But it may be objected that all this tends towards communism. Only
bigots and the unthinking are frightened by a name or a shadow from an
examination into anything. Perhaps at first it will create surprise when
I tell you that the only really good institutions that we have are
purely communistic. The public highways are a perfect illustration of
communism. They are constructed and maintained at the public expense for
the public benefit. All grades of people meet upon them on an equality,
and yet no one either loses his identity in the mass or is deprived of
any of his private rights, or of any of his personalities. But the
principles upon which the industries are conducted and that govern their
relations to wealth, the poor man who owns no property, would have no
right to use the highways. The same is true of the public schools. The
children of the rich, who, it is falsely pretended, pay the taxes to
support the schools, and the children of the poor there meet upon an
equality. The schools are not a public necessity, they are only a public
good. Who will pretend to say that they are not an improvement on the
old system, of every family conducting its own education, or of a few
families combining to do so? Everybody recognises the public advantage
of a communal basis for the education of all the children; recognises
that the public good demands that the community shall not only provide
school privileges, but shall insist on every child having the benefit of
them, not for the good of the child so much, as for the community’s own
good. Now this is communism. Why are you not frightened at the
communistic tendencies of the public schools? Because, without thinking
them to be communistic, you have adopted them and found them to be good.
Next is the post-office—a still better illustration in an industrial
sense. Here the Government conducts the business of the people. If the
system were maintained wholly instead of partially from the public
treasury, it would be purely communistic. Is there anyone who is
prepared to say that the postal system is not an improvement on the
transmission of letters by private enterprise? And yet nobody is
affrighted at the communistic character of the modern post-office.
Suppose that this system were extended to the transportation of
everything that is interchanged among the people, have we not a right to
assume that the same beneficent results that have followed the
development of the public mails would also follow there? We have not
only the right to assume, but we have the reason to know that it would,
and that the railroad question and railroad wars would be for ever
settled by such an advance towards communism, and an immense stride be
made towards the organization of the industries as a whole; and this is
what we have done industrially.