I have called your attention to merely a few of the problems that suggest themselves when we attempt to consider what kind of an existence Socialism has planned for us. There are hundreds of other examples that will occur to you if you stop to think the matter over seriously. If this is the kind of life you want to live—the kind of freedom you think you would enjoy—you are welcome to it.
CHAPTER XVI
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WORLD?
My dear John,
While I think I have shown you that Socialism is not what it pretends to be—a certain remedy for all the social evils of our day—and that it is utterly impossible for Socialism to keep its promises by making this world over into a veritable kingdom of God on earth, we must not make the mistake of dismissing all the contentions of the Socialists as so many exhibitions of mental aberration. There is madness in some of their doctrines—it is a crazy kind of a future that they have planned for us; but behind all their absurdities there is a well-justified protest against a series of social and industrial abuses from which the great body of humanity is suffering, as from so many hideous sores.
Mind you, John, I do not say that Socialists never exaggerate existing conditions. We have already seen how prone they are to try to make us put the most gloomy construction on the social outlook, and how ready they are to twist statistics into all kinds of strange contortions to make them fit their theories, in an endeavor to prove that the evils which exist are ever so much more glaring than they really are.
But the evils exist. The worker does not get an adequate share of the wealth which he contributes to produce. The problem of unemployment cries for solution from one end of the world to the other. In every State and country the evils of child labor demand a remedy. Everywhere numbers of men and women work under conditions that are a disgrace to our boasted civilization, and in all parts of the land workers are compelled to live in an environment and under circumstances that absolutely preclude the attainment of the ideals toward which humanity is supposed to be tending.
In a word, we cannot deny that something is radically wrong with the world. So far we may go hand in hand with the Socialist. To the extent that he demands reform measures which shall give to the worker greater opportunities for development and happiness, we must heartily concur. But is the Socialist right when he asserts that these wrongs are the inevitable result of the system which he calls “capitalism”? Is it impossible, as he insists, that these wrongs may be righted except by the overthrow of our present system and the substitution of collective ownership of all means of production for our privately-owned competitive method of managing things?
When the Socialist tells us that Individualism is responsible for all these evils, he is right. When he tells us that these evils are inherent in the system which permits individual ownership of productive properties, he is wrong. It is not the competitive system that is responsible for all our social and industrial abuses. These unjust features of modern life are the direct result of the vicious practices which selfish and cruel individuals have adopted in their relations to their fellow-men, but which do not necessarily have any place in the system itself.
If you were to study the development of political economy, you would discover that the marked degradation of the workers, as well as much of the callousness of the prosperous to the sufferings of the poor are the direct result of the economic ideas promulgated by the Liberal philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “Liberty, fraternity and equality,” are terms to conjure with; but, once we apply these principles to the practical affairs of life, we have started society upon a downward course which can be checked only by a complete reversal of such ideas.
The French Deists sought to remove all trammels from man that he might follow nature without restraint. They, and the economists who followed them—Adam Smith, Ricardo, Bentham, Mill, and others—saw no room for morality, religion, or even ethics, in political economy. The natural effect of such principles was to foster the selfish impulses of man rather than enforce conformity to the standards of conduct which are embodied in the eternal laws of justice. These principles taught men that the matter of prime importance was self-interest; they encouraged cruelty and greed; they opened the way for the practice of unregulated competition and stultified the Christian ideals of self-renunciation and human brotherhood.