Se.
It was Karl Marx who brought the second
great influx of suggestion into the intellectual process
of Socialism. Before his time there does not
seem to have been any clear view of economic relationships
as having laws of development, as having interactions
that began and went on and led towards new things.
But Marx had vision. He had-as Darwin
and the evolutionists had, as most men with a scientific
training, and many educated men without that advantage
now have-a sense of secular change.
Instead of being content with the accepted picture
of the world as a scene where men went on producing
and distributing wealth and growing rich or poor,
it might be for endless ages, he made an appeal to
history and historical analogies, and for the first
time viewed our age of individualist industrial development,
not as a possibly permanent condition of humanity,
but as something unstable and in motion, as an economic
process, that is to say, with a beginning, a middle,
and as he saw it, an almost inevitable end.
The last thing men contrive to discern
in every question is the familiar obvious, and it
came as a great and shattering discovery to the economic
and sociological thought of the latter half of the
nineteenth century that there was going on not simply
a production but an immense concentration of wealth,
a differentiation of a special wealthy class of landholder
and capitalist, a diminution of small property owners
and the development of a great and growing class of
landless, nearly propertyless men, the proletariat.
Marx showed-he showed so clearly that to-day
it is recognized by every intelligent man-that
given a continuance of our industrial and commercial
system, of uncontrolled gain seeking, that is,
given a continuance of our present spirit and ideas
of property, there must necessarily come a time when
the owner and the proletarian will stand face to face,
with nothing-if we except a middle class
of educated professionals dependent on the wealthy,
who are after all no more than the upper stratum of
the proletariat-to mask or mitigate their
opposition. We shall have two classes, the class-conscious
worker and the class-conscious owner, and they will
be at war. And with a broad intellectual sweep
he flung the light of this conception upon the whole
contemporary history of mankind. Das Kapital
was no sketch of Utopias, had no limitation to the
conditions or possibilities of this country or that.
“Here,” he says, in the widest way, “is
what is going on all over the world. So long
as practically untrammelled private property, such
as you conceive it to-day, endures, this must go on.
The worker gravitates steadily everywhere to a bare
subsistence, the rest of the proceeds of his labour
swell the power of the owners. So it will go
on while gain and getting are the rule of your system,
until accumulated tensions between class and class
smash this present social organization and inaugurate
a new age.”
In considering the thought and work
of Karl Marx, the reader must bear in mind the epoch
in which that work commenced. The intellectual
world was then under the sway of an organized mass
of ideas known as the Science of Political Economy,
a mass of ideas that has now not so much been examined
and refuted as slipped away imperceptibly from its
hold upon the minds of men. In the beginning,
in the hands of Adam Smith-whose richly
suggestive book is now all too little read-political
economy was a broad-minded and sane inquiry into the
statecraft of trade based upon current assumptions
of private ownership and personal motives, but from
him it passed to men of perhaps, in some cases, quite
equal intellectual energy but inferior vision and
range. The history of Political Economy is indeed
one of the most striking instances of the mischief
wrought by intellectual minds devoid of vision, in
the entire history of human thought. Special
definition, technicality, are the stigmata of second-rate
intellectual men; they cannot work with the universal
tool, they cannot appeal to the general mind.
They must abstract and separate. On such men
fell the giant’s robe of Adam Smith, and they
wore it after their manner. Their arid atmospheres
are intolerant of clouds, an outline that is not harsh
is abominable to them. They criticized their
master’s vagueness and must needs mend it.
They sought to give political economy a precision
and conviction such a subject will not stand.
They took such words as “value,”
an incurably and necessarily vague word, “rent,”
the name of the specific relation of landlord and
tenant, and “capital,” and sought
to define them with relentless exactness and use them
with inevitable effect. So doing they departed
more and more from reality. They developed a literature
more abundant, more difficult and less real than all
the exercises of the schoolmen put together.
To use common words in uncommon meanings is to sow
a jungle of misunderstanding. It was only to
be expected that the bulk of this economic literature
resolves upon analysis into a ponderous, intricate,
often astonishingly able and foolish wrangling about
terminology.
Now in the early Victorian period
in which Marx planned his theorizing, political economy
ruled the educated world. Ruskin had still to
attack the primary assumptions of that tyrannous and
dogmatic edifice. The duller sort of educated
people talked of the “immutable laws of political
economy” in the blankest ignorance that the basis
of everything in this so-called science was a plastic
human convention. Humane impulses were checked,
creative effort tried and condemned by these mystical
formulae. Political economy traded on the splendid
achievements of physics and chemistry and pretended
to an inexorable authority. Only a man of supreme
intelligence and power, a man resolved to give his
lifetime to the task, could afford in those days to
combat the pretensions of the political economist;
to deny that his categories presented scientific truth,
and to cast that jargon aside. As for Marx, he
saw fit to accept the verbal instruments of his time
(albeit he bent them not a little in use), to accommodate
himself to their spirit and to split and re-classify
and re-define them at his need. So that he has
become already difficult to follow, and his more specialized
exponents among Socialists use terms that arouse no
echoes in the contemporary mind. The days when
Socialism need present its theories in terms of a
science whose fundamental propositions it repudiates,
are at an end. One hears less and less of “surplus
value” now, as one hears less and less of McCulloch’s
Law of Wages. It may crop up in the inquiries
of some intelligent mechanic seeking knowledge among
the obsolescent accumulations of a public library,
or it may for a moment be touched upon by some veteran
teacher. But the time when social and economic
science had to choose between debatable and inexpressive
technicalities on the one hand or the stigma of empiricism
on the other, is altogether past.
The language a man uses, however,
is of far less importance than the thing he has to
say, and it detracts little from the cardinal importance
of Marx that his books will presently demand restatement
in contemporary phraseology, and revision in the light
of contemporary facts. He opened out Socialism.
It is easy to quibble about Marx, and say he didn’t
see this or that, to produce this eddy in a backwater
or that as a triumphant refutation of his general
theory. One may quibble about the greatness of
Marx as one may quibble about the greatness of Darwin;
he remains great and cardinal. He first saw and
enabled the world to see capitalistic production as
a world process, passing by necessity through certain
stages of social development, and unless some change
of law and spirit came to modify it, moving towards
an inevitable destiny. His followers are too
apt to regard that as an absolutely inevitable destiny,
but the fault lies not at his door. He saw it
as Socialism. It did not appear to him as it does
to many that there is a possible alternative to Socialism,
that the process may give us, not a triumph for the
revolting proletariat, but their defeat, and the establishment
of a plutocratic aristocracy culminating in imperialism
and ending in social disintegration. From his
study, from the studious rotunda of the British Museum
Reading-room he made his prophecy of the growing class
consciousness of the workers, of the inevitable class
war, of the revolution and the millennium that was
to follow it. He gathered his facts, elaborated
his deductions and waited for the dawn.
So far as his broad generalization
of economic development goes, events have wonderfully
confirmed Marx. The development of Trusts, the
concentration of property that America in particular
displays, he foretold. Given that men keep to
the unmodified ideas of private property and individualism,
and it seems absolutely true that so the world must
go. And in the American Appeal to Reason,
for example, which goes out weekly from Kansas to
a quarter of a million of subscribers, one may, if
one chooses, see the developing class consciousness
of the workers, and the promise-and when
strikers take to rifles and explosives as they do
in Pennsylvania and Colorado, something more than
the promise-of the class war....
But the modern Socialist considers
that this generalization is a little too confident
and comprehensive; he perceives that a change in custom,
law or public opinion may delay, arrest or invert the
economic process, and that Socialism may arrive after
all not by a social convulsion, but by the gradual
and detailed concession of its propositions.
The Marxist presents dramatically what after all may
come methodically and unromantically, a revolution
as orderly and quiet as the precession of the équinoxes.
There may be a concentration of capital and a relative
impoverishment of the general working mass of people,
for example, and yet a general advance in the world’s
prosperity and a growing sense of social duty in the
owners of capital and land may do much to mask this
antagonism of class interests and ameliorate its miseries.
Moreover, this antagonism itself may in the end find
adequate expression through temperate discussion, and
the class war come disguised beyond recognition, with
hates mitigated by charity and swords beaten into
pens, a mere constructive conference between two classes
of fairly well-intentioned albeit perhaps still biassed
men and women.
Se.
The circle of ideas in which Marx
moved was that of a student deeply tinged with the
idealism of the renascent French Revolution. His
life was the life of a recluse from affairs-an
invalid’s life; a large part of it was spent
round and about the British Museum Reading-room, and
his conceptions of Socialism and the social process
have at once the spacious vistas given by the historical
habit and the abstract quality that comes with a divorce
from practical experience of human government.
Only in England and in the eighties did the expanding
propositions of Socialism come under the influence
of men essentially administrative. As a consequence
Marx, and still more the early Marxists, were and
are negligent of the necessities of government and
crude in their notions of class action. He saw
the economic process with a perfect lucidity, practically
he foretold the consolidation of the Trusts, and his
statement of the necessary development of an entirely
propertyless working-class with an intensifying class
consciousness is a magnificent generalization.
He saw clearly up to that opposition of the many and
the few, and then his vision failed because his experience
and interests failed. There was to be a class
war, and numbers schooled to discipline by industrial
organization were to win.
After that the teaching weakens in
conviction. The proletariat was to win in the
class war; then classes would be abolished, property
in the means of production and distribution would
be abolished, all men would work reasonably-and
the millennium would be with us.
The constructive part of the Marxist
programme was too slight. It has no psychology.
Contrasted, indeed, with the splendid destructive
criticisms that preceded it, it seems indeed trivial.
It diagnoses a disease admirably, and then suggests
rather an incantation than a plausible remedy.
And as a consequence Marxist Socialism appeals only
very feebly to the man of public affairs or business
or social experience. It does not attract teachers
or medical men or engineers. It arouses such
men to a sense of social instability but it offers
no remedy. They do not believe in the mystical
wisdom of the People. They find no satisfactory
promise of a millennium in anything Marx foretold.
To the labouring man, however, accustomed
to take direction and government as he takes air and
sky, these difficulties of the administrative and
constructive mind do not occur. His imagination
raises no questioning in that picture of the proletariat
triumphant after a class war and quietly coming to
its own. It does not occur to him for an instant
to ask “how?”
Question the common Marxist upon these
difficulties and he will relapse magnificently into
the doctrine of laissez faire. “That
will be all right,” he will tell you.
“How?”
“We’ll take over the Trusts and run them."...
It is part of the inconveniences attending
all powerful new movements of the human mind that
the disciple bolts with the teacher, overstates him,
underlines him, and it is no more than a tribute to
the potency of Marx that he should have paralyzed
the critical faculty in a number of very able men.
To them Marx is a final form of truth. They talk
with bated breath of a “classic Socialism,”
to which no man may add one jot or one tittle, to
which they are as uncritically pledged as extreme
Bible Christians are bound to the letter of the “Word."...
The peculiar evil of the Marxist teaching
is this, that it carries the conception of a necessary
economic development to the pitch of fatalism, it
declares with all the solemnity of popular “science”
that Socialism must prevail. Such a fatalism
is morally bad for the adherent; it releases him from
the inspiring sense of uncertain victory, it leads
him to believe the stars in their courses will do
his job for him. The common Marxist is apt to
be sterile of effort, therefore, and intolerant-preaching
predestination and salvation without works.
By a circuitous route, indeed, the
Marxist reaches a moral position curiously analogous
to that of the disciple of Herbert Spencer. Since
all improvement will arrive by leaving things alone,
the worse things get, the better; for so much the
nearer one comes to the final exasperation, to the
class war and the Triumph of the Proletariat.
This certainty of victory in the nature of things makes
the Marxists difficult in politics, pedantic sticklers
for the letter of the teaching, obstinate opponents
of what they call “Palliatives”-of
any instalment system of reform. They wait until
they can make the whole journey in one stride, and
would, in the meanwhile, have no one set forth upon
the way. In America the Marxist fatalism has found
a sort of supreme simplification in the gospel of
Mr. H. G. Wilshire. The Trusts, one learns, are
to consolidate all the industry in the country, own
all the property. Then when they own everything,
the Nation will take them over. “Let the
Nation own the Trusts!” The Nation in the form
of a public, reading capitalistic newspapers, inured
to capitalistic methods, represented and ruled by
capital-controlled politicians, will suddenly take
over the Trusts and begin a new system....
It would be quite charmingly easy-if
it were only in the remotest degree credible.
Se.
The Marxist teaching tends to an unreasonable
fatalism. Its conception of the world after the
class war is over is equally antagonistic to intelligent
constructive effort. It faces that Future, utters
the word “democracy,” and veils its eyes.
The conception of democracy to which
the Marxist adheres is that same mystical democracy
that was evolved at the first French Revolution; it
will sanction no analysis of the popular wisdom.
It postulates a sort of spirit hidden as it were in
the masses and only revealed by a universal suffrage
of all adults-or, according to some Social
Democratic Federation authorities who do not believe
in women, all adult males-at the ballot
box. Even a large proportion of the adults will
not do-it must be all. The mysterious
spirit that thus peers out and vanishes again at each
election is the People, not any particular person,
but the quintessence, and it is supposed to be infallible;
it is supposed to be not only morally but intellectually
omniscient. It will not even countenance the
individuality of elected persons, they are to be mere
tools, delegates, from this diffused, intangible
Oracle, the Ultimate Wisdom....
Well, it may seem ungracious to sneer
at the grotesque formulation of an idea profoundly
wise, at the hurried, wrong, arithmetical method of
rendering that collective spirit a community undoubtedly
can and sometimes does possess-I myself
am the profoundest believer in democracy, in a democracy
awake intellectually, conscious and self-disciplined-but
so long as this mystic faith in the crowd, this vague,
emotional, uncritical way of evading the immense difficulties
of organizing just government and a collective will
prevails, so long must the Socialist project remain
not simply an impracticable but, in an illiterate,
badly-organized community, even a dangerous suggestion.
I as a Socialist am not blind to these possibilities,
and it is foolish because a man is in many ways on
one’s side that one should not call attention
to his careless handling of a loaded gun. Social-Democracy
may conceivably become a force that in the sheer power
of untutored faith may destroy government and not replace
it. I do not know how far that is not already
the case in Russia. I do not know how far this
may not ultimately be the case in the United States
of America.
The Marxist teaching, great as was
its advance on the dispersed chaotic Socialism that
preceded it, was defective in other directions as
well as in its innocence of any scheme of State organization.
About women and children, for example, it was ill-informed;
its founders do not seem to have been inspired either
by educational necessities or philoprogenitive passion.
No biologist-indeed no scientific mind at
all-seems to have tempered its severely
“economic” tendencies. It so over-accentuates
the economic side of life that at moments one might
imagine it dealt solely with some world of purely “productive”
immortals, who were never born and never aged, but
only warred for ever in a developing industrial process.
Now reproduction and not production
is the more central fact of social life. Women
and children and education are things in the background
of the Marxist proposal-like a man’s
dog, or his private reading, or his pet rabbits.
They are in the foreground of modern Socialism.
The Social Democrat’s doctrines go little further
in this direction than the Liberalism that founded
the United States, which ignored women, children and
niggers, and made the political unit the adult white
man. They were blind to the supreme importance
of making the next generation better than the present
as the aim and effort of the whole community.
Herr Bebel’s book, Woman, is an ample
statement of the evils of woman’s lot under
the existing regime, but the few pages upon
the Future of Woman with which he concludes are eloquent
of the jejune insufficiency of the Marxist outlook
in this direction. Marriage, which modern Socialism
tends more and more to sustain, was to vanish-at
least as a law-made bond; women were to count as men
so far as the State is concerned....
This disregard of the primary importance
of births and upbringing in human affairs and this
advocacy of mystical democracy alike contribute to
blind the Marxist to the necessity of an educational
process and of social discipline and to the more than
personal importance of marriage in the Socialist scheme.
He can say with a light and confident heart to untrained,
ignorant, groping souls: “Destroy the Government;
expropriate the rich, establish manhood suffrage, elect
delegates strictly pledged-and you will
be happy!”
A few modern Marxists stipulate in
addition for a Referendum, by which the acts of the
elected delegates can be further checked by referring
disputed matters to a general vote of all the adults
in the community....
Se.
My memory, as I write these things
of Marxism, carries me to the dusky largeness of a
great meeting in Queen’s Hall, and I see again
the back of Mr. Hyndman’s head moving quickly,
as he receives and answers questions. It was
really one of the strangest and most interesting meetings
I have ever attended. It was a great rally of
the Social Democratic Federation, and the place-floor,
galleries and platform-was thick but by
no means overcrowded with dingy, earnest people.
There was a great display of red badges and red ties,
and many white faces, and I was struck by the presence
of girls and women with babies. It was more like
the Socialist meetings of the popular novel than any
I had ever seen before. In the chair that night
was Lady Warwick, that remarkable intruder into the
class conflict, a blond lady, rather expensively dressed,
so far as I could judge, about whom the atmosphere
of class consciousness seemed to thicken. Her
fair hair, her floriferous hat, told out against the
dim multitudinous values of the gathering unquenchably;
there were moments when one might have fancied it
was simply a gathering of village tradespeople about
the lady patroness, and at the end of the proceedings,
after the red flag had been waved, after the “Red
Flag” had been sung by a choir and damply echoed
by the audience, some one moved a vote of thanks to
the Countess in terms of familiar respect that completed
the illusion.
Mr. Hyndman’s lecture was entitled
“In the Rapids of Revolution,” and he
had been explaining how inevitable the whole process
was, how Russia drove ahead, and Germany and France
and America, to the foretold crisis and the foretold
millennium. But incidentally he also made a spirited
exhortation for effort, for agitation, and he taunted
England for lagging in the schemes of fate. Some
one amidst the dim multitude discovered an inconsistency
in that.
Now the questions were being handed
in, written on strips of paper, and at last that listener’s
difficulty cropped up.
“What’s this?” said
Mr. Hyndman; unfolded the slip and read out: “Why
trouble to agitate or work if the Trusts are going
to do it all for us?”
The veteran leader of the Social Democratic
Federation paused only for a moment.
“Well, we’ve got to get
ready for it, you know,” he said, rustling
briskly with the folds of the question to follow-and
with these words, it seemed to me, that fatalistic
Marxism crumbled down to dust.
We have got to get ready for
it. Indeed, we have to make it-by
education and intention and set resolve. Socialism
is to be attained not by fate, but by will.
Se.
And here, as a sort of Eastern European
gloss upon Marxist Socialism, as an extreme and indeed
ultimate statement of this marriage of mystical democracy
to Socialism, we may say a word of Anarchism.
Anarchism carries the administrative laissez faire
of Marx to its logical extremity. “If the
common, untutored man is right anyhow-why
these ballot boxes; why these intermediaries in the
shape of law and representative?”
That is the perfectly logical outcome
of ignoring administration and reconstruction.
The extreme Social-Democrat and the extreme Individualist
meet in a doctrine of non-resistance to the forces
of Evolution-which in this connection they
deify with a capital letter. Organization, control,
design, the disciplined will, these are evil, they
declare-the evil of life. So
you come at the end of the process, if you are active-minded,
to the bomb as the instrument of man’s release
to unimpeded virtue, and if you are pacific in disposition
to the Tolstoyan attitude of passive resistance to
all rule and property.
Anarchism, then, is as it were a final
perversion of the Socialist stream, a last meandering
of Socialist thought, released from vitalizing association
with an active creative experience. Anarchism
comes when the Socialist repudiation of property is
dropped into the circles of thought of men habitually
ruled and habitually irresponsible, men limited in
action and temperamentally adverse to the toil, to
the vexatious rebuffs and insufficiencies, the dusty
effort, fatigue, and friction of the practical pursuit
of a complex ideal. So that it most flourishes
eastwardly, where men, it would seem, are least energetic
and constructive, and it explodes or dies on American
soil.
Anarchism, with its knife and bomb,
is a miscarriage of Socialism, an acephalous birth
from that fruitful mother. It is an unnatural
offspring, opposed in nature to its parent, for always
from the beginning the constructive spirit, the ordering
and organizing spirit has been strong among Socialists.
It was by a fallacy, an oversight, that laissez
faire in politics crept into a movement that was
before all things an organized denial of laissez
faire in economic and social life....
I write this of the Anarchism that
is opposed to contemporary Socialism, the political
Anarchism. But there is also another sort of
Anarchism, which the student of these schools of thought
must keep clear in his mind from this, the Anarchism
of Tolstoy and that other brand of William Morris,
neither of which waves any flag of black, nor counsels
violence; they present that conception of untrammelled
and spontaneous rightness and goodness which is, indeed,
I hazard, the moral ideal of all rightly-thinking
men. It is worth while to define very clearly
the relation of this second sort of Anarchism, the
nobler Anarchism, to the toiling constructive Socialism
which many of us now make our practical guide in life’s
activities, to say just where they touch and where
they are apart.
Now the ultimate ideal of human intercourse
is surely not Socialism at all, but a way of life
that is not litigious and not based upon jealously-guarded
rights, which is free from property, free from jealousy,
and “above the law.” There, there
shall not be “marriage or giving in marriage.”
The whole mass of Christian teaching points to such
an ideal; Paul and Christ turn again and again to the
ideal of a world of “just men made perfect,”
in which right and beauty come by instinct, in which
just laws and regulations are unnecessary and unjust
ones impossible. “Turn your attention,”
says my friend, the Rev. Stewart Headlam, in his admirable
tract on Christian Socialism-
“Turn your attention to that series
of teachings of Christ’s which we call parables-comparisons,
that is to say, between what Christ saw going
on in the every-day world around Him and the Kingdom
of Heaven. If by the Kingdom of Heaven in these
parables is meant a place up in the clouds, or
merely a state in which people will be after death,
then I challenge you to get any kind of meaning
out of them whatever. But if by the Kingdom
of Heaven is meant (as it is clear from other parts
of Christ’s teaching is the case) the righteous
society to be established upon earth, then they
all have a plain and beautiful meaning; a meaning
well summed up in that saying so often quoted
against us by the sceptic and the atheist, ’Seek
ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness,
and all these things shall be added unto you;’
or, in other words, ‘Live,’ Christ
said, ’all of you together, not each of you by
himself; live as members of the righteous society
which I have come to found upon earth, and then
you will be clothed as beautifully as the Eastern
lily and fed as surely as the birds.’”
And the Rev. R. J. Campbell, who comes
to Socialism by way of Nonconformity, is equally convincing
in support of this assertion that the “Kingdom
of Heaven” was and is a terrestrial ideal.
This is not simply the Christian ideal
of society, it is the ideal of every right-thinking
man, of every man with a full sense of beauty.
You will find it rendered in two imperishably beautiful
Utopias of our own time, both, I glory to write, by
Englishmen, the News from Nowhere of William
Morris, and Hudson’s exquisite Crystal Age.
Both these present practically Anarchist States, both
assume idealized human beings, beings finer, simpler,
nobler than the heated, limited and striving poor
souls who thrust and suffer among the stresses of
this present life. And the present writer, too-I
must mention him here to guard against a confusion
in the future-when a little while ago he
imagined humanity exalted morally and intellectually
by the brush of a comet’s tail, was forced
by the logic of his premises and even against his
first intention to present not a Socialist State but
a glorious anarchism as the outcome of that rejuvenescence
of the world.
But the business of Socialism lies
at a lower level and concerns immediate things; our
material is the world as it is, full of unjust laws,
bad traditions, bad habits, inherited diseases and
weaknesses, germs and poisons, filths and envies.
We are not dealing with magnificent creatures such
as one sees in ideal paintings and splendid sculpture,
so beautiful they may face the world naked and unashamed;
we are dealing with hot-eared, ill-kempt people, who
are liable to indigestion, baldness, corpulence and
fluctuating tempers; who wear top-hats and bowler
hats or hats kept on by hat-pins (and so with all
the other necessary clothing); who are pitiful and
weak and vain and touchy almost beyond measure, and
very naughty and intemperate; who have, alas! to be
bound over to be in any degree faithful and just to
one another. To strip such people suddenly of
law and restraint would be as dreadful and ugly as
stripping the clothes from their poor bodies....
That Anarchist world, I admit, is
our dream; we do believe-well, I, at any
rate, believe this present world, this planet, will
some day bear a race beyond our most exalted and temerarious
dreams, a race begotten of our wills and the substance
of our bodies, a race, so I have said it, “who
will stand upon the earth as one stands upon a footstool,
and laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars,”
but the way to that is through education and discipline
and law. Socialism is the preparation for that
higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously we mean to
destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate
unjust laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions
and prejudices, create a system of social right-dealing
and a tradition of right-feeling and action.
Socialism is the school-room of true and noble Anarchism,
wherein by training and restraint we shall make free
men.
There is a graceful and all too little
known fable by Mr. Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite,
which gives, I think, not only the relation of Socialism
to philosophic Anarchism, but of all discipline to
all idealism. It is the story of a beautiful mask
that was worn by a man in love, until he tired even
of that much of deceit and, a little desperately,
threw it aside-to find his own face beneath
changed to the likeness of the self he had desired.
So would we veil the greed, the suspicion of the self-seeking
scramble of to-day under institutions and laws that
will cry “duty and service” in the ears
and eyes of all mankind, keep down the evil so long
and so effectually that at last law will be habit,
and greed and self-seeking cease for ever, from being
the ruling impulse of the world. Socialism is
the mask that will mould the world to that better
Anarchism of good men’s dreams....
But these are long views, glimpses
beyond the Socialist horizon. The people who
would set up Anarchism to-day are people without human
experience or any tempering of humour, only one shade
less impossible than the odd one-sided queer beings
one meets, ridiculously inaccessible to laughter,
who, caricaturing their Nietzsche and misunderstanding
their Shaw, invite one to set up consciously with
them in the business of being Overmen, to rule a world
full of our betters, by fraud and force. It is
a foolish teaching saved only from being horrible
by being utterly ludicrous. For us the best is
faith and humility, truth and service, our utmost
glory is to have seen the vision and to have failed-not
altogether.... For ourselves and such as we are,
let us not “deal in pride,” let us be glad
to learn a little of this spirit of service, to achieve
a little humility, to give ourselves to the making
of Socialism and the civilized State without presumption-as
children who are glad they may help in a work greater
than themselves and the toys that have heretofore engaged
them.