are suggested, 
 certain principles need to be laid down as vitally neces- 
 sary to Socialism. They are essentially principles of 
 that Liberalism out of whose generous aspirations Social- 
 ism sprang, but they are principles that even to-day, un- 
 happily, do not figure in the fundamental creed 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 per- 
 suade. These freedoms must be guarded as sacred 
 things. It is not in the untutored nature of man to 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM 277 
 
 respect any of these freedoms; it is not in the bureau- 
 cratic 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 re- 
 spect, by a correction of natural instinct; men need to 
 be trained to be jealous of obscurantism, of unfair argu- 
 ment, of authoritative interference with opinion when 
 that opinion is against them. In England such a 
 jealousy does already largely exist; it has been culti- 
 vated 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 tyr- 
 anny in the matter of publication, an un-English dispo- 
 sition to boycott libraries, books, authors, and pub- 
 lications 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 necessi- 
 ties 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 dis- 
 
278 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 tributing books and newspapers, pamphlets, and every 
 form of printed matter. The post-ofRce must become 
 bookseller and news-agent. 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 black-mailing book or news 
 trust "fighting" author or publisher for some squalid 
 increase in its proportion of profits, or interested in 
 jBnancial 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 the universal news- 
 vender and bookseller; every news- vender and book- 
 seller 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 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM 279 
 
 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 in- 
 disputable 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 sup- 
 ported under Socialist conditions. It is not within the 
 design of this book to do more than indicate a possible 
 solution. 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 Socialist 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 reason- 
 able 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 
 
280 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 leaves a disagreeable possibility of uniformity haunting 
 the mind. But the whole trend of administrative So- 
 cialism is toward a conception of great local governments, 
 of land, elementary education, omnibus-transit, power- 
 distribution, and the like, vesting in the hands of muni- 
 cipalities as great as medioBval principalities, and it 
 seems possible to look to these great bodies and to the 
 municipal patriotism and intermunicipal 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 architec- 
 ture and public dignity and display.* Already, as I 
 have pointed out in a previous chapter (Chapter VIII, 
 § 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 munici- 
 palities might publish, seek out, maintain, and honour 
 writers and sell the books they produced, against each 
 
 ' I visited Liverpool and Manchester the other day for the 
 first time in my hfe, and was deUghted to find how the inferiority 
 of the local art galleries to those of Glasgow rankled in people's 
 minds. 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM 281 
 
 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. . . . 
 
 This, however, is but one passing suggestion out of 
 many possibilities. But in all these issues of the intel- 
 lectual life, it is manifest that public ownership must be 
 so contrived and can be so contrived as to avoid centrali- 
 zation 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 be- 
 cause it is a remarkable 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. . . . 
 
 The problem of the press is perhaps to be solved by 
 some parallel combination of individual enterprise and 
 
282 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 Vic- 
 torian period, and that a separation of public discussion 
 from the news-sheet is already in progress. Both in Eng- 
 land and America the popular magazine seems taking 
 over an increasing share of the public thinking. . . . 
 
 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 cul- 
 tivate. . . . 
 
 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 com- 
 peting organizations. An educated and prosperous 
 community, such as we hypotheticate for the Socialist 
 state, will necessarily be more alert for interest and in- 
 tellectual quality than our present "driven" multi- 
 tude; 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 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM 283 
 
 of the drama of life. Under Socialism, with the exten- 
 sion of the educational process it contemplates, univer- 
 sities 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 libra- 
 ries, the book exhibitions, and book and pamphlet 
 stores, keenly criticised, keenly used, will teem with un- 
 hurrying, 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 dis- 
 advantage ; that is to say, it will be developing and sus- 
 taining the social self-consciousness, the collective sense 
 of the state. 
 
 §5 
 
 I am naturally preoccupied with the Mind of that Civil- 
 ized 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 
 
284 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 and 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 preven- 
 tion, of hygiene and selection. And the specialized 
 man of science 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 
 student 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. 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM 285 
 
 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 as- 
 surance 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 cooperation 
 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 man- 
 kind. 
 
 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, in order that the 
 reader may be able to measure this fuller and completer 
 proposition against the earlier Fabian Socialism whose 
 propositions are set out in Chapter XI, § 1. All these 
 are incorporated in this that follows: there is no con- 
 tradiction whatever between them, but there is ampli- 
 fication ; new elements are taken into consideration, 
 
286 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 once disregarded difficulties have been faced and par- 
 tially resolved. 
 
 First, then, the constructive Socialist has to do 
 whatever lies in his power toward 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 em- 
 body and make real the state and the city. And the 
 Socialist idea, constantly restated, refreshed, and elabo- 
 rated, 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 morahty. 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 com- 
 munity and to remove the obstructions to Socialization 
 that are inevitable where institutions stand for "inter- 
 ests" 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 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM 287 
 
 built up, — bodies that shall be really capable of the im- 
 mense 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 hy the community, by 
 increased control, by taxation, by death duties, by pur- 
 chase, 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 col- 
 lective ownership and control now, and each can be 
 attacked independently of the others. There is first the 
 need of public educational machinery, and by educa- 
 tion 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 lit- 
 erary work. A civilized community is impossible with- 
 
288 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 out great public libraries, public museums, public art 
 schools, without public honour and support for contem- 
 porary 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 organiz- 
 ing the whole community in relation to health, the col- 
 lective development of hospitals, medical aid, public 
 sanitation, child welfare, into one great loyal and effi- 
 cient public service. This too may be pushed forward 
 either as the part of the general Socialist movement or 
 independently as a thing in itself by those who may find 
 the whole Socialist proposition unacceptable or incon- 
 venient. 
 
 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 replanning 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 manage- 
 ment, and so on to collective enterprise and ownership 
 of building land, houses, railways, tramways, and omni- 
 buses give the only way of escape from an endless drift- 
 ing entanglement and congestion of our mobile modern 
 population. 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM 289 
 
 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 connec- 
 tion 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 edu- 
 cational machinery, agriculturist colleges, and the like, 
 when the feeble intellectual initiative of the private 
 adventure miner and manufacturer demands a London 
 "Charlottenburg," it must be manifest that state initi- 
 ative has altogether outdistanced 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 com- 
 munity 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 
 
290 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 Socialism to-day. Under one or other head it can utilize 
 almost every sort of capacity and every type of oppor- 
 tunity. 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 ene- 
 mies are those foolish and litigious advocates who 
 antagonize and estrange every development of human 
 Good WiU that does not pay tribute to their vanity in 
 open acquiescence. Its most loyal servants, it may be 
 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 generaliza- 
 tions. But it still seems to remain — generalizations ; 
 and I feel the need of getting it into my mind as some- 
 thing concrete and real. "WTiat 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,^ but that has not been so 
 widely read as I could have wished ; it does not appeal 
 strongly enough perhaps to the practical everyday side 
 of life, and here I may do my best to give very briefly 
 * (Chapman and Hall, 3/6.) 
 291 
 
292 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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. 
 
 It would be a world and a life in no fundamental re- 
 spect 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 ego- 
 tistical 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 
 difhculty 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. You might, indeed, were you sud- 
 denly 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 
 
SOME ARGUMENTS AD HOMINEM 293 
 
 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 schoolroom, 
 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 classroom a much ampler building 
 
294 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 con- 
 ditions 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 edu- 
 cation from the state up to the age of sixteen or seven- 
 teen 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 posi- 
 tion in the service, whatever it is, and have been ac- 
 cepted, much as you apply and are accepted for posi- 
 tions now, by the school managers, and you will have 
 done so because it attracted you, and they will have ac- 
 cepted you because your qualifications seemed adequate 
 to them. You will draw a salary attached to the posi- 
 tion, 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 
 
SOME ARGUMENTS AD HOMINEM 295 
 
 be studying, writing, or doing some work of supereroga- 
 tion for the school or the state — because under Socialist 
 conditions it cannot he 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 dis- 
 posed. 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 chrysanthe- 
 mums, 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 con- 
 template. 
 
 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, exact- 
 ing 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 municipal- 
 ity, and your house will be built solidly and prettily, 
 
296 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 instead of being jerry-built and mean-looking, and it will 
 have bathroom, electric light, electrically equipped kitch- 
 en, 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 "Moder- 
 ate" 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 obliga- 
 tions 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 ade- 
 quately by electricity ; but if I am wrong in that, then 
 
SOME ARGUMENTS AD HOMINEM 297 
 
 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 tastes and pro- 
 chvities 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 Social- 
 ist state, and in their case the wife will probably have an 
 occupation and be a teacher, a medical practitioner, a 
 
298 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 
 
SOME ARGUMENTS AD HOMINEM 299 
 
 in their motlier'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 Social- 
 ism 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 em- 
 ployer, and if that does not do, she and her aggrieved 
 
300 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 groceries 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 criticise and 
 remedy it, just as one can now criticise 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, differ- 
 ent 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 
 
SOME ARGUMENTS AD HOMINEM 301 
 
 on the wholesome bottled ales of her great (municipalized) 
 breweries, and Maidstone or Rochester, let us say, boast- 
 ing 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 up- 
 lands, 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 Switzer- 
 land, the beer of Munich against the Kentish brew, 
 bread from the bakeries of London and Paris, biscuits 
 from Reading town, chocolate 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 Man- 
 chester 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 
 
302 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 artist 
 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 artist's direction. I don't think, 
 that is, that the milliner or dressmaker will make a trad- 
 ing profit, but only an artist's fee. 
 
 And if the lady wants to buy books, music, artistic 
 brac-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 organization and 
 
SOME ARGUMENTS AD HOMINEM 303 
 
 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 Hmit 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 employees in the distributing trade 
 would obviously be hving a sort of clarified, dignified 
 version of their present existence, freed from their worst 
 anxieties, the terror of the ''swap," the hopeless ap- 
 proach of old age, and from the sweated food and ac- 
 commodation of the living-in system. Under Socialism 
 the '4iving-in" system would be incredible. Their 
 conditions of life would approximate to those of the 
 
304 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 distributors and dis- 
 tinguish 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 edu- 
 cation, security for a minimum living, an assured old 
 
SOME ARGUMENTS AD HOMINEM 305 
 
 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 
 state of affairs would be even closer to a broadened and 
 liberalized version of things as they are. The con- 
 ductors 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 haton in 
 his knapsack. He will have had a good education; he 
 will have short hours of duty and leisure for self-im- 
 provement or other pursuits, and if he remains a con- 
 ductor or driver all his life, he will have only his own un- 
 pretending qualities to thank for that. He will probably 
 remain a conductor if he hkes to remain a conductor, and 
 
306 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 get out if he does not. He is not obliged to take that 
 baton 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 perma- 
 nence of employment and the systematic evasion of the 
 social hardship caused nowadays by new inventions and 
 economies in method. There will exist throughout the 
 world an organized economic survey, which will con- 
 tinually 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 teach- 
 ers and railway men, 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 defences upon soldiers casu- 
 ally 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 Social- 
 ist 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 
 
SOME ARGUMENTS AD HOMINEM 307 
 
 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 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 muni- 
 cipality 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 
 
308 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 clearer ownership in improvements than you have to-day. 
 I am inclined to think that your dairying and milling and 
 so forth will be done 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 asso- 
 ciation 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 scat- 
 tered 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 disap- 
 pearance 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 a hotel for a few 
 weeks, 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 
 
SOME ARGUMENTS AD HOMINEM 309 
 
 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 schoolmaster, will 
 cease to be a private adventurer under Socialism, con- 
 cerned 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 com- 
 ing time, — the service of public health. Either he — I 
 use this pronoun and imply its feminine — will be on the 
 staff of some 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 
 
310 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 So- 
 cialism points is a world that will necessarily be har- 
 monious with these constructive conceptions and free 
 from those jealousies. Whitehall and South Kensing- 
 ton 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 construc- 
 tive 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 ar- 
 chitecture — 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 
 
SOME ARGUMENTS AD HOMINEM 311 
 
 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 sal- 
 able, 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 con- 
 noisseurs of the municipal art collection or private as- 
 sociations of art patrons or the popular buyer, well, then 
 your lot will be no harder than the lot of any unsuccess- 
 ful 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 im- 
 provement 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 build- 
 ings, every theatre-going voter will be keen to see them 
 
312 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 even 
 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 mana- 
 gers 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 com- 
 peting committees. In all these matters, as every in- 
 telligent 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 oppor- 
 tunity 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 
 
SOME ARGUMENTS AD HOMINEM 313 
 
 often make an absolute corner in this artistic market or 
 that. You will not, under Socialism, see Sarah Bern- 
 hardt playing in a tent as she had to do in America, be- 
 cause 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 wor- 
 ship 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 re- 
 ligious 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 
 
314 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 their vows, if their devotees repent. So that you see 
 Socialism will touch nothing hving 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 threat- 
 ened by the development of an organized civilization, 
 who find it impossible to imagine lives at all Hke their 
 own in the Socialist state. 
 
 But first it may be well to remind them again of some- 
 thing 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 
 
SOME OBJECTIONS AD HOMINEM 315 
 
 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 ma- 
 chine for the socially more profitable employment of the 
 same energies. A family solicitor, such as we know him 
 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 trans- 
 formation. 
 
 But suppose now you are a servant, I mean a well- 
 trained, expert, prosperous servant; would the world 
 
316 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 disagreeables 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 con- 
 veniences 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 
 
SOME ARGUMENTS AD HOMINEM 317 
 
 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 clientele 
 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 produc- 
 tive 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 con- 
 ditions 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 
 
318 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 or superiority you enjoy 
 now, under Socialism. You will have to take your place 
 among the multitude again. Only a moiety of your prop- 
 erty will remain to you. 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 motor cars, your splendid 
 furnishings and equipments, will 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 sac- 
 rifice. You must come down to a simpler, and in many 
 material aspects a less distinguished, way of living. 
 
 This is so clearly evident that to any one who believes 
 
SOME ARGUMENTS AD HOMINEM 319 
 
 self-seeking is the ruling motive, the only possible mo- 
 tive in mankind, it seems incredible that your class 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. They preach a class 
 war, to my mind a lurid, violent, and distasteful pros- 
 pect. We shall have to get out of the miseries and dis- 
 order of to-day, if not by way of chateau-burning and 
 tumbrils, at least by a mitigated equivalent of that. 
 But I am not altogether of that opinion. I have a lurk- 
 ing 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 hair-brushes, 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 pos- 
 sesses 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 
 
320 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 this space, all this splendour, has its traceable connection 
 with the insufficiencies and miseries from which you are 
 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 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 bookmakers or music-hall pro- 
 prietors "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 numer- 
 ous 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 
 
SOME ARGUMENTS AD HOMINEM 321 
 
 through on the other side, stitch for stitch, in stunted 
 bodies, in children's deaths, in privation and anger. 
 Your grandmothers did not reaHze that. You do. You 
 know. In that recognition and a certain nobihty 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 
 
322 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 you could but realize it, better than respect. The com- 
 mon 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 and make all the 
 world infinitely richer by that impoverishment. And I 
 am sure that to some 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 
 reahty 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 forever at peace so 
 
SOME ARGUMENTS AD HOMINEM 323 
 
 far as guns and slaughter go, but each perpetually criti- 
 cises, 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 
 pride in your city, a city which will be like the city of the 
 ancient Athenian's or the mediseval Italian's, the centre 
 of a system of territories, the property and chief interest 
 of its citizens. I, for instance, should love and serve, 
 even as I love to-day, these home counties about London, 
 the great lap of the Thames Valley and the Weald and 
 Downlands, 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, Queensland, or 
 San Francisco. And keeping the immediate peace 
 between these vigorous giant municipal states and hold- 
 ing them together, there will still be in many cases the 
 old national or imperial government and kindred munici- 
 palities with a common language and a common his- 
 tory 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 inter- 
 national trade and an intermediary between its municipal 
 
324 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE ADVANCEMENT OF SOCIALISM 
 §1 
 
 And here my brief exposition of the ideals of modern 
 SociaHsm 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 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, conceahng noth- 
 ing 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 funda- 
 mental generalizations they are all absolutely agreed, 
 and some day the whole world will be agreed. Their 
 common purport is the resumption by the community 
 
 325 
 
326 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 ex- 
 planations continuously, that the present advancement 
 of Socialism must lie now along three several lines : — 
 First, and most important, is the primary intel- 
 lectual process, the elaboration, criticism, discussion, 
 enrichment, and enlargement of the project of So- 
 cialism. 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 atti- 
 tudes, 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 injus- 
 tices 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 educa- 
 tional task is at the present time the main work that 
 
THE ADVANCEMENT OF SOCIALISM 327 
 
 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 dis- 
 tribution of literature, by writing and speaking in 
 public, by subscribing its propagandist organization. 
 
 And Thirdly, there is the actual changing of 
 practical things in the direction of the coming Socialist 
 State, the actual socialization, bit by bit and more and 
 more completely, of the land, of the means of produc- 
 tion, of education and child welfare, of insurance and 
 the food-supply, — the secular realization, in fact, of 
 that great design the intellectual process of Socialism 
 is continually making more beautiful, attractive, and 
 worthy. Now this third group of activities is neces- 
 sarily various and divergent, and at every point the 
 conscious and confessed Socialist will find himself 
 cooperating with partial or unintentional Socialists, 
 with statesmen and officials, with opportunist philan- 
 thropists, with Trades Unionists, with religious bodies 
 and religious teachers, with educationists, with scien- 
 tific 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 never should he hesitate to work with 
 them because they refuse the label. For, in the house 
 
328 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 in- 
 cidentally does it sway the world of politics. It is not a 
 political movement; it may engender political move- 
 ments, 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. Construe- 
 
THE ADVANCEMENT OF SOCIALISM 329 
 
 tive 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, par- 
 ties and organizations and names may be used and aban- 
 doned; 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 Sdbialist movement, the 
 lesser the various organizations that come and go. There 
 is this necessity because there is a sort of natural antago- 
 nism 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," rosewater, and such like 
 
330 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 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 direc- 
 tion 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 Social- 
 ism, 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 abnega- 
 tion 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 type of personality which men follow with 
 enthusiasm. The others, Owen, Saint Simon, Proudhon, 
 
THE ADVANCEMENT OF SOCIALISM 331 
 
 Fourier, Marx, Bebel, Webb, contributed to a process 
 they never seized hold upon, never made their own, 
 they gave enrichment and enlargement and the move- 
 ment passed on ; passes on gathering as it goes. Kings- 
 ley, 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 
 
 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 right-thinking minds. 
 And in a sense they simplify life. Once they have been 
 understood they clear away and render impossible a 
 
332 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 
 thousand confusions and errors of thought and practice. 
 They are, in the completest sense of the word, illumi- 
 nation. 
 
 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 generaliza- 
 tions, 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, 
 
THE ADVANCEMENT OF SOCIALISM 333 
 
 as he turns his hand and way of living towards that com- 
 mon 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 fmality 
 this book of explanations is given to the world. 
 
« Socialism grew to be a very important question during the 
 nineteenth century ; in all probability it will be the supreme ques- 
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