SOCIALISM.

Temuka Leader, Volume I, Issue 73, 28 August 1878, Page 3

SOCIALISM.

(From the ‘ Saturday Review.’

What is Socialism ? If to use one hard word can make another hard word clearer, ii is the opposite of Individualism. We may conceive society as an arrangement by which each individual is left to do the best he can for himself under such an amount of protection against disorder, as the union of men in a political body implies. We may also conceive society as an arrangement in which the unit is lost in the whole ; in which each person has his place in the community, is provided for by it, and must work and live in its interests, and not in his own. The first

theory is that of the strict political economists. The latter is the theory of the strict Socialists. To the former set of theorists it seems monstrous that a man shoul.l not have the place among his neighbours for which he honestly strives. To the latter it seems monstrous that any one should he left out in the cold, and that his neighbours should not care for him enough to see that he has a tolerable existence. Historically, all early communities are socialistic. Property belongs to the tribe—not to the individual. It is only by having a recognized place in a community that the individual has any existence better than that of a slave or a hunted animal. Gradually, and by a process which does not admit of accurate description, the property and rights of the individuals emerge. So far as experience is a guide, this emergence of the individual is the indispensable condition of civilisation. The less society is advanced the more there is of socialism ; the more society is advanced the more there is of individualism. But human societies do not go forward in a straight line. There are cataclysms such as that of the irruption of the barbarians and the introduction of Christianity into the Roman Empire. Society becomes more simple, for the elements of a complete civilisation are wanting or immature. Socialism in its turn comes to the front. We have monasteries, guilds, fraternities of all kinds, religious and civil. Then, if progress is once more possible, the individual becomes again prominent. Each man makes his future as he can ; but Socialism does not disappear, and it can never altogether disappear where Christianity prevails, _ in however nominal a form, for Christianity is the corrective of individualism. The creed which started with a community of goods, and preaches as the first, or almost the first, of its tenets the love of each man’s neighbour, can never altogether harmonise with the rude forcible prominence of the individual. The treasure of the Christian is in Heaven ; his mission is to bear the burden of others. To him the cry of suffering humanity can never be a matter of indifference. He can never think it the end of all things that a man should make by efforts, however honest, a big fortune and leave it to his children. The Christians who belong to a civilized world accept civilization, and with civiliza. tion all its conditions and consequences ; and so far as is known to us at present, the prominence of the individual and the sanctity of the property of the individual are among the necessary conditions of civilization. But the influence of Socialism is never extinct. It is always working in ways both good and bad, and civilization finds it at once necessary to accept what is good in Socialism and hard to exclude what is bad. The Poor-laws are nothing more than a piece of Socialism, and in England we know how difficult it is to prevent the operation of the Poor-laws from becoming mischevious. What, again, is Protection but a form of mistaken kindness 1 The consumer, who is not seen, is sacrificed to the producer, who is seen. The journal that advocates the re-imposition of the duties on iron in Germany might be described, without much straining of criticism, as a Socialist publication. While duties are imposed for the sake of revenue only, they are merely a means of preserving the order which is necessary that the exertions of individuals may bring forth tlieir fruits. But directly they are imposed in order that certain industries may flourish—that is, that one portion of a society may thrive at the expense of another portion of that society, so that the many consumers may from kindness bear the burdens of the few producers—Socialism is introduced. The French Empire was Socialist when it taxed France to find work for the artisans of Paris; and the German Government was leaning to Socialism when it coquetted with the followers of Lassale in order to win the favour of the mob in its struggle with the bourgeoisie. The question of the day is not whether there shall not be some Socialism—for some Socialism is inevitable —but how much there shall be., It seems a very rude method of answering the question to leave it the police to decide it. Socialism is the natural creed of the babes of this world, of ardent,' loving souls who think that everything could be put right if everyone would but altogether change, and if men lived altogether for one another. But there are babes and babes, and the Socialism which appeals to the babes of a higher class, also appeals to the babes of a lower class, to those who are just educated enough to be really ignorant, who hate the society in which they find themselves, and who think they are entitled to a much better lot on earth than is given them. Socialism is to such as these a mere decomposing force. It gives them an excuse for breaking the bonds which tie them to the order of things that exists around them. Babes in a state of babyish revolt are not very edifying specimens of humanity, but the worst types of every set of men are unpleasant. A roaring, conceited, shallow, Socialist demagogue is a weariness to the flesh, hut so likewise is that perverted flower of individualism, the pampered, blatant, self-opinionated grocer. And when men of feeling and genius have surveyed modern society there has been amongst them a constant leaning to the Socialist side. If the writings of Socialists incite men to commit desperate legal offences, to defile themselves with inventing malicious libels, or to wander into the dangerous paths of treason or sedition, the writers ought to be punished ; but then they would hot be punished simply as Socialists. A man who thinks that Socialism is the cure for the evils of modern society is, we think, altogether in error; but he ought to be confuted, not crushed. What is meant by a Socialist work, if the latest publication of M. de Laveleye, in which an imitation of the . Russian Mir is advocated as the cure for the social miseries of the West, is not a Socialist work? Discussion would, we think, show that all artificial revivals are doomed to fail, and that modern Socialism is in a great measure only the artificial revival of what used to obtain in early communities. But there is nothing wicked in preaching such a revival any more than there is in inviting Frenchmen to believe that Englishmen like, and that all other men ought to like, to live in the queer red complicated houses, with win-dow-panes the size of watch-glasses, which are offered as the acme of English taste to those who visit the Paris Exhibition. Artificial revivals are one of the conspicuous hobbies of the day, and they may be let to go the way in which all such things are apt to go.