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Typos p. 98: Communsit's [= Communist's]; p. 99: parisitism [= parasitism]; p. 118: conidtions [= conditions]; p. 121: Eurpoean [= European]
Chapter V Socialism and Communism
If a particular group manifest a disposition for war, then it is war to which they resign themselves; if it is female suffrage, then lo! Votes for Women come upon them with the certainty of the monsoon or the mistral. Nobody moves, nobody holds up a hand to ward off the approaching scourge, because everybody is either too indolent to make an effort, or too thoroughly persuaded beforehand that nothing can avail, to attempt to interfere with what he calls "the natural course of events." The scrub on a wind-swept moor offers more resistance to the elements than does modern man to his fellows' restless tinkering at the social structure; and as for the gentle fine rain which, falling athwart the fiercest blast, ultimately constrains it to abate its fury, and to die down, modern man has no knowledge of such tactics, and even Despite the enormous amount of apparent hostility aroused by the immense progress that Socialism and Communism have made since the war, it must not be supposed that with regard to them modern men are feeling any more actively indignant than they have felt towards any other impending change. The hostility, as we have pointed out, is only apparent. For, in their heart of hearts the men of the present day are just as much prepared to resign themselves to Socialism as to civil war, class war, or any other kind of social upheaval. The factor in the threatening reform which makes certain sections of the public stand as if they really meant to offer resistance, is unfortunately not their intellectual conviction that Socialism or Communism is so palpably wrong that it must be resisted at all costs; but rather the negative quality of inertia, which in this case assumes the appearance of positive resistance because, as it happens, Socialism and Communism propose to oust from positions of ease a great number of people who have not only grown accustomed to ease, but to whom life without ease presents few if any attractions. Otherwise, Socialism, Communism, Bolshevism, Nihilism who cares? They appear right because so many millions seem to believe in them. Any "ism" seems to be right to modern man, provided a sufficient number of people raise their hands in favour of it. In this sense, be he a Tory, a Conservative, or a Monarchist, modern man is essentially democratic in spirit. Moreover, in order to do this, it will not be necessary to examine the proposals of Socialism and Communism in detail, but simply to concentrate upon their basic principles, and to show how entirely untenable are the very first positions they take up. Stated in the fairest possible way, their position is as follows: The leading Socialist and Communist thinkers are men as a rule whose hearts have been moved by the spectacle of sorrow and hardship which is the lot of a large number of their fellow-creatures on earth; and they are earnestly desirous so to modify the organisation of society as to render that burden of sorrow and hardship lighter for the mass of mankind. They see all about them inequalities of the crudest kind, sharp contrasts, and abysmal chasms, and they wish to achieve greater evenness among men. Why? Not because the spectacle of mankind thus evened up will necessarily be more picturesque or more harmonious to behold; but because on the whole it will be less heartrending, less revolting, less inequitable. This element, which the Socialist and Communist detect in modern society and which they wish to eliminate because it is not human, is Violence. According to the present writer's belief this is, in a few words, a fair statement, if not the fairest possible statement, of the Socialist and Communsit's position. Assuming at all events that it is correct, it is now possible to examine it and to call attention to the amount of error it contains. For, let the Socialist and Communist say what they will, let them wish rather to substitute the word Predatoriness, or Oppression, or Exploitation, or Slavery, for the word Violence, or for the particular quality in modern society which they would fain eliminate, it does not signify much. All these words in their essence are reducible to the one notion Violence, and Violence we shall therefore name the feature that Socialists and Communists propose to remove from human communities, and which we propose now to examine. Violence as a phenomenon is not presented to us chiefly in our own societies. Where we recognise its sway to be most general and most rigorous, is in Nature herself, and all We ourselves are guilty of violence towards the lower animals, and there are few people who, upon dying a sudden death, would not betray this violence by the contents of their stomachs or intestines. Violence, therefore, constitutes no novelty to the human being. He knows of it in Nature and he knows he is guilty of it towards those lower animals which he consumes as food. At a first glance then it would appear that violence of a sort is an essential factor in all life, even in human life. The kind of violence, however, that the Socialist and Communist wish to eliminate from human society is not the violence which men perpetrate against the lower animals; though there are certainly some Socialists who would wish to eliminate that also; but chiefly the violence between man and man, This you may protest is what all societies since Moses, and even before him, have tried their utmost to suppress. To some extent this is true. Murder and assault have been prohibited by most moral codes. The kind of violence, however, that the Socialist and Communist wish to suppress is the violence that is at present tolerated by law, that receives its sanction from society at large, and that men now perpetrate with clean consciences, How does this violence chiefly arise? By means of the inequalities of human advantages. One man A finds himself by birth or by his own efforts (frequently the outcome of his endowments at birth) in possession of something that somebody else B very much requires; and before A relinquishes a particle of it, convention allows him to exact some service from B. According to the urgency of B's needs and the quality of B's gifts that service is either very strenuous or comparatively light. For instance, if A happens to be a man of rare genius, holding in his mind the secret of his country's salvation B, the country, may voluntarily offer him fabulous wealth from her own coffers to divulge his secret knowledge, and may even involve herself in a crushing debt in order to do so. Or A may be simply a producer of corn, and B an impecunious starving man begging corn of A because he needs it as food. In the latter case, short of an act of immorality While the service is being performed and B is obtaining corn from A, B who cannot pay cash for the corn, may be asked to do pretty well anything, with the gloomy alternative before him of going without corn altogether. This I take it is the meaning of the word violence in the mouth of the Socialist and Communist: it is the power that one man can exercise over another, in determining his occupation and in exacting service or else withholding food from him. The Socialist would admit that service must be exacted from all at some time or other, but he suggests that the State should exact it, so that the power may be exercised corporately, and the profit, if any, allotted, not to individuals, but to the whole body. The extent to which an element of violence adheres even to the proposition that the State should exact service and not the individual, would be an interesting speculation; for the fact that some violence still remains implicit in the proposition everybody will see at a glance. But the present writer hopes to point to other means by which violence must inevitably enter into the Socialistic State, just as forcibly as it does now into any well ordered capitalistic State. So far the Socialist's proposals appear to contain no measures for ridding human stock of its pronounced inequalities. It is, however, from inequalities that apparent injustices and violence ultimately arise. Men of great talent and men of the most miserable endowments, will continue to be born in any State, whether Socialistic or capitalistic. So long as the individual right to procreate be admitted there will continue to be pressed into the community, not only the offspring of the virtuous man, the sage, and the craftsman, but also the offspring of the knave, the mediocre and the fool. So long as the individual's right to parenthood is accepted as inviolable, society will therefore continue to be perturbed as it is now by an uninvited access of one, two or even half a dozen to a dozen, new mouths, from certain individuals, the low quality of whose accompanying bodies may be out of all proportion (in regard to the services they can render) to the high quantity of food and other supplies they can account for. New members will be forced into the community by procreation which, according to the quality of Further to elucidate this point, let two extreme examples be given: (1). A man of singularly high gifts, C by name, presses upon the community in his lifetime eight children all of which take more or less after him. Their endowments are so conspicuous that they plainly overshadow all the other higher men of the community. It happens, moreover, that the community has reached a crisis in its affairs when it urgently needs men of C's type. Obviously then C, by presenting the community with eight singularly gifted replicas of himself, has profoundly affected its life and its constitution. By elevating the standard of the administrative work, some of the whilom administrators will have been driven from office and forced to take up an inferior form of service. A perturbation will have occurred. In its ultimate analysis it will have amounted to a coercive act, an act which though tolerated by the State (assumed in this case to admit the individual's right to procreate) thus turns out to be an act of violence. It was not deliberate, or of a kind savouring of malice aforethought, but it is nevertheless an act which forces a change on the community at large, and a marked change of position on a (2) Now suppose the case of a man who is the butt of everybody's ridicule for his stubborn stupidity and intractable indolence. Suppose his condition of utter unworthiness, from the intellectual and moral point of view, to be moreover aggravated by poor health. This man, too, we presume, claiming by law the right of parenthood, forces upon the community half-a-dozen new members in the form of his offspring, who are so far like him that the competent authority can scarcely cover the cost of their clothes and food by the produce of their labours, and has to encroach upon other resources of the State in order to provide for them. Here again we have a profound perturbation, resulting from the pressing of a new set of members upon the community by the act of procreation. Nobody asked for them, nobody wanted them. But now they have come, everybody has to work a little more or a little longer in order to provide for them. In its ultimate analysis this is once more a coercive act, an act which, though tolerated by the State that admits the individual's right to parenthood, thus turns out to be an act of violence. It certainly was not deliberate, or designed particularly to harass the community; but it forces an extra burden on the social body, it is therefore tantamount to an act of violence: it is in fact an act of violence. Now here we have two extreme instances of violence entering a socialistic society against which it would appear to be impossible The act of procreation is thus an act which in the long run amounts to a means of pressing any number from one to a dozen (sometimes more) of new members upon a community, which members may, in one way or another, cause a profound perturbation of the balance of that community. The act of procreation is, therefore, an act of violence, of trespass, of invasion. The * The present writer has purposely avoided reducing the violence to an act of depredation in regard to food, air and space; although in a steadily increasing community, which is the only healthy community, surrounded by other steadily increasing communities, this aspect of the question would have to be taken into account. In such a community every baby born may rightly be said to constitute a menace to every other baby's food, air and space. Nor has any mention been made of the multiplication of people who become a burden to the rest of the community by the sheer inferiority of their physique. But again in their case provision would have to be made by the administrators of a Socialistic State, just as it is made by capitalistic States; and the parents of such physically inferior people would thus, by the act of procreation alone, have pressed a burden upon their fellow citizens which would virtually amount to an act of violence against them. Though the parents of such physically inferior people might scruple to put their hands in their fellow members' pockets for food or money, by means of their offspring they thus indirectly perpetrate a predatory act. against them. In human society the continuity of the species is secured by procreation; but since reciprocal destruction does not occur to nearly the same extent among human beings as it does among the lower animals *, in a healthy society, which is an increasing society, the balance of the community, far from fluctuating around a mean, tends to be thrown ever more seriously out with each successive generation. Thus in a healthy society, which is an increasing society, procreation is not merely a transitory but a perpetual source of violence. The present writer is not arguing that this is right or wrong; he is only trying to state a fact. Whether it be a pleasant fact, or a desirable fact, is for the moment beside the point. It is at all events a fundamental truth of life, and as such it would be idle to devise any new scheme of society in which it is not allowed for. It may be objected that the whole of a man's offspring in modern society may elude their destiny of impinging violently against that society by becoming emigrants. This appears to be forcible enough. But is not emigration in itself merely a means of postponing the act of violence by one stage? Besides, is not emigration say to the colonies possible to-day only because we happen to * There are reasons for believing that Socialists promise to make it cease altogether among human beings. It serves no purpose to revile life and the world because we happen to have lighted upon a fundamental fact that is unpleasant to our cultivated sensibilities. Life is as it is, and Nature is as it is, and no bewailing or reviling on our parts will alter them. The brave attitude, the healthy attitude, indeed the only dignified attitude, is to accept life and Nature as they are, and to endeavour to discover the most desirable method of dealing with both of them. This primary act of violence, which is procreation, cannot be cancelled out or annulled; it cannot be expunged from the essential character of existence. It must be accepted. This much, however, should be immediately understood; you cannot have at the very portals of life an act of violence, and hope to build upon it a form of society in which violence in some form, however attenuated, Starting out then with this original act of violence which is rooted in life and in Nature and enters into every form of human society willy nilly, it is obvious that its reverberations must proceed rhythmically throughout all the sections of any human community whatsoever, be its organisation what you will. Thus inequalities, apparent injustices and even bondage, appear only as the necessary ultimate repercussions of the original perturbing influence. And in every society hitherto, such regrettable repercussions of the original act of violence have always been regarded as inevitable. As a rule the authorities have, according to their lights, endeavoured to mitigate the asperity of these perturbations; but to eliminate them completely they have always known is an impossible achievement, because they are not man-made, but created by the laws of life itself. All societies hitherto appear to have recognised with varying degrees of liberality the sacredness of man's right over his procreative powers. But what a large number of recent sociological thinkers appear to have forgotten is, that since procreation and its Acquiescing in the inviolability of this right, then, the utmost society could do, was to mitigate the worst consequences of its free operation, by ordering as far as possible the union of couples, and by properly allocating the general burden of responsibility for the support of the offspring arising from these unions. Albeit no amount of order introduced into the joining of couples, could possibly place a check upon man's procreative powers when once he had fulfilled all the formalities that the State demanded; consequently, despite all its attempts to regulate the relations of the sexes, society's ultimate control over the act of procreation and its results remain more or less ineffectual, and in so far as it attempts to establish any reasonable proportion between a man's *The wisdom of ancient societies in never checking or limiting this right is now becoming more than ever apparent in the light that psycho analysis has thrown upon the disastrous effects of interfering too drastically with this function in human beings. Evidently mankind seems to have come to the conclusion fairly early in the history of civilisation that if there is one kind of interference, one kind of control or of constraint that his fellows can with difficulty brook, it is that which would presume to meddle with their right over their procreative powers. But the consequences of this attitude in regard to so vital a function as procreation should not be overlooked by shallow political thinkers and other romanticists. This consequence, which cannot be repeated too often, is that with the free operation of the right to parenthood every society hitherto has incorporated in its organisation a piece of life and nature, raw and unmitigated by any softening influence. And, having done this, it cannot hope to eliminate from its organisation that modicum of violence, harshness and inexorability which attaches to the free operation of all natural and vital laws. The lack of candour and bravery in the Socialist's and Communist's position, is that they do not refer to this basic natural element in all human societies, and furthermore that they propose a form of society in which this basic natural element is not even reckoned with. For it must be clear that to hope on such a basis to build up a social structure that will be all mutual help, mutual give and take, But this is not the only form in which the dishonesty of Socialist and Communist propaganda manifests itself. For the Socialist and Communist not only refuse to recognise the violence inherent in the consequences of the free operation of the right to parenthood, they also lay to the score of man's legislation the injustices and inequalities which are clearly the outcome of that right alone. In all societies, however wisely controlled and directed, there are certain to be thousands of malcontents. Those malcontents who owe their position of failure, obscurity, or impotence to circumstances over which no organised community ever has had or ever can have control, are however easily won over to an attack upon society, if they can be shown by unscrupulous or incompetent thinkers that their position is due, not to an essential law of life or nature, but to the peculiar conventions or rules regulating the community of which they happen to form a part. Men who are congenitally inefficient, beneath even mediocre attainments in their intelligence, their physical strength or their health, very naturally find Now nothing is easier, nevertheless, than to convince this class of malcontents that their subordinate positions and menial tasks are the result of a social rather than of a natural injustice, and the dishonesty of Communistic propaganda, consists very largely in the fact that it will not scruple to delude this class of malcontents into believing that in a perfectly realisable ideal state of society their disabilities would be removed. Nay, it goes further than that, it adds to the small list of remediable injustices which are really of man's creating, the long list of gross injustices which are the work of life and nature, and flinging the whole sum of these injustices at the head of society, leads the ignorant and the thoughtless to believe that. the grand total of the account can legitimately be charged against man and his institutions. And this brings us to the next step in the argument. So far we have seen: (a). That procreation acts as a perturbing force in society, and that in its consequences it is therefore an act of violence. (b). That tradition and recent investigation lead us to believe that it is not advisable to meddle with the individual's sacred right over his procreative powers (c). That therefore in any community where The next step in the argument is the consequence of (c) and it is that where there is violence, however slight or however carefully regulated, its results must redound with more or less severity to the disadvantage of certain individuals, that is to say, there must be someone or some group that suffers. And this appears to be another of the fundamental social truths without allowing for which it seems hopeless to set forth to rebuild society. To deny it may sound pleasant, kind, humane, charitable, and chivalrous; but it is not candid; and although to the ignorant, to the sentimental and the thoughtless, that which is pleasant frequently makes the appeal of truth itself, in the end that man or party who is not straightforward about these matters is bound to be discovered and reviled. Those therefore who wish to reform all future societies, and who wish to make it unnecessary for sufferers or suffering to exist in the world, except at the will of the legislature, can do so only in one of two ways. * Either they must close the backdoor through which the violence of nature and life enters the community -that backdoor being the free operation of the right to parenthood * Sufferers and suffering are to be understood here as of a kind which the inequalities of life and nature alone bring about not the sufferers and suffering resulting from ordinary human passions and the accidents of their manifestation: love, hate, indifference, childlessness, spinsterhood, etc.; for it is presumed that no reformer has ever been so foolish as to pretend that he could eliminate these. The suffering which, in society is the necessary outcome of the act of violence which is procreation, that suffering which is the only means of balancing this violence, does not necessarily fall on the heads of all. It selects its victims as it were with a certain caprice. And hitherto, while endeavouring to mitigate the severity of it as far as possible, society has been content to leave its incidence more or less to chance, to the blind forces which ultimately determine, as they do in nature, the fate of all individual beings. It is only in war time, when the kind of person to be sacrificed for the whole is definitely indicated, that society proceeds by legislation to select those who should suffer from those who should be spared. And even then, a certain element of chance remains over by means of which it is possible for large numbers of young men to escape the ultimate price. If, however, it is proposed to reform society so that it shall either contain no violence, or that the effects of that violence shall be annulled for the majority by legislative means, then whatever the Socialist or Communist may have to say to the contrary, this can be done only in one of two ways: (a) Either man's right to parenthood must be violated. (b) Or the section of society which is to be sacrificed to balance the original act of violence must be deliberately decided upon by legislative means. The fact that they are impossible alternatives invalidates the whole of the Socialist and Communist's position. To promise a Utopia from which inequalities and injustices will have been removed, without stating frankly that one or the other of the above alternatives is necessary, is therefore the acme of dishonesty; and in this respect the present writer has reluctantly to admit that the Socialist, Communist and Bolshevist, whether from ignorance, ineptitude or design, appear to be radically dishonest. It has been shown, however, that their dishonesty does not stop at this. In addition they fasten the few remediable injustices which are of man's own creating, on to the grosser and more flagrant injustices in modern society which are only the inevitable repercussions from the original act of violence we have been examining, and then proceed to declare that the whole sum of injustices are of man's own making. This is their greatest perfidy, their most misleading and most dexterous feat of legerdemain. The ignorant and the thoughtless are very naturally deceived, and it is always too late when they discover how clumsily and how cruelly they have been deceived. It has been pointed out that it is an indispensable portion of life and of nature which True in its repercussions it leads to some of the chief asperities of human life; but is it not accountable for most or humanity's principal joys as well? On its shadow side it may appear harsh, but seriously would we have it otherwise? And are not those who pretend that it can be otherwise merely romanticists who want all life to be the perpetual white glare of a noonday sun without any shadow? Consider, to begin with, the sanctity of the individual's right over his procreative powers. How many of humanity's finest emotions and most treasured virtues arise out of it? This is not sentiment, but psychological fact. And what does society expect to become if it succeeds in suppressing the source of these virtues and emotions? How many sober-minded men, actually faced with one of the two alternatives stated above, as the essential first measure to the establishment of a Utopia without violence or accidental suffering, would give that Utopia a second thought? There is nothing the present writer deprecates more sincerely than an appeal to the emotions alone. He is aware that in the above paragraph he has made a frank appeal to the emotions. But surely in this particular instance it is amply justified? Having made And even in its inevitable repercussions the inequalities and injustices of which so much has been said above has the free operation of the individual's right to parenthood not also immense advantages? In nature it is the violence and inexorable character of the forces at play that give life its manifold beauties and contrasts, the mountains and the valleys, the rivers and the lakes, the tableland and the gorge, the forest and the open plain. In the animal world it is the difference between the tiger and the antelope, the vulture and the hare, the lion and the jackal, that lends to life that panoramic charm of variegated virtue and adaptation to ends. While in the domain of plants it is the divergences of the oak from the shrub, of the palm from the cactus, of the poplar from the plum tree, that combine to produce that harmony and dissonance which the landscape painter converts into graphic music. This is not empty imagery and grandiloquent sentiment, it is the plainest truth. It is impossible to conceive of a society at all unless we presuppose among its members the presence of those particularly happy results of inequality which are higher men. Even the lowest forms of gregariousness the wolf To inveigh against the necessary consequences of life is not to open a "class war," as the Socialist and Communist claim to have done, but to open war against life itself; and this conclusion supplies me with the terms of my last charge against them. The Socialist and Communist do not really know their true objective; they do not really know against whom they are marching and levelling their attacks. In addition to being dishonest, therefore, they are utterly confused. It is life itself that causes the chief among the grievances that they propose to redress, and thus their description of their campaign as a class war is the outcome of a most complete misunderstanding. They are the advocates of a principle of death, or putting it more mildly, at least of a movement hostile to life, and they do not know it and never have known it. Their banners are sewn with false and meaningless devices calculated to delude only the ignorant This might prove unpopular, it might even sound less alluring than "Down with the bourgeoisie!" but at least it would be honest and might help them to achieve their real aim. The present writer does not suggest that the mass of the people of England or France understand the real errors in the Socialist and Communist's position. He does not even believe that when once these errors have been made known to them they will be able to grasp or understand them; but certainly the capacity which very large numbers of them are showing for resisting the seductive appeal of these so-called "class-war" doctrines, points to a certain instinctive insight on their part .which does them credit, and may possibly be a sign that they are moved by a vague, but none the less powerful, suspicion that all is not as golden as it glitters in the Socialistic creed, and therefore that there is still a chance for those who would win them back to a wisely controlled capitalism, and to a future in which reform rather than revolution is the general programme. Is the case against Socialism as strong as this? Is there really nothing to be said for the position that the Socialist and Communist assume? Certainly there is nothing to be said for it. Then what gives it its seductive plausibility? What is it that makes three- Those among the possessing classes who, while opposing active Socialist propaganda, yet believe in their heart of hearts that Socialism is right, are usually as confused as the Socialists and Communists themselves, and as incapable of tracing political propositions back to first principles. They make the same mistakes as the Socialists, and confound life and nature's injustices with the remediable injustices which are the outcome of human legislation, and after adding the two together charge the whole sum to the account of society or civilisation. They belong to the class of thoughtless people who are in the habit of saying in the face of every impending reform good or bad, "The thing must come"; and their attitude of forestalled acquiescence offers so little Opposition, that as a rule the thing to which they refer does come. But the reason why the claims and proposals of the Socialist and Communist succeed in displaying a certain modicum of plausibility is not because, on examination, they impel the inquirer to agreement; for, as we have seen, the more thoroughly they are investigated, the more impossible does it become to accept them; it is rather because in modern Eurpoean society certain unnecessarily gross evils which are truly the creation of man and which seem to lend a colourable warrant to the revolutionist's position, are too glaring to be overlooked. We have seen that where there is violence Now it is the first duty of rulers, as we have seen, to watch vigilantly that the violence is not of man's making, for that can be helped, but only of life's making, for that cannot be helped. The second duty of rulers, however; most certainly is to assuage as far as possible the asperities resulting from the violence that is life's making. Charles I. was an ideal monarch in this respect; not only did he suppress fraud, profiteering, and the exploitation of the poorer classes, all means by which violence of man's making breaks loose in society; but he also sheltered those whom natural disaster had overtaken. * Now the gross evils of modern European society which lend a colourable warrant to the otherwise absurd proposals of the Communist and Socialist, are the multifarious deeds of violence of man's making, that have been allowed to break loose on the community. Among those deeds of violence we may mention: (1) Sweating. (2) The act of inviting the proletariat to engage in unhealthy occupations, frequently resulting in permanent ill-health or premature death. (3) Profiteering and the turning of any form of temporary distress to advantage. * This I have demonstrated with sufficient detail else where. See my Defence of Aristocracy, Chapter IV. (5) Unwise and wasteful disposal of property after death: as for instance for the support of cranky and faddist societies, of useless and non productive people in unnecessary affluence; the endowment of institutions that have a degenerating effect on the general standard of health of the nation. (6) Class cleavage and snobbery. (7) The encouragement by the legislature of the growth of large urban centres, and the ill-health and general unwholesomeness of the poorer quarters of such centres. (8) The purveying of inferior food to the masses, and of food that is not strictly life-supporting, such as vegetable margarine, dried fruit and vegetables, adulterated beer, tinned foods of all kinds (except possibly tinned tomatoes), dirty milk and adulterated bread. (9) The lack of protection afforded to the masses against: (a) usurious money lending (a penny a week per shilling is not uncommon), (b) pollution and demoralisation through inferior and pernicious literature, (c), pollution and demoralisation through alien immigration. (10) The failure to impart to the masses by means of education any thorough grasp of any branch of knowledge which might ennoble their outlook, add dignity to their characters, and lend support to their self-esteem. In addition to all this, not a single item of which deals with any evil that is not susceptible of reform, it should be borne in mind that modern western civilisation has in some way failed so miserably to mould her values The greatest indictment of modern society is perhaps the frequency with which vulgarity and the meanest attainments in virtue and intellect achieve phenomenal material success; and since this is the outcome of values, and the laws governing commerce and industry, it is obvious that in this direction reforms must be effected, if the Communist and Socialist are to be deprived of the small amount of validity which appears to attach to their sweeping condemnation of society and civilisation. On the other hand, while we have seen that the original act of violence at the base of all society, must lead to suffering somewhere and somewhen, the characteristic about modern western civilisation which lends so much colour to the Socialist and Communist's schemes, is the frequency with which this suffering seems to be borne by people who are by no means the unworthiest in the community. The values of modern society have become so vulgar and mercenary that again and again it happens that the section of the social body which the chance play of forces selects for sacrifice, is superior to the section which is Thus it is not the suffering in modern society that lends support to the so-called class-war doctrines; for as we have seen suffering of some kind is inevitable where there is inequality and injustice; but it is the fact that the suffering in question often falls upon the most desirable members of the community, or at least upon those who are capable of the greatest virtue and the greatest industry, and this is the outcome purely of the vulgarity and coarseness of our values which are quite as susceptible to modification and reform as any other man-made feature of our lives. The fact that after all these reforms, however, there will still remain a residuum of violence in all civilisation, which it will be impossible altogether to eliminate, so long as nations recognise the individual's inviolable right to parenthood, should nevertheless be carefully remembered and reckoned with; for, both as a check upon any too romantic schemes of our own, as well as a means with which to criticise our enemies' proposals, the recollection of this unpleasant but ineluctable principle is one of the most valuable measures of caution by which it is possible for us to abide; and he who, by forgetting it, fancies he has discovered a royal road to his Utopia, will find perhaps too late that life, nature and society are not easily made the sport of false ideals and shallow fantasies, but are ruled by inexorable and frequently unpleasant laws the rigour of which it is safer to acknowledge than to ignore. |
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