New worlds for old: A plain account of modern socialism

by H. G. Wells

CHAPTER IX
SOME COMMON OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM

§ 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.