This is not simply the Christian ideal of society, it is the ideal of every right-thinking man, of every man with a full sense of beauty. You will find it rendered in two imperishably beautiful Utopias of our own time, both, I glory to write, by Englishmen, the News from Nowhere of William Morris, and Hudson’s exquisite Crystal Age. Both these present practically Anarchist States, both assume idealized human beings, beings finer, simpler, nobler than the heated, limited and striving poor souls who thrust and suffer among the stresses of this present life. And the present writer, too—I must mention him here to guard against a confusion in the future—when a little while ago he imagined humanity exalted morally and intellectually by the brush of a comet’s tail,[20] was forced by the logic of his premises and even against his first intention to present not a Socialist State but a glorious anarchism as the outcome of that rejuvenescence of the world.
But the business of Socialism lies at a lower level and concerns immediate things; our material is the world as it is, full of unjust laws, bad traditions, bad habits, inherited diseases and weaknesses, germs and poisons, filths and envies. We are not dealing with magnificent creatures such as one sees in ideal paintings and splendid sculpture, so beautiful they may face the world naked and unashamed; we are dealing with hot-eared, ill-kempt people, who are liable to indigestion, baldness, corpulence and fluctuating tempers; who wear top-hats and bowler hats or hats kept on by hat-pins (and so with all the other necessary clothing); who are pitiful and weak and vain and touchy almost beyond measure, and very naughty and intemperate; who have, alas! to be bound over to be in any degree faithful and just to one another. To strip such people suddenly of law and restraint would be as dreadful and ugly as stripping the clothes from their poor bodies….
That Anarchist world, I admit, is our dream; we do believe—well, I, at any rate, believe this present world, this planet, will some day bear a race beyond our most exalted and temerarious dreams, a race begotten of our wills and the substance of our bodies, a race, so I have said it, “who will stand upon the earth as one stands upon a footstool, and laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars,” but the way to that is through education and discipline and law. Socialism is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and action. Socialism is the school-room of true and noble Anarchism, wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.
There is a graceful and all too little known fable by Mr. Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite, which gives, I think, not only the relation of Socialism to philosophic Anarchism, but of all discipline to all idealism. It is the story of a beautiful mask that was worn by a man in love, until he tired even of that much of deceit and, a little desperately, threw it aside—to find his own face beneath changed to the likeness of the self he had desired. So would we veil the greed, the suspicion of the self-seeking scramble of to-day under institutions and laws that will cry “duty and service” in the ears and eyes of all mankind, keep down the evil so long and so effectually that at last law will be habit, and greed and self-seeking cease for ever, from being the ruling impulse of the world. Socialism is the mask that will mould the world to that better Anarchism of good men’s dreams….
But these are long views, glimpses beyond the Socialist horizon. The people who would set up Anarchism to-day are people without human experience or any tempering of humour, only one shade less impossible than the odd one-sided queer beings one meets, ridiculously inaccessible to laughter, who, caricaturing their Nietzsche and misunderstanding their Shaw, invite one to set up consciously with them in the business of being Overmen, to rule a world full of our betters, by fraud and force. It is a foolish teaching saved only from being horrible by being utterly ludicrous. For us the best is faith and humility, truth and service, our utmost glory is to have seen the vision and to have failed—not altogether…. For ourselves and such as we are, let us not “deal in pride,” let us be glad to learn a little of this spirit of service, to achieve a little humility, to give ourselves to the making of Socialism and the civilized State without presumption—as children who are glad they may help in a work greater than themselves and the toys that have heretofore engaged them.
CHAPTER XII
ADMINISTRATIVE SOCIALISM
§ 1.
Marx gave to Socialism a theory of world-wide social development, and rescued it altogether from the eccentric and localized associations of its earliest phases; he brought it so near to reality that it could appear as a force in politics, embodied first as the International Association of Working Men, and then as the Social Democratic movement of the continent of Europe that commands to-day over a third of the entire poll of German voters. So much Marx did for Socialism. But if he broadened its application to the world, he narrowed its range to only the economic aspect of life. He arrested for a time the discussion of its biological and moral aspects altogether. He left it an incomplete doctrine of merely economic reconstruction supplemented by mystical democracy, and both its mysticism and incompleteness, while they offered no difficulties to a labouring man ignorant of affairs, rendered it unsubstantial and unattractive to people who had any real knowledge of administration.
It was left chiefly to the little group of English people who founded the Fabian Society to supply a third system of ideas to the amplifying conception of Socialism, to convert Revolutionary Socialism into Administrative Socialism.