The Inhumanity of Socialism

by Edward F. Adams

PHAEDO—Surely, for hath not the poet said:

"That they shall take who have the power, And they may keep who can."

SOCRATES—Therefore it is plain that the United States may keep Chinamen out of America.

PHAEDO—There can be no doubt of it whatever.

SOCRATES—And Chinese may keep Americans out of China.

PHAEDO—That is another story. One must never let his logic get the better of him.

And so we might play with these great subjects forever, with reasoning as leaky as a sieve, but good enough to catch the careless or the untrained.

One of the most interesting lectures which I ever listened to was one before the Economic League of San Francisco on the "Dialectics of Socialism." The lecturer was a very acute man, who would not for one moment be deceived by the sophistry of my Socrates and Phaedo, but, who, himself, made willing captives of his hearers by similar methods. I was unable to hear all his address, but when I reluctantly left, it appeared to me that he was expecting to prove that Socialism must be sound philosophy because it was contradictory to all human observation, experience, judgment and the dictates of sound common sense—and his large audience was plainly enough with him.

The dialectics of the schoolmen or their equivalent are useless in Social discussion. Social phenomena do not lend themselves to the rigorous formulas of mathematics and logic, for the human intellect is unable to discern and grasp all the factors of these problems. My travesty of Plato was intended to illustrate the difficulty of close reasoning on such topics.

Neither, on the other hand, are we to blindly follow the impulses of emotion which lead us to jump at a conclusion, support it with what reason we can, but reach it in any event. Emotion is the source of Social power, but power unrestrained and undirected is dangerous. Energy created by the sight of distress must be controlled by reason or it will not relieve distress. And by reason I do not mean Social syllogisms, of whose premises we are always uncertain, but conclusions half unconsciously formed in the mind as the result of human experience operating on human feeling—the practical wisdom which we call common sense. Human conduct, individual and aggregate, must be regulated and determined by the consensus of the judgment of the wisest made effective through its gradual acceptance as the judgment of the majority. Private ownership of land, with its accompanying rent, is justified, not by an imaginary inherent right in the individual, which has no real existence and so cannot be conveyed, but because the interests of Society require the stimulus to effort which private ownership and private ownership only can give. And here I shall leave this point without the further illustration and elaboration with which I could torment you longer than you could keep awake. And with the other two points I will confine myself to the most condensed forms of statement.