But again I repeat: Who provides the funds for this vast campaign? Do they come out of the pockets of the workers or from some other mysterious reservoir of wealth? We shall return to this point in a later chapter.
How is it possible at any rate to believe in the sincerity of the exponents of equality who themselves adopt a style of living so different from that of the proletariat whose cause they profess to represent? If the doctrinaires of Socialism formed a band of ascetics who had voluntarily renounced luxury and amusement in order to lead lives of poverty and self-sacrifice--as countless really devoted men and women not calling themselves Socialists have done--we should still doubt the soundness of their economic theories as applied to society in general, but we should respect their disinterestedness. But with very few exceptions Socialist Intellectuals dine and sup, feast and amuse themselves with as few scruples of conscience as any unregenerate Tories.
With people such as these it is obviously as futile to reason, as it would be to attempt to convince the agent of a quack medicine company that the nostrums he presses on the public will not effect a cure. He is very well aware of that already. Hence the efforts of well-meaning people to set forth in long, well-reasoned arguments the "fallacies of Socialism" produce little or no result. All these so-called "fallacies" have been exposed repeatedly by able writers and disproved by all experience, so that if based merely on ignorance or error they would long since have ceased to obtain credence. The truth is that they are not fallacies but lies, deliberately devised and circulated by men who do not believe in them for a moment and who can therefore only be described as unscrupulous charlatans exploiting the credulity of the public.
But if this description may be legitimately applied to the brains behind Socialism and to certain of its leading doctrinaires, there are doubtless thousands of honest visionaries to be found in the movement. A system that professes to cure all the ills of life inevitably appeals to generous minds that feel but do not reason. In reality many of these people, did they but know it, are simply social reformers at heart and not Socialists at all, and their ignorance of what Socialism really means leads them to range themselves under the banner of a party that claims a monopoly of ideals. Others again, particularly amongst the young intelligentsia, take up Socialism in the same spirit as they would adopt a fashion in ties or waistcoats, for fear of being regarded as "reactionaries." That in reality, far from being "advanced," the profession of Socialism is as retrogressive as would be a return to the side-whiskers and plaid trousers of the last century, does not occur to them. The great triumph of Mussolini was to make the youth of Italy realize that to be a Communist was to be a "back number," and that progress consisted in marching forward to new ideas and aspirations. The young men of Cabet's settlement discovered this sixty years ago when they formed themselves into a band of "Progressives" in opposition to the old men who still clung to the obsolete doctrine of Communism.
Socialism at the present moment is in reality less a creed than a cult, founded not on practical experience but on unreal theory. It is here we find a connexion with secret societies. M. Augustin Cochin in his brilliant essays on the French Revolution[738] has described that "World of the Clouds" of which the Grand Orient was the capital, peopled by the precursors of the French Revolution. "Whilst in the real world the criterion of all thought lies in putting it to the test," there in the World of the Clouds the criterion is opinion. "They are there to talk, not to do; all this intellectual agitation, this immense traffic in speeches, writings, correspondence, leads not to the slightest beginning of work, of real effort." We should be wrong to judge them harshly; their theories on the perfectibility of human nature, on the advantages of savagery, which appear to us "dangerous chimeras," were never intended to apply to real life, only to the World of the Clouds, where they present no danger but become, on the contrary, "the most fecund truths."
The revolutionary explosion might well have finally shattered these illusions but for the Grand Orient. We have already seen the identity of theory between French Masonry and French Socialism in the nineteenth century. It was thus that, although in France one experiment after another demonstrated the unreality of Socialist Utopias, the lodges were always there to reconstruct the mirage and lead humanity on again across the burning desert sands towards the same phantom palm-trees and illusory pools of water.
Whatever the manner in which these ideas penetrated to this country--whether through the Radicals of the last century, adorers of the Encyclopædist Masons of France, or through the British disciples of German Social Democrats from the time of the First Internationale onwards--it is impossible to ignore the resemblance between the theories not only of French but of modern British Socialism and the doctrines of illuminized Freemasonry. Thus the idea running through Freemasonry of a Golden Age before the Fall, when man was free and happy, and which through the application of masonic principles is to return once more, finds an exact counterpart in the Socialist conception of a past halcyon era of Liberty and Equality, which is to return not merely in the form of a regenerated social order, but as a complete Millennium from which all the ills of human life have been eliminated. This idea has always haunted the imagination of Socialist writers from Rousseau to William Morris, and leads directly up to the further theory--the necessity for destroying civilization.
I cannot find in Mr. Lothrop Stoddart's conception of the revolutionary movement as the revolt of the "Under Man" against civilization, the origin of this campaign. In reality the leaders of world-revolution have not been "Under Men," victims of oppression or of adverse fate, nor could they be ranged in this category on account of physical or mental inferiority. It is true that most revolutionary agitators have been in some way abnormal and that the revolutionary army has largely been recruited from the unfit, but the real inspirers of the movement have frequently been men in prosperous circumstances and of brilliant intellect who might have distinguished themselves on other lines had they not chosen to devote their talents to subversion. To call Weishaupt, for example, an "Under Man" would be absurd. But let us see what is the idea on which the plan of destroying civilization is ostensibly founded.
It will be remembered that Rousseau like Weishaupt held that the Golden Age of felicity did not end in the garden of Eden, as is popularly supposed, but was prolonged into tribal and nomadic life. Up to this moment Communism was the happy disposition under which the human race existed and which vanished with the introduction of civilization. Civilization is therefore the fons et origo mali and should be done away with. Let no one exclaim that this theory died out either with Rousseau or with Weishaupt; the idea that "civilization is all wrong" runs all through the writings and speeches of our Intellectual Socialists to-day. I have referred elsewhere to Mr. H.G. Wells's prediction that mankind will more and more revert to the nomadic life, and Mr. Snowden has recently referred in tones of evident nostalgia to that productive era when man "lived under a system of tribal Communism."[739] The children who attend the Socialist Schools are also taught in the "Red Catechism" the advantages of savagery, thus:
Question. Do savages starve in the midst of plenty?