And so, while the Poor Law ought to be carried out in the humanest and most liberal fashion compatible with the interests of the poor who pay the rates as well as the poor who benefit by them, any movement for so extending it as to bring more persons under its operation, and thus to further pauperize the community, would be dangerous. We had enough of that under the system swept away by the Act of 1834, the hideous demoralization caused by which should be studied to-day by those who are eager for a freer dispensation of State relief.
The arguments against the State going further than at present in the direction of giving food to all are equally good as against providing work for all. Relief works have ever been centres of corruption and waste of the worst type, while “national workshops” have not been so brilliant a success in the form of dockyards and arsenals as to warrant an extension of the system to all the trades we practise.
The theory that the State is bound to provide work for all was never more concisely put than in the original draft of the French Republican Constitution after the Revolution of 1848, the seventh article of which ran thus: “The right of labour is the right which every man has to live by his labour. It is the duty of Society, through the channels of production and other means at its command, hereafter to be organized, to provide work for such able-bodied men as cannot find it for themselves.” But even a Government imbued with Socialistic tendencies found this to be much too strong, and modified it thus: “It is the duty of Society by fraternal assistance to protect the lives of necessitous citizens, either by finding them work as far as possible, or by providing for those who are incapacitated for work and who have no families to support them.” Yet the modified form was not found to work well in actual practice, and the history of the failure of the French National Workshops of 1848 remains as an eloquent testimony to the fact that the State ought to interfere as little as possible with industrial enterprises and private concerns.
XXXVI.—HOW OUGHT WE TO DEAL WITH SOCIALISM?
Even the considerations already put forward do not exhaust the social question, for only in the briefest fashion have been touched the important points which that question involves. And there is yet left to be discussed the attitude which ought to be adopted towards that body of opinions upon public affairs vaguely known as “Socialism.”
The attitude of some is simply denunciatory, for there is a class of politician which always imputes base motives to those with whom it disagrees, and which is so proficient in abuse that it apparently thinks it a waste of time to argue. That class has been painfully in evidence in regard to the Socialists. It is considered that—so true is the old proverb that if you give a dog a bad name you may as well hang him—nothing more need be done respecting a new and therefore unpopular doctrine than to so label it as to ensure its repudiation by honest but unthinking men. And thus the name “Socialist” is applied as equivalent to thief; and men utterly ignorant of what the words imply link Socialist to Nihilist, Communist to Anarchist, as if each were equal to each, and all therefore equal to one another.
This has been the favourite device of the opponents of all new doctrines, political or social, philosophical or religious. To be ridiculed, to be persecuted, even to be slain has been the fate of the would-be elevators of their kind, as the roll of fame, which includes the names of Socrates and Galileo, Luther and Savonarola, Voltaire and Roger Bacon, Mazzini and Darwin will testify. The Socialists now are hardly called worse names than were applied to geologists fifty years ago, and to Evolutionists but the other day. Atheists, of course, they have been named, for Atheist is the epithet customarily applied by ignorant and bigoted men, who have made God in their own image, to those more zealous in endeavouring to raise humanity.