REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM
§ 1.
It was Karl Marx who brought the second great influx of suggestion
into the intellectual process of Socialism. Before his time there does
not seem to have been any clear view of economic relationships as
having laws of development, as having interactions that began and went
on and led towards new things. But Marx had vision. He had--as Darwin
and the evolutionists had, as most men with a scientific training, and
many educated men without that advantage now have--a sense of secular
change. Instead of being content with the accepted picture of the
world as a scene where men went on producing and distributing wealth
and growing rich or poor, it might be for endless ages, he made an
appeal to history and historical analogies, and for the first time
viewed our age of individualist industrial development, not as a
possibly permanent condition of humanity, but as something unstable
and in motion, as an economic process, that is to say, with a
beginning, a middle, and as he saw it, an almost inevitable end.
The last thing men contrive to discern in every question is the
familiar obvious, and it came as a great and shattering discovery to
the economic and sociological thought of the latter half of the
nineteenth century that there was going on not simply a production but
an immense concentration of wealth, a differentiation of a special
wealthy class of landholder and capitalist, a diminution of small
property owners and the development of a great and growing class of
landless, nearly propertyless men, the _proletariat_. Marx showed--he
showed so clearly that to-day it is recognized by every intelligent
man--that _given a continuance of our industrial and commercial
system_, of uncontrolled gain seeking, that is, given a continuance of
our present spirit and ideas of property, there must necessarily come
a time when the owner and the proletarian will stand face to face,
with nothing--if we except a middle class of educated professionals
dependent on the wealthy, who are after all no more than the upper
stratum of the proletariat--to mask or mitigate their opposition. We
shall have two classes, the class-conscious worker and the
class-conscious owner, and they will be at war. And with a broad
intellectual sweep he flung the light of this conception upon the
whole contemporary history of mankind. _Das Kapital_ was no sketch of
Utopias, had no limitation to the conditions or possibilities of this
country or that. "Here," he says, in the widest way, "is what is going
on all over the world. So long as practically untrammelled private
property, such as you conceive it to-day, endures, this must go on.
The worker gravitates steadily everywhere to a bare subsistence, the
rest of the proceeds of his labour swell the power of the owners. So
it will go on while gain and getting are the rule of your system,
until accumulated tensions between class and class smash this present
social organization and inaugurate a new age."
In considering the thought and work of Karl Marx, the reader must bear
in mind the epoch in which that work commenced. The intellectual world
was then under the sway of an organized mass of ideas known as the
Science of Political Economy, a mass of ideas that has now not so much
been examined and refuted as slipped away imperceptibly from its hold
upon the minds of men. In the beginning, in the hands of Adam
Smith--whose richly suggestive book is now all too little
read--political economy was a broad-minded and sane inquiry into the
statecraft of trade based upon current assumptions of private
ownership and personal motives, but from him it passed to men of
perhaps, in some cases, quite equal intellectual energy but inferior
vision and range. The history of Political Economy is indeed one of
the most striking instances of the mischief wrought by intellectual
minds devoid of vision, in the entire history of human thought.
Special definition, technicality, are the stigmata of second-rate
intellectual men; they cannot work with the universal tool, they
cannot appeal to the general mind. They must abstract and separate. On
such men fell the giant's robe of Adam Smith, and they wore it after
their manner. Their arid atmospheres are intolerant of clouds, an
outline that is not harsh is abominable to them. They criticized their
master's vagueness and must needs mend it. They sought to give
political economy a precision and conviction such a subject will not
stand. They took such words as "_value_," an incurably and necessarily
vague word, "_rent_," the name of the specific relation of landlord
and tenant, and "_capital_," and sought to define them with relentless
exactness and use them with inevitable effect. So doing they departed
more and more from reality. They developed a literature more abundant,
more difficult and less real than all the exercises of the schoolmen
put together. To use common words in uncommon meanings is to sow a
jungle of misunderstanding. It was only to be expected that the bulk
of this economic literature resolves upon analysis into a ponderous,
intricate, often astonishingly able and foolish wrangling about
terminology.
Now in the early Victorian period in which Marx planned his
theorizing, political economy ruled the educated world. Ruskin had
still to attack the primary assumptions of that tyrannous and dogmatic
edifice. The duller sort of educated people talked of the "immutable
laws of political economy" in the blankest ignorance that the basis of
everything in this so-called science was a plastic human convention.
Humane impulses were checked, creative effort tried and condemned by
these mystical formulæ. Political economy traded on the splendid
achievements of physics and chemistry and pretended to an inexorable
authority. Only a man of supreme intelligence and power, a man
resolved to give his lifetime to the task, could afford in those days
to combat the pretensions of the political economist; to deny that his
categories presented scientific truth, and to cast that jargon aside.
As for Marx, he saw fit to accept the verbal instruments of his time
(albeit he bent them not a little in use), to accommodate himself to
their spirit and to split and re-classify and re-define them at his
need. So that he has become already difficult to follow, and his more
specialized exponents among Socialists use terms that arouse no echoes
in the contemporary mind. The days when Socialism need present its
theories in terms of a science whose fundamental propositions it
repudiates, are at an end. One hears less and less of "surplus value"
now, as one hears less and less of McCulloch's Law of Wages. It may
crop up in the inquiries of some intelligent mechanic seeking
knowledge among the obsolescent accumulations of a public library, or
it may for a moment be touched upon by some veteran teacher. But the
time when social and economic science had to choose between debatable
and inexpressive technicalities on the one hand or the stigma of
empiricism on the other, is altogether past.
The language a man uses, however, is of far less importance than the
thing he has to say, and it detracts little from the cardinal
importance of Marx that his books will presently demand restatement in
contemporary phraseology, and revision in the light of contemporary
facts. He opened out Socialism. It is easy to quibble about Marx, and
say he didn't see this or that, to produce this eddy in a backwater or
that as a triumphant refutation of his general theory. One may quibble
about the greatness of Marx as one may quibble about the greatness of
Darwin; he remains great and cardinal. He first saw and enabled the
world to see capitalistic production as a world process, passing by
necessity through certain stages of social development, and unless
some change of law and spirit came to modify it, moving towards an
inevitable destiny. His followers are too apt to regard that as an
absolutely inevitable destiny, but the fault lies not at his door. He
saw it as Socialism. It did not appear to him as it does to many that
there is a possible alternative to Socialism, that the process may
give us, not a triumph for the revolting proletariat, but their
defeat, and the establishment of a plutocratic aristocracy culminating
in imperialism and ending in social disintegration. From his study,
from the studious rotunda of the British Museum Reading-room he made
his prophecy of the growing class consciousness of the workers, of the
inevitable class war, of the revolution and the millennium that was to
follow it. He gathered his facts, elaborated his deductions and waited
for the dawn.
So far as his broad generalization of economic development goes,
events have wonderfully confirmed Marx. The development of Trusts, the
concentration of property that America in particular displays, he
foretold. Given that men keep to the unmodified ideas of private
property and individualism, and it seems absolutely true that so the
world must go. And in the American _Appeal to Reason_, for example,
which goes out weekly from Kansas to a quarter of a million of
subscribers, one may, if one chooses, see the developing class
consciousness of the workers, and the promise--and when strikers take
to rifles and explosives as they do in Pennsylvania and Colorado,
something more than the promise--of the class war....
But the modern Socialist considers that this generalization is a
little too confident and comprehensive; he perceives that a change in
custom, law or public opinion may delay, arrest or invert the economic
process, and that Socialism may arrive after all not by a social
convulsion, but by the gradual and detailed concession of its
propositions. The Marxist presents dramatically what after all may
come methodically and unromantically, a revolution as orderly and
quiet as the precession of the equinoxes. There may be a concentration
of capital and a relative impoverishment of the general working mass
of people, for example, and yet a general advance in the world's
prosperity and a growing sense of social duty in the owners of capital
and land may do much to mask this antagonism of class interests and
ameliorate its miseries. Moreover, this antagonism itself may in the
end find adequate expression through temperate discussion, and the
class war come disguised beyond recognition, with hates mitigated by
charity and swords beaten into pens, a mere constructive conference
between two classes of fairly well-intentioned albeit perhaps still
biassed men and women.
§ 2.
The circle of ideas in which Marx moved was that of a student deeply
tinged with the idealism of the renascent French Revolution. His life
was the life of a recluse from affairs--an invalid's life; a large
part of it was spent round and about the British Museum Reading-room,
and his conceptions of Socialism and the social process have at once
the spacious vistas given by the historical habit and the abstract
quality that comes with a divorce from practical experience of human
government. Only in England and in the eighties did the expanding
propositions of Socialism come under the influence of men essentially
administrative. As a consequence Marx, and still more the early
Marxists, were and are negligent of the necessities of government and
crude in their notions of class action. He saw the economic process
with a perfect lucidity, practically he foretold the consolidation of
the Trusts, and his statement of the necessary development of an
entirely propertyless working-class with an intensifying class
consciousness is a magnificent generalization. He saw clearly up to
that opposition of the many and the few, and then his vision failed
because his experience and interests failed. There was to be a class
war, and numbers schooled to discipline by industrial organization
were to win.
After that the teaching weakens in conviction. The proletariat was to
win in the class war; then classes would be abolished, property in the
means of production and distribution would be abolished, all men would
work reasonably--and the millennium would be with us.
The constructive part of the Marxist programme was too slight. It has
no psychology. Contrasted, indeed, with the splendid destructive
criticisms that preceded it, it seems indeed trivial. It diagnoses a
disease admirably, and then suggests rather an incantation than a
plausible remedy. And as a consequence Marxist Socialism appeals only
very feebly to the man of public affairs or business or social
experience. It does not attract teachers or medical men or engineers.
It arouses such men to a sense of social instability but it offers no
remedy. They do not believe in the mystical wisdom of the People. They
find no satisfactory promise of a millennium in anything Marx
foretold.
To the labouring man, however, accustomed to take direction and
government as he takes air and sky, these difficulties of the
administrative and constructive mind do not occur. His imagination
raises no questioning in that picture of the proletariat triumphant
after a class war and quietly coming to its own. It does not occur to
him for an instant to ask "how?"
Question the common Marxist upon these difficulties and he will
relapse magnificently into the doctrine of _laissez faire_. "That will
be all right," he will tell you.
"How?"
"We'll take over the Trusts and run them."...
It is part of the inconveniences attending all powerful new movements
of the human mind that the disciple bolts with the teacher, overstates
him, underlines him, and it is no more than a tribute to the potency
of Marx that he should have paralyzed the critical faculty in a number
of very able men. To them Marx is a final form of truth. They talk
with bated breath of a "classic Socialism," to which no man may add
one jot or one tittle, to which they are as uncritically pledged as
extreme Bible Christians are bound to the letter of the "Word."...
The peculiar evil of the Marxist teaching is this, that it carries the
conception of a necessary economic development to the pitch of
fatalism, it declares with all the solemnity of popular "science" that
Socialism _must_ prevail. Such a fatalism is morally bad for the
adherent; it releases him from the inspiring sense of uncertain
victory, it leads him to believe the stars in their courses will do
his job for him. The common Marxist is apt to be sterile of effort,
therefore, and intolerant--preaching predestination and salvation
without works.
By a circuitous route, indeed, the Marxist reaches a moral position
curiously analogous to that of the disciple of Herbert Spencer. Since
all improvement will arrive by leaving things alone, the worse things
get, the better; for so much the nearer one comes to the final
exasperation, to the class war and the Triumph of the Proletariat.
This certainty of victory in the nature of things makes the Marxists
difficult in politics, pedantic sticklers for the letter of the
teaching, obstinate opponents of what they call "Palliatives"--of any
instalment system of reform. They wait until they can make the whole
journey in one stride, and would, in the meanwhile, have no one set
forth upon the way. In America the Marxist fatalism has found a sort
of supreme simplification in the gospel of Mr. H. G. Wilshire. The
Trusts, one learns, are to consolidate all the industry in the
country, own all the property. Then when they own everything, the
Nation will take them over. "Let the Nation own the Trusts!" The
Nation in the form of a public, reading capitalistic newspapers,
inured to capitalistic methods, represented and ruled by
capital-controlled politicians, will suddenly take over the Trusts and
begin a new system....
It would be quite charmingly easy--if it were only in the remotest
degree credible.
§ 3.
The Marxist teaching tends to an unreasonable fatalism. Its conception
of the world after the class war is over is equally antagonistic to
intelligent constructive effort. It faces that Future, utters the word
"democracy," and veils its eyes.
The conception of democracy to which the Marxist adheres is that same
mystical democracy that was evolved at the first French Revolution; it
will sanction no analysis of the popular wisdom. It postulates a sort
of spirit hidden as it were in the masses and only revealed by a
universal suffrage of all adults--or, according to some Social
Democratic Federation authorities who do not believe in women, all
adult males--at the ballot box. Even a large proportion of the adults
will not do--it must be all. The mysterious spirit that thus peers out
and vanishes again at each election is the People, not any particular
person, but the quintessence, and it is supposed to be infallible; it
is supposed to be not only morally but intellectually omniscient. It
will not even countenance the individuality of elected persons, they
are to be mere tools, _delegates_, from this diffused, intangible
Oracle, the Ultimate Wisdom....
Well, it may seem ungracious to sneer at the grotesque formulation of
an idea profoundly wise, at the hurried, wrong, arithmetical method of
rendering that collective spirit a community undoubtedly can and
sometimes does possess--I myself am the profoundest believer in
democracy, in a democracy awake intellectually, conscious and
self-disciplined--but so long as this mystic faith in the crowd, this
vague, emotional, uncritical way of evading the immense difficulties
of organizing just government and a collective will prevails, so long
must the Socialist project remain not simply an impracticable but, in
an illiterate, badly-organized community, even a dangerous suggestion.
I as a Socialist am not blind to these possibilities, and it is
foolish because a man is in many ways on one's side that one should
not call attention to his careless handling of a loaded gun.
Social-Democracy may conceivably become a force that in the sheer
power of untutored faith may destroy government and not replace it. I
do not know how far that is not already the case in Russia. I do not
know how far this may not ultimately be the case in the United States
of America.
The Marxist teaching, great as was its advance on the dispersed
chaotic Socialism that preceded it, was defective in other directions
as well as in its innocence of any scheme of State organization. About
women and children, for example, it was ill-informed; its founders do
not seem to have been inspired either by educational necessities or
philoprogenitive passion. No biologist--indeed no scientific mind at
all--seems to have tempered its severely "economic" tendencies. It so
over-accentuates the economic side of life that at moments one might
imagine it dealt solely with some world of purely "productive"
immortals, who were never born and never aged, but only warred for
ever in a developing industrial process.
Now reproduction and not production is the more central fact of social
life. Women and children and education are things in the background of
the Marxist proposal--like a man's dog, or his private reading, or his
pet rabbits. They are in the foreground of modern Socialism. The
Social Democrat's doctrines go little further in this direction than
the Liberalism that founded the United States, which ignored women,
children and niggers, and made the political unit the adult white man.
They were blind to the supreme importance of making the next
generation better than the present as the aim and effort of the whole
community. Herr Bebel's book, _Woman_, is an ample statement of the
evils of woman's lot under the existing _régime_, but the few pages
upon the Future of Woman with which he concludes are eloquent of the
jejune insufficiency of the Marxist outlook in this direction.
Marriage, which modern Socialism tends more and more to sustain, was
to vanish--at least as a law-made bond; women were to count as men so
far as the State is concerned....
This disregard of the primary importance of births and upbringing in
human affairs and this advocacy of mystical democracy alike contribute
to blind the Marxist to the necessity of an educational process and of
social discipline and to the more than personal importance of marriage
in the Socialist scheme. He can say with a light and confident heart
to untrained, ignorant, groping souls: "Destroy the Government;
expropriate the rich, establish manhood suffrage, elect delegates
strictly pledged--and you will be happy!"
A few modern Marxists stipulate in addition for a Referendum, by which
the acts of the elected delegates can be further checked by referring
disputed matters to a general vote of all the adults in the
community....
§ 4.
My memory, as I write these things of Marxism, carries me to the dusky
largeness of a great meeting in Queen's Hall, and I see again the back
of Mr. Hyndman's head moving quickly, as he receives and answers
questions. It was really one of the strangest and most interesting
meetings I have ever attended. It was a great rally of the Social
Democratic Federation, and the place--floor, galleries and
platform--was thick but by no means overcrowded with dingy, earnest
people. There was a great display of red badges and red ties, and many
white faces, and I was struck by the presence of girls and women with
babies. It was more like the Socialist meetings of the popular novel
than any I had ever seen before. In the chair that night was Lady
Warwick, that remarkable intruder into the class conflict, a blond
lady, rather expensively dressed, so far as I could judge, about whom
the atmosphere of class consciousness seemed to thicken. Her fair
hair, her floriferous hat, told out against the dim multitudinous
values of the gathering unquenchably; there were moments when one
might have fancied it was simply a gathering of village tradespeople
about the lady patroness, and at the end of the proceedings, after the
red flag had been waved, after the "Red Flag" had been sung by a choir
and damply echoed by the audience, some one moved a vote of thanks to
the Countess in terms of familiar respect that completed the illusion.
Mr. Hyndman's lecture was entitled "In the Rapids of Revolution," and
he had been explaining how inevitable the whole process was, how
Russia drove ahead, and Germany and France and America, to the
foretold crisis and the foretold millennium. But incidentally he also
made a spirited exhortation for effort, for agitation, and he taunted
England for lagging in the schemes of fate. Some one amidst the dim
multitude discovered an inconsistency in that.
Now the questions were being handed in, written on strips of paper,
and at last that listener's difficulty cropped up.
"What's this?" said Mr. Hyndman; unfolded the slip and read out: "Why
trouble to agitate or work if the Trusts are going to do it all for
us?"
The veteran leader of the Social Democratic Federation paused only for
a moment.
"Well, we've got to get _ready_ for it, you know," he said, rustling
briskly with the folds of the question to follow--and with these
words, it seemed to me, that fatalistic Marxism crumbled down to dust.
We _have_ got to get ready for it. Indeed, we have to make it--by
education and intention and set resolve. Socialism is to be attained
not by fate, but by will.
§ 5.
And here, as a sort of Eastern European gloss upon Marxist Socialism,
as an extreme and indeed ultimate statement of this marriage of
mystical democracy to Socialism, we may say a word of Anarchism.
Anarchism carries the administrative _laissez faire_ of Marx to its
logical extremity. "If the common, untutored man is right anyhow--why
these ballot boxes; why these intermediaries in the shape of law and
representative?"
That is the perfectly logical outcome of ignoring administration and
reconstruction. The extreme Social-Democrat and the extreme
Individualist meet in a doctrine of non-resistance to the forces of
Evolution--which in this connection they deify with a capital letter.
Organization, control, design, the disciplined will, these are evil,
they declare--_the_ evil of life. So you come at the end of the
process, if you are active-minded, to the bomb as the instrument of
man's release to unimpeded virtue, and if you are pacific in
disposition to the Tolstoyan attitude of passive resistance to all
rule and property.
Anarchism, then, is as it were a final perversion of the Socialist
stream, a last meandering of Socialist thought, released from
vitalizing association with an active creative experience. Anarchism
comes when the Socialist repudiation of property is dropped into the
circles of thought of men habitually ruled and habitually
irresponsible, men limited in action and temperamentally adverse to
the toil, to the vexatious rebuffs and insufficiencies, the dusty
effort, fatigue, and friction of the practical pursuit of a complex
ideal. So that it most flourishes eastwardly, where men, it would
seem, are least energetic and constructive, and it explodes or dies on
American soil.
Anarchism, with its knife and bomb, is a miscarriage of Socialism, an
acephalous birth from that fruitful mother. It is an unnatural
offspring, opposed in nature to its parent, for always from the
beginning the constructive spirit, the ordering and organizing spirit
has been strong among Socialists. It was by a fallacy, an oversight,
that _laissez faire_ in politics crept into a movement that was before
all things an organized denial of _laissez faire_ in economic and
social life....
I write this of the Anarchism that is opposed to contemporary
Socialism, the political Anarchism. But there is also another sort of
Anarchism, which the student of these schools of thought must keep
clear in his mind from this, the Anarchism of Tolstoy and that other
brand of William Morris, neither of which waves any flag of black, nor
counsels violence; they present that conception of untrammelled and
spontaneous rightness and goodness which is, indeed, I hazard, the
moral ideal of all rightly-thinking men. It is worth while to define
very clearly the relation of this second sort of Anarchism, the nobler
Anarchism, to the toiling constructive Socialism which many of us now
make our practical guide in life's activities, to say just where they
touch and where they are apart.
Now the ultimate ideal of human intercourse is surely not Socialism at
all, but a way of life that is not litigious and not based upon
jealously-guarded rights, which is free from property, free from
jealousy, and "above the law." There, there shall not be "marriage or
giving in marriage." The whole mass of Christian teaching points to
such an ideal; Paul and Christ turn again and again to the ideal of a
world of "just men made perfect," in which right and beauty come by
instinct, in which just laws and regulations are unnecessary and
unjust ones impossible. "Turn your attention," says my friend, the
Rev. Stewart Headlam, in his admirable tract on Christian Socialism--
"Turn your attention to that series of teachings of Christ's
which we call parables--comparisons, that is to say, between
what Christ saw going on in the every-day world around Him and
the Kingdom of Heaven. If by the Kingdom of Heaven in these
parables is meant a place up in the clouds, or merely a state
in which people will be after death, then I challenge you to
get any kind of meaning out of them whatever. But if by the
Kingdom of Heaven is meant (as it is clear from other parts of
Christ's teaching is the case) the righteous society to be
established upon earth, then they all have a plain and
beautiful meaning; a meaning well summed up in that saying so
often quoted against us by the sceptic and the atheist, 'Seek
ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all
these things shall be added unto you;' or, in other words,
'Live,' Christ said, 'all of you together, not each of you by
himself; live as members of the righteous society which I have
come to found upon earth, and then you will be clothed as
beautifully as the Eastern lily and fed as surely as the
birds.'"
And the Rev. R. J. Campbell, who comes to Socialism by way of
Nonconformity, is equally convincing in support of this assertion that
the "Kingdom of Heaven" was and is a terrestrial ideal.
This is not simply the Christian ideal of society, it is the ideal of
every right-thinking man, of every man with a full sense of beauty.
You will find it rendered in two imperishably beautiful Utopias of our
own time, both, I glory to write, by Englishmen, the _News from
Nowhere_ of William Morris, and Hudson's exquisite _Crystal Age_. Both
these present practically Anarchist States, both assume idealized
human beings, beings finer, simpler, nobler than the heated, limited
and striving poor souls who thrust and suffer among the stresses of
this present life. And the present writer, too--I must mention him
here to guard against a confusion in the future--when a little while
ago he imagined humanity exalted morally and intellectually by the
brush of a comet's tail,[20] was forced by the logic of his premises
and even against his first intention to present not a Socialist State
but a glorious anarchism as the outcome of that rejuvenescence of the
world.
[20] _In the Days of the Comet._ (Macmillan & Co., 1906.)
Anti-Socialist speakers and writers are in the habit of
quoting passages of a review from the _Times Literary
Supplement_, published during the heat of the "Book War,"
and promptly controverted, as though they were quotations
from this book.
But the business of Socialism lies at a lower level and concerns
immediate things; our material is the world as it is, full of unjust
laws, bad traditions, bad habits, inherited diseases and weaknesses,
germs and poisons, filths and envies. We are not dealing with
magnificent creatures such as one sees in ideal paintings and splendid
sculpture, so beautiful they may face the world naked and unashamed;
we are dealing with hot-eared, ill-kempt people, who are liable to
indigestion, baldness, corpulence and fluctuating tempers; who wear
top-hats and bowler hats or hats kept on by hat-pins (and so with all
the other necessary clothing); who are pitiful and weak and vain and
touchy almost beyond measure, and very naughty and intemperate; who
have, alas! to be bound over to be in any degree faithful and just to
one another. To strip such people suddenly of law and restraint would
be as dreadful and ugly as stripping the clothes from their poor
bodies....
That Anarchist world, I admit, is our dream; we do believe--well, I,
at any rate, believe this present world, this planet, will some day
bear a race beyond our most exalted and temerarious dreams, a race
begotten of our wills and the substance of our bodies, a race, so I
have said it, "who will stand upon the earth as one stands upon a
footstool, and laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars," but
the way to that is through education and discipline and law. Socialism
is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously
we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust
laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a
system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and
action. Socialism is the school-room of true and noble Anarchism,
wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.
There is a graceful and all too little known fable by Mr. Max
Beerbohm, _The Happy Hypocrite_, which gives, I think, not only the
relation of Socialism to philosophic Anarchism, but of all discipline
to all idealism. It is the story of a beautiful mask that was worn by
a man in love, until he tired even of that much of deceit and, a
little desperately, threw it aside--to find his own face beneath
changed to the likeness of the self he had desired. So would we veil
the greed, the suspicion of the self-seeking scramble of to-day under
institutions and laws that will cry "duty and service" in the ears and
eyes of all mankind, keep down the evil so long and so effectually
that at last law will be habit, and greed and self-seeking cease for
ever, from being the ruling impulse of the world. Socialism is the
mask that will mould the world to that better Anarchism of good men's
dreams....
But these are long views, glimpses beyond the Socialist horizon. The
people who would set up Anarchism to-day are people without human
experience or any tempering of humour, only one shade less impossible
than the odd one-sided queer beings one meets, ridiculously
inaccessible to laughter, who, caricaturing their Nietzsche and
misunderstanding their Shaw, invite one to set up consciously with
them in the business of being Overmen, to rule a world full of our
betters, by fraud and force. It is a foolish teaching saved only from
being horrible by being utterly ludicrous. For us the best is faith
and humility, truth and service, our utmost glory is to have seen the
vision and to have failed--not altogether.... For ourselves and such
as we are, let us not "deal in pride," let us be glad to learn a
little of this spirit of service, to achieve a little humility, to
give ourselves to the making of Socialism and the civilized State
without presumption--as children who are glad they may help in a work
greater than themselves and the toys that have heretofore engaged them.