The Altruist in Politics | Page 5

their own true selves, shall enjoy, if one will, a fair
abundance of the material blessings of life. Some Matthew Arnold of
the future would inevitably say of them in phase like that applied to the
Puritans of old: "They entered the prison of socialism and had the key
turned upon their spirit there for hundreds of years." Into that prison of

socialism, with broken enterprise and broken energy, as serfs under the
mastery of the State, while human personality is preferred to
unreasoning mechanism, mankind must hesitate to step. When they
shall once have entered within it, when the key shall have been turned
upon their spirit and have confined them in narrower straits than even
Puritanism could have done, it will be left for them to find, in their
blind obedience and passive submission, the recompense for the
singleness of character, the foresight, and the energy, that they have left
behind them.
In almost every phase of life, this doctrine of political altruists is
equally impracticable and pernicious. In its social results, it involves
the substitution of the community in the family's present position. In its
political aspects, it involves the absolute dominion of the State over the
actions and property of its subjects. Thus, though claiming to be an
exaltation of the so-called natural rights of liberty and equality, it is in
reality their emphatic debasement. It teaches that thoughtless docility is
a recompense for stunted enterprise. It magnifies material good at the
cost of every rational endowment. It inculcates a self-denial that must
result in dwarfing the individual to a mere instrument in the hands of
the State for the benefit of his fellows. No such organization of
society-no organization that fails to take note of the fact that man must
have scope for the exercise and development of his faculties-no such
organization of society can ever reach a permanent success. However
beneficent its motives, the hypothesis with which it starts can never be
realized. The aphorism of Emerson, "Churches have been built, not
upon principles, but upon tropes," is as true in the field of politics as it
is in the field of religion. In a like figurative spirit, the followers of
communism have reared their edifice; and, looking back upon the
finished structure, seeking to discern the base on which it rests, the
critic finds, not principles, but tropes. The builders have appealed to a
future that has no warrant in the past; and fixing their gaze upon the
distant dreamland, captivated by the vision there beheld, entranced by
its ideal effulgence, their eyes were blinded to the real conditions of the
human problem they had set before them. Their enemies have not been
slow to note such weakness and mistake; and perhaps it may serve to
clear up misconceptions, perhaps it may serve to lessen cant and open
the way for fresh and vigorous thought, if we shall once convince

ourselves that altruism cannot be the rule of life; that its logical result is
the dwarfing of the individual man; and that not by the death of human
personality can we hope to banish the evils of our day, and to realize
the ideal of all existence, a nobler or purer life.

End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of "The Altruist in Politics"

The Altruist in Politics

from http://www.dertz.in/