“Not if they give it over again to whomsoever has immediate need,” answered Derwent. “In this broad world there is room for all; and there are fruits in plenty, ample food, and raiment always ready. Let each one take what he needs, and have no fear of getting no more when these are gone. Why, the labor of all men for some few minutes a day will suffice to bring them all things they can need and use. Property is unnecessary. But men are like rude children at a public feast: each one fearing that he shall not get enough, they trample one another forward, and the foremost few lay hands upon it all.”
“No one of us who thinks,” said Haviland, “would object to communism if it were practicable. But I must have an overcoat, or a roof, or a horse; is anyone coming along who prefers my coat, my roof, to his, or to none, to take it? And, in the second place, men are not unselfish enough to work, even those few minutes a day, that all humanity may live.”
“They are, if they have souls,” said Derwent. “And if not, we are beasts; and let us perish like them. And as for the first objection, it is a trivial one, soon forgotten in practice. There will naturally grow up an unwritten respect for one’s personal belongings; so far as it is necessary that there should be. If a man needs a coat so much as to filch mine, it is better he should have it. Free men will no more stoop to take a neighbor’s coat, or roof, or hat, than a prince will steal a pocket-handkerchief. And as to great values like statues, paintings, libraries, they are for all the world, and not to be monopolized by a vulgar money-maker. He truly owns a picture who enjoys it; not he who buys it. The pleasure in these, by divine law, is not selfish, not individual; only when a man loses himself in the contemplation of a beautiful picture does he really enjoy it, really make it his; it is of as little moment who has the title to the canvas and frame, as it is who owns the wide prairies and the mountains that the poet roams over. So there need be no vulgar property in these things; and they are all that is worth enjoying. As to exotics, and waste land, and dozens of houses, and yachts, and palaces, and game-preserves—these are social crimes.”
“Exactly,” said Wemyss, with a well-bred sneer in his inflection. “You wish, like all the rest, to abolish civilization. All communists hate excellence; because they do not themselves excel. They say, since we cannot all be princes, let us all be savages.”
“What they say, Mr. Wemyss,” cried Derwent, fiercely, “is this: Instead of the vulgar democracy of crass possession, let us have the noble aristocracy of merit, mind, and soul. Let no man excel by owning the souls and bodies, the waking and the sleeping, the getting up and the lying down of his fellow-men. And this whether it be done directly, by chattel slavery, or more secretly and dangerously, by corporate control, monopoly of land, monopoly of that fateful thing that men call capital. Money is the devil’s counters; a treasure accursed, thrice cursed when welded into the ring of power, like that fabled Rhine-gold, which only he may win who for it lays aside all love, both human and divine. Let men enjoy the light of the earth, the noble teachings of art and letters, the health of the body and the freedom of the soul; but these without the virus of self-appropriation. It is this that makes barbarism; it is not civilization. Look at your Yankee money-grubbers; they give, and greedily, ten thousand dollars for a common painting, which they may ostentatiously make their own; they would hesitate to give a dollar for Dante’s Divine Comedy, if he wrote to-day, because—of course, they do not care for it—and they cannot lock it up as theirs and bar it from their fellow-men. And even if, as you insinuate, the future were to be what you call barbarism, the morning chase of the free savage after the wild creature on whom he feeds is more ennobling than the grimy greed of a stunted humanity for these counters that are worthless in themselves. I have seen Australia and Hawaii, and I have seen Sheffield and East London; and I say, better a thousand-fold the heathen savagery than such Christian civilization as are these.”
“I have hitherto failed to observe, among socialists or knights of labor, or their wives,” said Wemyss, dryly, “any newer or other impulse than a rising desire for these same counters that you scoff at, or the gin and brass jewellery that they may purchase with them.”
“Ay,” cried Lionel Derwent, “you have seen little yet but a blind, instinctive striving for the drugs and poisons you have fed them on; for the treasure you have kept, and welded to the ring of tyranny that held them down. So, when you lift a stone from the ground, or hurl the roof from some long-lived-in Bastile of humanity, the sudden sunlight streams in, and the prisoners, poor insects that they are, crushed by a thousand years of oppression, blinded, dazzled by the light of heaven, grope vainly and mechanically for the things of earth they have been wonted to, and which want and custom and your own example have taught them, too, to prize. No, they are not better than you are, yet; not until their souls have come to life that you so long have robbed them of. But give us light and love, and the word of Christ, and we will see. But, as I said in the beginning, your priests have tortured even this to suit their ends.”
“Well, Mr. Derwent, I wish you success in your mission. Civilization has got to go, one way or another; and I don’t know that it matters much which. I confess that your way strikes me as rather a novel one. Most of your radical friends, however, if what you say be their true aim, show a singular predilection for atheism, free-love, and omitting their daily baths.” With which climax and a slight yawn, Wemyss walked over and joined the group in the other corner.
John Haviland had for a long time been silent; but now he spoke. “I am afraid, Mr. Derwent,” said he, “that I so far agree with Mr. Wemyss as to feel that three essentials of civilization are so bound up together that with leaving either one we may lose the rest—I mean, my right to my property, my right to my wife, and my right to personal liberty. The same radicalism which, on the one hand, sets up a tyranny of majority government to tell me what I shall think, what I shall eat, what I shall spend, is that which, on the other hand, tends to the age of reason and the regulation of property out of existence, and women’s rights to lose themselves as women, and absolute liberty of divorce. Property and marriage and personal liberty—they go together. There is no argument for freedom but the inner light of the mind; none for monogamy but that it seems farther from the beasts; none for property but that man creates it for himself. And the age of reason, which denies a divine sanction, will yet require a divine sanction for all that it does not destroy.”
“Man does not create the air, nor the ocean, nor the surface of the earth,” said Derwent.