It may be asked here by some simple-minded reader why we should not
resort to crude Communism as the disciples were told to do. This would
be quite practicable in a village where production was limited to the
supply of the primitive wants which nature imposes on all human beings
alike. We know that people need bread and boots without waiting for them
to come and ask for these things and offer to pay for them. But when
civilization advances to the point at which articles are produced that
no man absolutely needs and that only some men fancy or can use, it is
necessary that individuals should be able to have things made to their
order and at their own cost. It is safe to provide bread for everybody
because everybody wants and eats bread; but it would be absurd to
provide microscopes and trombones, pet snakes and polo mallets, alembics
and test tubes for everybody, as nine-tenths of them would be wasted;
and the nine-tenths of the population who do not use such things
would object to their being provided at all. We have in the invaluable
instrument called money a means of enabling every individual to order
and pay for the particular things he desires over and above the things
he must consume in order to remain alive, plus the things the State
insists on his having and using whether he wants to or not; for example,
clothes, sanitary arrangements, armies and navies. In large communities,
where even the most eccentric demands for manufactured articles average
themselves out until they can be foreseen within a negligible margin
of error, direct communism (Take what you want without payment, as
the people do in Morris's News From Nowhere) will, after a little
experience, be found not only practicable but highly economical to an
extent that now seems impossible. The sportsmen, the musicians, the
physicists, the biologists will get their apparatus for the asking as
easily as their bread, or, as at present, their paving, street lighting,
and bridges; and the deaf man will not object to contribute to communal
flutes when the musician has to contribute to communal ear trumpets.
There are cases (for example, radium) in which the demand may be limited
to the merest handful of laboratory workers, and in which nevertheless
the whole community must pay because the price is beyond the means of
any individual worker. But even when the utmost allowance is made for
extensions of communism that now seem fabulous, there will still remain
for a long time to come regions of supply and demand in which men will
need and use money or individual credit, and for which, therefore, they
must have individual incomes. Foreign travel is an obvious instance. We
are so far from even national communism still, that we shall probably
have considerable developments of local communism before it becomes
possible for a Manchester man to go up to London for a day without
taking any money with him. The modern practical form of the communism of
Jesus is therefore, for the present, equal distribution of the surplus
of the national income that is not absorbed by simple communism.