It is of the first importance to realize that each perceptible social change involves many other perceptible changes, that, in Spencer’s happy analogy, the social constitution is a web, no strand of which can be moved without moving others. The changes we have tried to forecast cannot come effectively before the subsidence of the wave of fierce competition which was partly smoothed down by the trusts. In many businesses, competition in drumming and advertising is still at the point where it costs more to sell goods than to make them and hosts of men accomplish only the neutralizing of each other’s efforts. The rationalizing of competition and the growth of a coöperative spirit would release men for other pursuits; and the growth of intelligence in learning what is to be had and discriminating what is best, must diminish the billions spent on advertising. These additions to productive labor and capital must diminish the ills which have made Socialism seem desirable as well as inevitable.
Suppose we do our best to realize these possibilities to the full. Suppose a Socialist then revisits the earth two or three hundred years from now. He may see in full operation what he has always declared impossible, a democratic individualism. Instead of an impoverished and disappearing farming class, he will find a populous countryside divided into small homesteads, and run at a handsome profit by specialists in intensive agriculture. Instead of a factory or mining proletariat, hungry and rebellious, he will find great wholesale establishments owned and run by a handful of engineers, turning out pulp, cloth, metal and standard parts for machinery, turning the products over to millions of independent artisan establishments supplied with cheap and plentiful power, to be worked into countless articles of art and utility. He will look to the processes of exchange to find great financial magnates and railway barons on the one hand, and a horde of miserable clerks and small shopkeepers in difficulties on the other. Instead, he will discover a network of voluntary credit and sales associations, information bureaus, individually owned freight automobiles (and possibly airships); with perhaps a few regulated railway lines and pneumatic delivery tubes, run by a prosperous association of experts. He will look for the old-time “servant class,” and find that the scientifically trained housewife, with a power plant in the cellar, can run her own house, thank you, and consider it the most honorable of professions. Seeing everything so effectively managed for the happiness of the people, he will look to see in the government the universal owner and employer of his dreams, but he will find instead a clearing house of help and information, which puts its knowledge of efficient management, of technical processes, of economic and sociological conditions, at everyone’s disposal, and comes to the rescue in the rare case of poverty, failure or crime. Will he rejoice that the world is happy, or be sorry that it is not happy his way? If I know the Socialist, he will claim that he was right all along, and that this state of society is really Socialism. Let him claim the word; I call it democratic individualism, because it means the greatest possible distribution of economic power and function consistent with efficient production.
THE REPUBLIC OF MEGAPHON
Persons of the Dialogue:
Socrates.
Chærephon.
Megaphon.
Scene: At first a street in the Metropolis,[5] and afterward the house of Megaphon.[6]
Time: Year 4 of Olympiad 25 after American Independence.
The narrator and leading person of the dialogue is Socrates.