The Soul of Man Under Socialism | Page 7

in
morals and in life is wrong. Through the streets of Jerusalem at the
present day crawls one who is mad and carries a wooden cross on his
shoulders. He is a symbol of the lives that are marred by imitation.
Father Damien was Christlike when he went out to live with the lepers,
because in such service he realised fully what was best in him. But he
was not more Christlike than Wagner when he realised his soul in
music; or than Shelley, when he realised his soul in song. There is no
one type for man. There are as many perfections as there are imperfect
men. And while to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be
free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at

all.
Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to. As a
natural result the State must give up all idea of government. It must
give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries before
Christ, there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there is no such
thing as governing mankind. All modes of government are failures.
Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was
probably made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many,
and ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of
democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the
people by the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say
that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades
those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.
When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect,
by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and
Individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount of
kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully
demoralising. People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible
pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a
sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that
they are probably thinking other people's thoughts, living by other
people's standards, wearing practically what one may call other people's
second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment.
'He who would be free,' says a fine thinker, 'must not conform.' And
authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of
over-fed barbarism amongst us.
With authority, punishment will pass away. This will be a great gain--a
gain, in fact, of incalculable value. As one reads history, not in the
expurgated editions written for school-boys and passmen, but in the
original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the
crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the
good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by
the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occurrence of
crime. It obviously follows that the more punishment is inflicted the
more crime is produced, and most modern legislation has clearly
recognised this, and has made it its task to diminish punishment as far
as it thinks it can. Wherever it has really diminished it, the results have

always been extremely good. The less punishment, the less crime.
When there is no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or,
if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form of
dementia, to be cured by care and kindness. For what are called
criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not sin, is
the parent of modern crime. That indeed is the reason why our
criminals are, as a class, so absolutely uninteresting from any
psychological point of view. They are not marvellous Macbeths and
terrible Vautrins. They are merely what ordinary, respectable,
commonplace people would be if they had not got enough to eat. When
private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no
demand for it; it will cease to exist. Of course, all crimes are not crimes
against property, though such are the crimes that the English law,
valuing what a man has more than what a man is, punishes with the
harshest and most horrible severity, if we except the crime of murder,
and regard death as worse than penal servitude, a point on which our
criminals, I believe, disagree. But though a crime may not be against
property, it may spring from the misery and rage and depression
produced by our wrong system of property-holding, and so, when that
system is abolished, will disappear. When each member of the
community has sufficient for his wants,