It should guarantee that no one should be rich enough to take anyone into bondage, and that no one should be poor enough to be compelled to sell himself.
Again, no man should be able to say: “I am hungry, I do not know how to get food: I am cold, I have no means of warming myself: I am homeless, I do not know where to rest my head.” No woman must need to make merchandise of herself to escape starvation.
Man being no longer obliged to sell his physical strength or intellect, woman no longer constrained to throw herself into the market, security of life would exist for all, and a sort of equality would be established.
But is not this equality a chimera, and can it exist in practice? Are not abuses inevitable? How can the feelings and duties of everyone be subject to rule, in such a way as to restrict the great as to their wealth and power and the small as to their avarice and covetousness?
Socialism would have to impose a sort of economic equality which would satisfy everyone; so that he who had climbed a few rungs of the social ladder need not envy him who is already at the top. It must, in short, do away with every cause of discontent, envy, and revenge, between the classes who are compelled to have constant dealings with one another. Thus would great social disorder be avoided. But it would be necessary to keep clear of side issues, to take as the base of Socialism the “simplifying of life,” always keeping an intellectual and spiritual ideal as the end in view.
“The characteristic of social organisation,” says Nicati, “is to be the means of information; a faithful medium between the individuals from whom primarily all activity emanates, and with whom it ends: just as the personal intellect intervenes in the emotional domain, between impressions and the impulses to which they give rise.
“The function of this natural organisation conforms to the religious principles regulating its formation and acts.
“Its ultimate object is to maintain harmony between men, as the intellect maintains harmony amongst the emotions, and to unite them in a common desire for equalisation, balance.
“The doctrine of the cultivation of an intellectual and spiritual ideal, then, may be defined as a natural social organisation having for aim the religious pursuit of good, remembering that we understand by ‘religious’ that which is consistent with the natural fabric of social relationship; and by ‘good’ the necessary and natural result of all harmony, balance.”
In reality, however, it appears to me that social equilibrium is no better established now than it was before. The weight which tipped one side of the scale is now on the other. The drawbacks of the lack of stability have not yet disappeared.