§ 1.
In the preceding eight chapters I have sought to give as plain and full an account of the great generalizations of Socialism as I can, and to make it clear exactly what these generalizations convey, and how far they go in this direction and that. Before we go on to a brief historical and anticipatory account of the actual Socialist movement, it may be worth while to take up and consider compactly the chief objections that are urged against the general propositions of Socialism in popular discussion.
Now a very large proportion of these arise out of the commonest vice of the human mind, its disposition to see everything as “yes” or “no,” as “black” or “white,” its impatience, its incapacity for a fine discrimination of intermediate shades.[14] The queer old scholastic logic still prevails remarkably in our modern world; you find Mr. Mallock, for example, going about arranging his syllogisms, extracting his opponent’s “self-contradictions,” and disposing of Socialism with stupendous self-satisfaction in all the magazines. He disposes of Socialism quite in the spirit of the young mediæval scholar returning home to prove beyond dispute that “my cat has ten tails” and, given a yard’s start, that a tortoise can always keep ahead of a running man. The essential fallacy is always to declare that either a thing is A or it is not A; either a thing is green or it is not green; either a thing is heavy or it is not heavy. Unthinking people, and some who ought to know better, fall into that trap. They dismiss from their minds the fact that there is a tinge of green in nearly every object in the world, and that there is no such thing as pure green, unless it be just one line or so in the long series of the spectrum; they forget that the lightest thing has weight and that the heaviest thing can be lifted. The rest of the process is simple and has no relation whatever to the realities of life. They agree to some hard and fast impossible definition of Socialism, permit the exponent to extract absurdities therefrom as a conjurer gets rabbits from a hat, and retire with a conviction that on the whole it is well to have had this disturbing matter settled once for all.
For example, the Anti-Socialist declares that Socialism “abolishes property.” He makes believe there is a hard absolute thing called “property” which must either be or not be, which is now, and which will not be under Socialism. To any person with a philosophical education this is a ridiculous mental process, but it seems perfectly rational to an untrained mind—and that is the usual case with the Anti-Socialist. Having achieved this initial absurdity, he then asks in a tone of bitter protest whether a man may not sleep in his own bed, and is he to do nothing if he finds a coal-heaver already in possession when he retires? This is the method of Mr. G. R. Sims, that delightful writer, who from altitudes of exhaustive misunderstanding tells the working-man that under Socialism he will have—I forget his exact formula, but it is a sort of refrain—no money of his own, no home of his own, no wife of his own, no hair of his own! It is effective nonsense in its way—but nonsense nevertheless. In my preceding chapters I hope I have made it clear that “property” even to-day is a very qualified and uncertain thing, a natural vague instinct capable of perversion and morbid exaggeration and needing control, and that Socialism seeks simply to give it a sharper, juster and rationally limited form in relation to the common-weal.
Or again, the opponent has it that Socialism “abolishes the family”—and with it, of course, “every sacred and tender association,” etc., etc. To that also I have given a chapter.
I do not think much Anti-Socialism is dishonest in these matters. The tricks of deliberate falsification, forgery and falsehood that discredit a few Conservative candidates and speakers in the north of England and smirch the reputations of one or two London papers, are due to a quite exceptional streak of baseness in what is on the whole a straightforward opposition to Socialism. Anti-Socialism, as its name implies, is no alternative doctrine; it is a mental resistance, not a mental force. For the most part one is dealing with sheer intellectual incapacity; with people, muddle-headed perhaps, but quite well-meaning, who are really unable to grasp the quantitative element in things. They think with a simple flat certitude that if, for example, a doctor says quinine is good for a case it means that he wishes to put every ounce of quinine that can be procured into his patient, to focus all the quinine in the world upon him; or that if a woman says she likes dancing, that thereby she declares her intention to dance until she drops. They are dear lumpish souls who like things “straightforward” as they say—all or nothing. They think qualifications or any quantitative treatment “quibbling,” to be loudly scorned, bawled down and set aside.
In controversy the temptations for a hot and generous temperament, eager for victory, to misstate and overstate the antagonist’s position are enormous, and the sensible Socialist must allow for them unless he is to find discussion intolerable. The reader of the preceding chapters should know exactly how Socialism stands to the family relations, the things it urges, the things it regards with impartiality or patient toleration, the things it leaves alone. The preceding chapters merely summarize a literature that has been accessible for years. Yet it is extraordinary how few antagonists of Socialism seem able even to approach these questions in a rational manner. One admirably typical critic of a pamphlet in which I propounded exactly the same opinions as are here set out in the third chapter, found great comfort in the expression “brood mares.” He took hold of my phrase, “State family,” and ran wild with it. He declared it to be my intention that women were no longer to be wives but “brood mares” for the State. Nothing would convince him that this was a glaring untruth. His mind was essentially equestrian; “human stud farm” was another of his expressions.[15] Ridicule and argument failed to touch him; I believe he would have gone to the stake to justify his faith that Socialists want to put woman in the Government haras. His thick-headedness had, indeed, a touch of the heroic.
Then a certain Father Phelan of St. Louis, no doubt in a state of mental exaltation as honest as it was indiscriminating, told the world through the columns of an American magazine that I wanted to tear the babe from the mother’s breast and thrust it into an “Institution.” He said worse things than that—but I set them aside as pulpit eloquence. Some readers, no doubt, knew better and laughed, but many were quite sincerely shocked, and resolved after that to give Socialism a very wide berth indeed. Honi soit qui mal y pense; the revolting ideas that disgusted them were not mine, they came from some hot dark reservoir of evil thoughts that years of chastity and discipline seem to have left intact in Father Phelan’s soul.
The error in all these cases is the error of overstatement, of getting into a condition of confused intellectual excitement, and because a critic declares your window curtains too blue, saying, therefore, and usually with passion, that he wants the whole universe, sky and sea included, painted bright orange. The inquirer into the question of Socialism will find that an almost incurable disease of these controversies. Again and again he will meet with it. If after that critic’s little proposition about your window curtains he chances to say that on the whole he thinks an orange sky would be unpleasant, the common practice is to accuse him of not “sticking to his guns.”
My friends, Mr. G. K. Chesterton and Mr. Max Beerbohm, those brilliant ornaments of our age, when they chance to write about Socialism, confess this universal failing—albeit in a very different quality and measure. They are not, it is true, distressed by that unwashed coal-heaver who haunts the now private bed of the common Anti-Socialist, nor have they any horrid vision of the fathers of the community being approved by a select committee of the County Council—no doubt wrapped in horse-cloths and led out by their grooms—such as troubles the spurred and quivering soul of that equestrian—I forget his name—the “brood-mare” gentleman who denounced me in the Pall Mall Gazette; but their souls fly out in a passion of protest against the hints of discipline and order the advancement of Socialism reveals. Mr. G. K. Chesterton mocks valiantly and passionately, I know, against an oppressive and obstinately recurrent anticipation of himself in Socialist hands, hair clipped, meals of a strictly hygienic description at regular hours, a fine for laughing—not that he would want to laugh—and austere exercises in several of the more metallic virtues daily. Mr. Max Beerbohm’s conception is rather in the nature of a nightmare, a hopeless, horrid, frozen flight from the pursuit of Mr. Sidney Webb and myself, both of us short, inelegant men indeed, but for all that terribly resolute, indefatigable, incessant, to capture him, to drag him off to a mechanical Utopia and there to take his thumb-mark and his name, number him distinctly in indelible ink, dress him in an unbecoming uniform, and let him loose (under inspection) in a world of neat round lakes of blue lime water and vistas of white sanitary tiling….
The method of reasoning in all these cases is the same; it is to assume that whatever the Socialist postulates as desirable is wanted without limit or qualification, to imagine whatever proposal is chosen for the controversy is to be carried out by uncontrolled monomaniacs, and so to make a picture of the Socialist dream. This picture is presented to the simple-minded person in doubt with “This is Socialism. Surely! SURELY! you don’t want this!”
And occasionally the poor, simple-minded person really is overcome by these imagined terrors. He turns back to our dingy realities again, to the good old grimy world he knows, thanking God beyond measure that he will never live to see the hateful day when one baby out of every four ceases to die in our manufacturing towns, when lives of sordid care are banished altogether from the earth, and when the “sense of humour” and the cult of Mark Tapley which flourishes so among these things will be in danger of perishing from disuse….
But the reader sees now what Socialism is in its essentials, the tempered magnificence of the constructive scheme to which it asks him to devote his life. It is a laborious, immense project to make the world a world of social justice, of opportunity and full living, to abolish waste, to abolish the lavish unpremeditated cruelty of our present social order. Do not let the wit or perversity of the adversary or, what is often a far worse influence, the zeal and overstatement of the headlong advocate, do not let the manifest personal deficiencies of this spokesman or that, distract you from the living heart in Socialism, its broad generosity of conception, its immense claim in kinship and direction upon your Good Will.