26
THE DIAGNOSTIC OF SOCIALISM
WE have now disposed of the only common objections to equal division of income not dealt with in our earlier examination of the various ways in which income is or might be unequally divided. And we have done the whole business without bothering over what the Socialists say, or quoting any of their books. You see how any intelligent woman, sitting down to decide for herself how the national income should be distributed, and without having ever heard the word Socialism or read a line by any Socialist writer, may be driven by her own common sense and knowledge of the world to the conclusion that the equal plan is the only permanent and prosperous one possible in a free community. If you could find a better way out of our present confusion and misery for us, you would be hailed as one of the greatest of discoverers.
“And if I cannot,” you will say, “I suppose you will tell me I must join the Socialists!”
Dear lady: have you ever read St Augustine? If you have, you will remember that he had to admit that the early Christians were a very mixed lot, and that some of them were more addicted to blackening their wives’ eyes for tempting them, and wrecking the temples of the pagans, than to carrying out the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount. Indeed you must have noticed that we modern Christians are still a very mixed lot, and that it is necessary to hang a certain number of us every year for our country’s good. Now I will be as frank as St Augustine, and admit that the professed Socialists are also a very mixed lot, and that if joining them meant inviting them indiscriminately to tea I should strongly advise you not to do it, as they are just like other people, which means that some of them steal spoons when they get the chance. The nice ones are very nice; the general run are no worse than their neighbors; and the undesirable ones include some of the most thoroughpaced rascals you could meet anywhere. But what better can you expect from any political party you could join? You are, I hope, on the side of the angels; but you cannot join them until you die; and in the meantime you must put up with mere Conservatives, Liberals, Socialists, Protestants, Catholics, Dissenters, and other groups of mortal women and men, very mixed lots all of them, so that when you join them you have to pick your company just as carefully as if they had no labels and were entire strangers to you. Carlyle lumped them all as mostly fools; and who can deny that, on the whole, they deserve it?
But, after all, you are an Intelligent Woman, and know this as well as I do. What you may be a little less prepared for is that there are a great many people who call themselves Socialists who do not clearly and thoroughly know what Socialism is, and would be shocked and horrified if you told them that you were in favor of dividing-up the income of the country equally between everybody, making no distinction between lords and laborers, babies in arms and able-bodied adults, drunkards and teetotallers, archbishops and sextons, sinners and saints. They would assure you that all this is a mere ignorant delusion of the man in the street, and that no educated Socialist believes such crazy nonsense. What they want, they will tell you, is equality of opportunity, by which I suppose they mean that Capitalism will not matter if everyone has an equal opportunity of becoming a Capitalist, though how that equality of opportunity can be established without equality of income they cannot explain. Equality of opportunity is impossible. Give your son a fountain pen and a ream of paper, and tell him that he now has an equal opportunity with me of writing plays, and see what he will say to you! Do not let yourself be deceived by such phrases, or by protestations that you need not fear Socialism because it does not really mean Socialism. It does; and Socialism means equality of income and nothing else. The other things are only its conditions or its consequences.
You may, if you have a taste that way, read all the books that have been written to explain Socialism. You can study the Utopian Socialism of Sir Thomas More, the Theocratic Socialism of the Incas, the speculations of Saint Simon, the Communism of Fourier and Robert Owen, the so-called Scientific Socialism of Karl Marx, the Christian Socialism of Canon Kingsley and the Rev. F. D. Maurice, William Morris’s News from Nowhere (a masterpiece of literary art which you should read anyhow), the Constitutional Socialism of Sidney and Beatrice Webb and of the highly respectable Fabian Society, and several fancy Socialisms preached by young men who have not yet had time to become celebrated. But clever as they all are, if they do not mean equality of income they mean nothing that will save civilization. The rule that subsistence comes first and virtue afterwards is as old as Aristotle and as new as this book. The Communism of Christ, of Plato, and of the great religious orders, all take equality in material subsistence for granted as the first condition of establishing the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Whoever has reached this conclusion, by whatever path, is a Socialist; and whoever has not reached it is no Socialist, though he or she may profess Socialism or Communism in passionate harangues from one end of the country to the other, and even suffer martyrdom for it.
So now you know, whether you agree with it or not, exactly what Socialism is, and why it is advocated so widely by thoughtful and experienced people in all classes. Also, you can distinguish between the genuine Socialists, and the curious collection of Anarchists, Syndicalists, Nationalists, Radicals, and malcontents of all sorts who are ignorantly classed as Socialists or Communists or Bolshevists because they are all hostile to the existing state of things, as well as the professional politicians, or Careerists, who are deserting Liberalism for Labor because they think the Liberal ship is sinking. And you are qualified to take at its proper value the nonsense that is talked and written every day by anti-Socialist politicians and journalists who have never given five minutes serious thought to the subject, and who trot round imaginary Bolshies as boys trot round Guys on the fifth of November.