Idling in Italy: Studies of literature and of life

by Joseph Collins

"Children who are the issue of these unions are to become the property of the state."

The "decree" states further that it has been based on the excellent "example" of similar decrees already issued at Luga, Kolpin, and elsewhere.

A similar "Project of Provisional Rights in Connection with the Socialization of Women in the City of Hvolinsk and Vicinity" was published in the Local Gazette of the Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.

I am not sure that this lurid conduct of the Bolsheviks will do the cause of social reconstruction harm. I recall the conduct of the promoters of woman-suffrage in England in the few years preceding 1914. Their campaign seemed to be founded in insanity, and yet something of the kind was necessary to concentrate the world's attention on their rights, and the Bolsheviks have got the world's attention and thought to-day—and will have them to-morrow.

Socialism is adverse to imperialism and capitalism. Imperialism has been conquered, but capitalism has not yet been throttled. One will be able more safely to prophesy how much it has been weakened, potentially and actually, after labor has had its next chance at the bat in Great Britain. This war was not undertaken to overcome capitalism. It was undertaken to overcome imperialism and the tyranny of foreign domination, but its success has been dependent upon the people, who will now assert their rights, and the most fundamental of their rights is that they shall not be oppressed by money. It is not sufficient that the principles of nationality defined by Mazzini shall be upheld—that is, that the peoples of one nationality shall not be dominated by the peoples of another. It is necessary, if such peoples are going to live in freedom, that they must not be dominated or enslaved by any mastodonic power which is protected from attack, such as capital. Had it not been for the determination of the people to have the right to live in freedom, the miracle that transpired in the closing months of 1918 in Europe would not have been wrought. The factors that sustained the peoples of the conquering nations in these long, dark months of tragedy and of carnage, the thing that made them go on stubbornly and steadfastly with the war when the odds seemed to be all against them, may be summarized in one sentence: "Their determination to have their inalienable right, the right to live in freedom." One may perhaps say that in different countries of the world they have had such right, but the person who says this would have great difficulty in naming the country. Any one who contended that in republics such as ours capital has not been privileged and arbitrary, that it has not been the dominant factor in making and adopting the laws to which the people are beholden, would be laughed at by any sane man.

And now that the people who have lived and died, toiled and wrought, suffered and supplicated through fifty-two months of agony have won, there will arise from those who have survived a dominant chorus which will insist upon the fulfilment of the promises that were made them to incite them to victory. Their hopes and desires and aspirations must be satisfied. I am one of those who believe that they will make their demands orderly and insistently, and not by means of revolution or serious disturbance of order. They will work out their salvation by mutual co-operation, not only amongst themselves but with those who are the leaders of the world's thought, many of whom have been heretofore of the privileged classes, but they will insist upon certain fundamental things which I have previously enumerated, and the foremost of which is the dispersion of great wealth, particularly hereditary wealth. The revolutionary Socialist sees an easy solution of the matter in the giving of the wealth to the masses and of recognizing no other source of wealth except labor, but that is not the kind of Socialist who will have to do with the reordering of the world that is now being born. It is the Socialist who is to-day frequently called the individualist, who believes that the dissipation of individual property and initiative will spell a greater ruin for the masses than for the individual and who believes in harmonizing the principles of individual liberty with those of solidarity, who will be the Socialist of the New Era.

The future state will be arbitrary only in so far as it is the expression of the collected, united force of its citizens. They will really make its laws, not have them made for them by capital or privileged interests; they will enforce them impartially, and it is devoutly to be hoped the external force of such peoples will be conventionized in such a way with other peoples that armies and navies will practically cease to exist. The basis of such hope is in the League of Nations, for then we shall have a world-state which shall make international law or convention subject to law and enforcement. Once the fear of invasion of a country is overcome and once the principles of nationality can be established and put into operation, there will be no reason for the existence of armies and navies.

The beneficences subsumed under the name liberty that must flow from the sacrifices that we have made for the welfare of the people must assure their health, contribute to their happiness, and promote their efficiency. Disease must be prevented, not by personal effort as on the part of physicians who do it for gain or fame, but by the state, which shall devote adequate sums for research, investigation, propaganda, and enforcement of the principles of sanitation. It shall likewise devote adequate sums for the education of all the people and thrust such education upon them in order that they may make use, not only for themselves but for the state, of the talents with which they have been endowed, so that liberty and personal initiative may be made running mates, and no closely knit organization as the church shall be permitted to stand in the way of such education. It shall permit them to worship God as they, educated, see fit and proper, and it shall not attempt, or tolerate the attempt of others, to thrust a religion founded in authority upon them, non-conformation to which is followed by punishment, often in condign form, such as social ostracism, refusal of the ministration of paid priests, refusal of burial in consecrated grounds, or threat of punishment. It shall not enforce upon them a conduct at variance with the laws of nature in sex relations; therefore, it shall solve the marriage and population questions, or at least make an attempt to do so. It shall give the same freedom to woman as it does to man and not have one written or unwritten law for the former and another for the latter. It shall replace our present economic system by a better one; in other words, money must be given a new valuation.

When everything has been said, the state is the thing. What constitutes a state or a nation? We know what has constituted it in the past, but when we read history we realize that it has never been stable, always has been in transformation. Some have been more stable than others—England more than Italy, France more than Austria, the United States more than France. When a nation does not change it is dead like Spain, strangled by the parasite, arbitrary authority, the church.

A new order of state-formation is about to be instituted—that of nationalism. Comparatively few people appreciate what is meant by nationalism. Until the wide-spread discussion of the aspirations of the Czecho-Slovaks in America, I doubt whether any one, except students of history and statesmen, gave any attention to it whatsoever. And yet, despite this, no one has elaborated the fundamental facts of nationality as clearly as has President Wilson. Nearly a third of all the peoples of Europe have been obliged to submit to governments to which they were antipathic by birth, sympathy, or tradition. In other words, Italians living beyond a certain arbitrary geographic line have been obliged to subscribe to the laws of Austria; French living beyond a certain geographic line have been obliged to subscribe to the laws of Germany; Slavs to those of Hungary. Patriotism, that indefinable quality made up of primitive instincts, intellectual convictions, and religious feeling, which is supposed to be the greatest of all the virtues, has been an artifice for a third of all the peoples of the European continent. If they were really patriotic, their hearts and minds were with their mother countries, and therefore their conduct toward the ruler to which they bowed the knee must have been that of the hypocrite. One of the things on which all the Allied nations are agreed is that in the remaking of the map of Europe every man shall be free to elect his nationality and that no one shall be coerced to be a citizen of another nation. He may elect to be a citizen of another nation, but that is his concern.