It is the most remarkable fact in political bibliography that all the Utopias worth mentioning have been written by Socialists. The fact is not surprising to anyone who has considered that the Socialists are the only political party in the State who ever attempt to look more than a dozen years ahead. The ordinary politician steers the ship by keeping a look-out for rocks and squalls, and does not trouble to make for any distant landmark. Only the Socialist looks ahead to a harbour attainable perhaps in a hundred years, from which a happier voyage may be begun. Only the Socialist seems to realise that in the world conceived, as modern thought must conceive it, as a continuous process, Government rather than Trade, Science and Art rather than Industry are the chief activities of the citizen. Government is nothing less than the organisation of the State to take its place among the other States of the world. It includes of course education, being itself a form of education: for the State must be educated to fulfil its duty to other States, just as the citizen must be (and more or less is) educated in duty towards his neighbour. The first task of education is naturally to eliminate violence, to inhibit, by inducing in the young citizen the recognition of mutual rights, those acts of ferocity by which primitive man instinctively expresses his solipsistic passions.
But where, it may well be asked, is the authority which is to begin the neglected education of the nations of Europe? Where is what Mr. Boon (or Mr. Bliss) would call "the Mind of the Race"? At present the only body of doctrine with any conception of the nature of government for the collective benefit of humanity is International Socialism. It is the International Socialists who must lead the attack on War, if only because the only instigators of war themselves form an international body in so far as the only occasions for war are contrived by the Imperialists and Capitalists who are to be found in every nation. To Socialism belongs the duty of educating Europe against Imperialism, as it has begun to educate the nation against Capitalism; for Imperialism is only an allotropic form of Capitalism, manifesting itself in the exploitation of fellow-nations instead of in the exploitation of fellow-citizens. The first step in that education must be the fight not only against "private" or profiteering Trade, but against "private" or profiteering War: and "private war" is every war that is not authorised by an International Authority and waged by an International army.
I seem to have heard it said before that there is only one way to break the chains that bind us: and that Amalgamation is the mother of Liberty. The need for the education of Europe is a call to the Trade Unionists and Fabians and Collectivists and Guildsmen of every Nation: