[10] I am careful to use the word "community" and not the word "state," for state ownership is not Socialism. The Prussian State stands for state ownership, and even Mr. Roosevelt would not characterize the Prussian Government as Socialistic.
Michaelangelo has said that sculpture is the art of chipping off superfluous stone. The sculptor sees a statue in every block. This is what Whistler used to call the "divine art of seeing." The sculptor's task is to remove those parts of the block that hide the statue from the layman's eye. So the Socialist sees the coöperative commonwealth imprisoned within the huge, rough, cruel mass that we call modern civilization, and his task is to remove from the beautiful form he sees the errors which mask it from the view of the unenlightened. If we can but remove these errors our task is in great part accomplished; and the first of these errors is that which confounds Socialism with Anarchism.
Nothing is more unjustified than the confusion which exists in people's minds between Anarchism and Socialism. This confusion is not altogether unnatural, for Socialism and Anarchism have one great feature in common--both express discontent with existing conditions. The remedies, however, propounded by the Anarchists for evil conditions and those propounded by Socialists are contradictorily opposite. They are so opposite that the bourgeois turns out to be more nearly associated with the Anarchist than the Socialist is.
The theory upon which our present economic and political conditions are founded is that the less government interferes with the individual's action, the better. This theory may be said to have taken its start at the period of the French Revolution, and is generally connected in the minds of English-speaking people with Adam Smith, the Manchester School of _laissez faire_, the earlier works of John Stuart Mill, and all the works of Herbert Spencer. When, however, the pernicious consequences of allowing every individual to do as he chose with his own became felt, as for example in the poisoning of rivers by allowing every factory to pour its waste into them; and in degeneration of the race through unlimited exploitation of women and children in factories and mines, governments all over the world have been obliged as measures of self-defence to enact laws limiting individual action. The individualism of the beginning of last century has been gradually leading to the Socialism of to-day, Socialism being, among other things, an intelligent limitation of the abuse of property in accordance with a preconceived plan, instead of spasmodic limitation of the abuse of property forced upon us by the pernicious consequences thereof, often creating new abuses as bad as those suppressed.[12] While therefore the Socialist asks that the functions of government be extended sufficiently to secure to every man the greatest amount of liberty, and the bourgeois on the contrary demands that there shall be the least amount of government consistent with the protection of property and life, the Anarchist asks that there shall be no government at all. The bourgeois, therefore, is closer to the Anarchist than the Socialist is--in fact he stands between the two.
