To bring the chief counts of the editor’s indictment again clearly before the readers, it will be well to summarize them:—
(1) National socialism means governmentalism, which is tyranny over the individual.
(2) National socialism means paternalism, which, exercised by all the people, is the most hopeless kind of tyranny.
(3) National socialism means the arrest of progress, because the majority will surely tyrannize over the small “vanguard of human progress.”
(4) National socialism will be needless when the people are educated to the fraternalism which alone could temper the inevitable despotism of the majority.
There is a period in every agitation of a new idea when the most prosperous weapon against it is a thumping epithet. The name must be apt enough to stick. Furthermore, no matter how misleading, it must be suggestive of sinister things.
“Governmentalism” is such a word. In its etymology it is harmless enough. Governmental is the adjective of government, and means “exercising the powers of government.” Governmentalism, therefore, means the exercise of the powers of government considered as a principle. But the word when made the bogy of socialism is supposed to mean the principle of the exercise of the powers of government raised to the nth degree, and separated from the people. It suggests a shadowy somewhat of officialdom; a Corliss engine of functionaryism; all of which is thought of as apart from the people, yet pressing upon the people. In other words, the name “governmentalism,” while intended as a word of opprobrium for socialism, really indicates the amazing misconception which the critics have of the nation itself, and of the relation of the nation’s life to its self-direction.
The nation is not an aggregate of the Smiths, and Joneses, and Robinsons. It is a favorite formula with the opponents of the new school that the nation is but a multitude of individuals. So is a sand-heap. But in the nation the individual atoms are linked by mutual obligations. They are members one of another. No individual can claim isolation and independency. Let him make the most of his individuality; yet, as Aristotle said, “Man is a political animal;” his nature apart from the nation is incomplete; sundered from that to which he belongs he seems a freak.
The nation, then, is not an artificial binding of units; it is a natural relationship. The ideal nation is not entered as a result of reflection and choice. A man is born into the nation as into the family. To belong to the English nation when born an Englishman is not usually considered so “greatly to his credit,” except in the case of Mr. Gilbert’s naval hero. The very term “naturalize,” with which we denote the initiation of a foreigner, is a confession that the nation is not a social contract but a natural relation. It is this natural relation which makes the nation worth dying for; it is fatherland.
Still further, the nation is an organic being. The scattered atoms of a sand-heap are as perfect as before they were dislodged; not so an amputated arm. When the nation is disunited, the detached segment becomes a different kind of body. “The man without a country” begins to be another sort of man. The nation is not a mass of independent individuals, but of related individuals, who, moreover, are so closely related that they make together an indivisible organism; this organism develops according to orderly laws; this organism has perpetuity, never disjoining itself either from its past or future; and this organism has also self-consciousness and moral personality. This is the nation in which we live, and move, and have our being.