"Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits--and then Remold it nearer to the Heart's Desire!"
From that spirit only vain dreams and fantastic vagaries can ever come. What we must bear in mind is that the social fabric of to-morrow, like that of yesterday, whose ruins we contemplate to-day, will not spring up, complete, in response to our will, but will grow out of social experience and needs.
One of the greatest and most lamentable errors in connection with the propaganda of modern Socialism has been the assumption of its friends, in many instances, and its foes, in most instances, that Socialism and Individualism are entirely antithetical concepts. Infinite confusion has been caused by setting the two against each other. Society consists of an aggregation of individuals, but it is something more than that in just the same sense as a house is something more than an aggregation of bricks. It is an organism, though as yet an imperfectly developed one. While the units of which it is composed have distinct and independent lives within certain limits, they are, outside of those limits, interdependent and inter-related. Man is governed by two great forces. On the one hand, he is essentially an egoist, ever striving to attain individual freedom; on the other hand, he is a social animal, ever seeking association and avoiding isolation. This duality expresses itself in the life of society. There is a struggle between its members motived by the desire for individual expression and gain; and, alongside of it, a sense of solidarity, a movement to mutual, reciprocal relations, motived by the gregarian instinct. All social life is necessarily an oscillation between these two motives. The social problem in its last analysis is nothing more than the problem of combining and harmonizing social and individual interests and actions springing therefrom.
In dealing with this social problem, the problem of how to secure harmony of social and individual interests and actions, it is necessary first of all to recognize that both motives are equally important and necessary agents of human progress. The idea largely prevails that Socialists ignore the individual motive and consider only the social motive, just as the ultra-individualists have erred in an opposite discrimination. The Socialist ideal has been conceived to be a great bureaucracy. Mr. Anstey gave humorous and vivid expression to this idea in _Punch_ some years ago, when he represented the citizens of the Socialist state as being all clothed alike, known only by numbers, strangers to all the joys of family life, plodding through their allotted tasks under a race of hated bureaucrats, and having the solace of chewing gum in their leisure time as a specially paternal provision. Some such mental picture must have inspired Herbert Spencer's "Coming Slavery," and it must be confessed that the early forms of Socialism which consisted mainly of detailed plans of coöperative commonwealths afforded some excuse for the idea. Most intelligent Socialists, if called upon to choose between them, would probably prefer to live in Thibet under a personal despotism, rather than under the hierarchies of most of the imaginary commonwealths which Utopian Socialists have depicted.