The Soul of Man Under Socialism | Page 3

been made,
through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are
praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both
grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat
less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be
absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live
like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should
either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a
form of stealing. As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is
finer to take than to beg. No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty,
discontented, and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has
much in him. He is at any rate a healthy protest. As for the virtuous
poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire
them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their
birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily
stupid. I can quite understand a man accepting laws that protect private
property, and admit of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able

under those conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual
life. But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred
and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their
continuance.
However, the explanation is not really difficult to find. It is simply this.
Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a
paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really
conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other
people, and they often entirely disbelieve them. What is said by great
employers of labour against agitators is unquestionably true. Agitators
are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some
perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of
discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so
absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there
would be no advance towards civilisation. Slavery was put down in
America, not in consequence of any action on the part of the slaves, or
even any express desire on their part that they should be free. It was put
down entirely through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in
Boston and elsewhere, who were not slaves themselves, nor owners of
slaves, nor had anything to do with the question really. It was,
undoubtedly, the Abolitionists who set the torch alight, who began the
whole thing. And it is curious to note that from the slaves themselves
they received, not merely very little assistance, but hardly any
sympathy even; and when at the close of the war the slaves found
themselves free, found themselves indeed so absolutely free that they
were free to starve, many of them bitterly regretted the new state of
things. To the thinker, the most tragic fact in the whole of the French
Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen,
but that the starved peasant of the Vendee voluntarily went out to die
for the hideous cause of feudalism.
It is clear, then, that no Authoritarian Socialism will do. For while
under the present system a very large number of people can lead lives
of a certain amount of freedom and expression and happiness, under an
industrial-barrack system, or a system of economic tyranny, nobody
would be able to have any such freedom at all. It is to be regretted that
a portion of our community should be practically in slavery, but to
propose to solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is

childish. Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work. No
form of compulsion must be exercised over him. If there is, his work
will not be good for him, will not be good in itself, and will not be good
for others. And by work I simply mean activity of any kind.
I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose
that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that
each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours. Humanity
has got beyond that stage, and reserves such a form of life for the
people whom, in a very arbitrary manner, it chooses to call criminals.
But I confess that many of the socialistic views that I have come across
seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual
compulsion. Of course, authority and compulsion are out of the
question. All association must be quite voluntary. It is only in voluntary
associations that