inevitable ills accompanying a socialistic regime. None the less I retain for the manner of thinking which so long engaged me a respect which most of its opponents do not have. I cannot condemn socialists so unqualifiedly as is commonly done. Not only are the majority of them true philanthropists at heart but their ideas and ideals are worthy the most careful thought. Indeed, one not versed in Marx's reasonings can hardly be called fit to discuss any leading social theme. I rejoice in socialistic study and agitation; vast net good must issue from it. Few can help going far with the socialists in their indictment of present industry: Much wealth without merit; much poverty without demerit; cross purposes in production, inducing glut, scarcity, waste and injustice; idle wealth that might be supporting industry but is not; enforced idleness and poverty; fraud in trade; and the tyranny and menace of corporate power. These and such evils exist and they are grave. Usually socialists do not overmagnify them. If such distresses are curable, all wish to know how. Most wise people, whatever their style of social thinking, sympathize with socialism in wishing the public power, when necessary, to extend more or less its economic function. Now and then, of course, some one still denounces as dangerous, per se, disregarding place, circumstance, and the state of the civil service, the municipal ownership of street railways. It is hard to see why this is more a peril than the owning of schools, or of water or gas works by cities. There is nothing alarming, either, in the proposal that government should purchase and work mines. Not another foot of mining land now owned by the government should ever be sold. Public ownership of mines is in continental Europe the regular thing, as is the public ownership of railways. All municipal functioning that involves money is dangerous unless the civil service is right. This condition given, the question how far the corporate people may engage in industry is simply, What is best? If the question were merely whether or not it is desirable for government to possess and administer certain indispensable public utilities, it would not be worth discussion. The thoughtful people are few, however opposed to socialism, who do not believe that government will in time take over a great many of the productive agencies now in private hands. Government might go a long way in this without even an approach to socialism. Socialism would not be reached until all material instrumentalities for the production of wealth had passed into the state's hands, or at least so many of them. that individual initiative in its present and historic form had ceased to have play. Nor need anti-socialists have any radical quarrel with socialists over Fabianism. Call the Fabians socialists, if you will, they are socialists of a very innocuous stripe. The three great tenets of orthodox socialismthat economic conditions absolutely determine social, moral and political ones; that profits are always and inevitably iniquitous; and that, therefore, all productive property and occupations without exception ought to be in state hands-Fabianism denies. What is unfortunate in Fabianism is that it seems to look upon state economic activity as rather the normal order, to be departed from or not insisted on only when personal initiative is clearly better. I should urge just the reverse-that individualism ought to be the standing presumption, to be resolutely trenched on when it fails, provided public functioning is certain to do better, but always to be preserved and acted upon as the normal. I deem this difference in points of view rather important; but public ownership has not yet gone so far that a Fabianist policy and a rational individualism need at present clash. Here at least, I fear, I for one must part company with socialism, that mode of thought in its orthodox form seeming to me to proceed upon presuppositions wholly unscientific. One of these is the assumption that the estate of the human species on this earth |