During the past century the Socialists of the school for bettering the environment have for the most part had the game in their own hands. They founded themselves on the very reasonable basis of sympathy, a basis which the eighteenth-century moralists had prepared, which Schopenhauer had formulated, which George Eliot had passionately preached, which had around its operations the immense prestige of the gospel of Jesus. The environmental Socialists—always quite reasonably—set themselves to improve the conditions of labour; they provided local relief for the poor; they built hospitals for the free treatment of the sick. They are proceeding to feed school children, to segregate and protect the feeble-minded, to insure the unemployed, to give State pensions to the aged, and they are even asked to guarantee work for all. Now these things, and the likes of them, are not only in accordance with natural human impulses, but for the most part they are reasonable, and in protecting the weak the strong are, in a certain sense, protecting themselves. No one nowadays wants the hungry to hunger or the suffering to suffer. Indeed, in that sense, there never has been any laissez-faire school. [258]
But as the movement of environmental Socialism realizes itself, it becomes increasingly clear that it is itself multiplying the work which it sets itself to do. In enabling the weak, the incompetent, and the defective to live and to live comfortably, it makes it easier for those on the borderland of these classes to fall into them, and it furnishes the conditions which enable them to propagate their like, and to do this, moreover, without that prudent limitation which is now becoming universal in all classes above those of the weak, the incompetent, and the defective. Thus unchecked environmental Socialism, obeying natural impulses and seeking legitimate ends, would be drawn into courses at the end of which only social enfeeblement, perhaps even dissolution, could be seen.
The key to the situation, it is now beginning to be more and more widely felt, is to be found in the counterbalancing tendency of Individualism, and the eugenic guardianship of the race. Not, rightly understood, as a method of arresting environmental Socialism, nor even as a counterblast to its gospel of sympathy. Nietzsche, indeed, has made a famous assault on sympathy, as he has on conventional morality generally, but his "immoralism" in general and his "hardness" in particular are but new and finer manifestations of those faded virtues he was really seeking to revive. The superficially sympathetic man flings a coin to the beggar; the more deeply sympathetic man builds an almshouse for him so that he need no longer beg; but perhaps the most radically sympathetic of all is the man who arranges that the beggar shall not be born.
So it is that the question of breed, the production of fine individuals, the elevation of the ideal of quality in human production over that of mere quantity, begins to be seen, not merely as a noble ideal in itself, but as the only method by which Socialism can be enabled to continue on its present path. If the entry into life is conceded more freely to the weak, the incompetent, and the defective than to the strong, the efficient, and the sane, then a Sisyphean task is imposed on society; for every burden lifted two more burdens appear. But as individual responsibility becomes developed, as we approach the time to which Galton looked forward, when the eugenic care for the race may become a religion, then social control over the facts of life becomes possible. Through the slow growth of knowledge concerning hereditary conditions, by voluntary self-restraint, by the final disappearance of the lingering prejudice against the control of procreation, by sterilization in special cases, by methods of pressure which need not amount to actual compulsion, [259] it will be possible to attain an increasingly firm grip on the evil elements of heredity. Not until such measures as these, under the controlling influence of a sense of personal responsibility extending to every member of the community, have long been put into practice, can we hope to see man on the earth risen to his full stature, healthy in body, noble in spirit, beautiful in both alike, moving spaciously and harmoniously among his fellows in the great world of Nature, to which he is so subtly adapted because he has himself sprung out of it and is its most exquisite flower. At this final point social hygiene becomes one with the hygiene of the soul. [260]
Poets and prophets, from Jesus and Paul to Novalis and Whitman, have seen the divine possibilities of Man. There is no temple in the world, they seem to say, so great as the human body; he comes in contact with Heaven, they declare, who touches a human person. But these human things, made to be gods, have spawned like frogs over all the earth. Everywhere they have beslimed its purity and befouled its beauty, darkening the very sunshine. Heaped upon one another in evil masses, preying upon one another as no other creature has ever preyed upon its kind, they have become a festering heap which all the oceans in vain lave with their antiseptic waters, and all the winds of heaven cannot purify. It is only in the unextinguished spark of reason within him that salvation for man may ever be found, in the realization that he is his own star, and carries in his hands his own fate. The impulses of Individualism and of Socialism alike prompt us to gain self-control and to learn the vast extent of our responsibility. The whole of humanity is working for each of us; each of us must live worthy of that great responsibility to humanity. By how fine a flash of insight Jesus declared that few could enter the Kingdom of Heaven! Not until the earth is purified of untold millions of its population will it ever become the Heaven of old dreamers, in which the elect walk spaciously and nobly, loving one another. Only in such spacious and pure air is it possible for the individual to perfect himself, as a rose becomes perfect, according to Dante's beautiful simile, [261] in order that he may spread abroad for others the fragrance that has been generated within him. If one thinks of it, that seems a truism, yet, even in this twentieth century, how few, how very few, there are who know it!
This is why we cannot have too much Individualism, we cannot have too much Socialism. They play into each other's hands. To strengthen one is to give force to the other. The greater the vigour of both, the more vitally a society is progressing. "I can no more call myself an Individualist or a Socialist," said Henry George, "than one who considers the forces by which the planets are held to their orbits could call himself a centrifugalist or a centripetalist." To attain a society in which Individualism and Socialism are each carried to its extreme point would be to attain to the society that lived in the Abbey of Thelema, in the City of the Sun, in Utopia, in the land of Zarathustra, in the Garden of Eden, in the Kingdom of Heaven. It is a kingdom, no doubt, that is, as Diderot expressed it, "diablement idéal." But to-day we hold in our hands more certainly than ever before the clues that were imperfectly foreshadowed by Plato, and what our fathers sought ignorantly we may attempt by methods according to knowledge. No Utopia was ever realized; and the ideal is a mirage that must ever elude us or it would cease to be ideal. Yet all our progress, if progress there be, can only lie in setting our faces towards that goal to which Utopias and ideals point.
[248] In the narrow sense Socialism is identical with the definite economic doctrine of the Collectivistic organization of the productive and distributive work of society. It also possesses, as Bosanquet remarks (in an essay on "Individualism and Socialism," in The Civilization of Christendom), "a deeper meaning as a name for a human tendency that is operative throughout history." Every Collectivist is a Socialist, but not every Socialist would admit that he is a Collectivist. "Moral Socialism," however, though not identical with "Economic Socialism," tends to involve it.
[249] The term "Individualism," like the term "Socialism," is used in varying senses, and is not, therefore, satisfactory to everyone. Thus E.F.B. Fell (The Foundations of Liberty, 1908), regarding "Individualism," as a merely negative term, prefers the term "Personalism," to denote a more positive ideal. There is, however, by no means as any necessity to consider "Individualism," a more negative term than "Socialism."
[250] The inspiring appeal of Socialism to ardent minds is no doubt ethical. "The ethics of Socialism," says Kirkup, "are closely akin to the ethics of Christianity, if not identical with them." That, perhaps, is why Socialism is so attractive to some minds, so repugnant to others.
[251] This idea was elaborated by Eimer in an appendix to his Organic Evolution on the idea of the individual in the animal kingdom.