Part 15 (1/2)

Under Socialism, with the extension of the educational process it contemplates, universities and colleges must become the most prominent of facts; nearly every one will have that feeling for some such place which now one finds in a Trinity man for Trinity; the sort of feeling that sent the last thoughts of Cecil Rhodes back to Oriel. Everywhere, balanced against the Town Hall or the Parliament House, will be the great university buildings and art museums, the lecture halls open to all comers, the great noiseless libraries, the book exhibitions and book and pamphlet stores, keenly criticized, keenly used, will teem with unhurrying, incessant, creative activities.

And all this immense publicly sustained organization will be doing greatly and finely what now our scattered line of Socialist propagandists is doing under every disadvantage, that is to say it will be developing and sustaining the social self-consciousness, the collective sense of the State.

-- 5.

I am naturally preoccupied with the Mind of that Civilized State we seek to make; because my work lies in this department. But while the writer, the publisher and printer, the bookseller and librarian, and teacher and preacher must chiefly direct himself to developing this great organized mind and intention in the world, other sorts of men will be concerned with parallel aspects of the Socialist synthesis.

The medical worker or the medical investigator will be building up the body of a new generation, the Body of the Civilized State, and he will be doing all he can not simply as an individual, but as a citizen, to _organize_ his services of cure and prevention, of hygiene and selection. And the specialized man of science--he will be concerned with his own special synthesis, the Knowledge of the Civilized State, whether he measure crystals or stain microtome sections or count stars. A great and growing mult.i.tude of men will be working out the Apparatus of the Civilized State; the students of transit and housing, the engineers in their incessantly increasing variety, the miners and geologists estimating the world's resources in metals and minerals, the mechanical inventors perpetually economizing force. The scientific agriculturist, again, will be studying the food supply of the world as a whole, and how it may be increased and distributed and economized.

And to the student of law comes the task of rephrasing his intricate and often quite beautiful science in relation to the new social a.s.sumptions we have laid down. All these and a hundred other aspects are integral to the wide project of Constructive Socialism as it shapes itself now.

And to the man or woman who looks at these issues not as one specialized in relation to some constructive calling but as a common citizen, a mere human being eager to make and do from the standpoint of personal liberty and personal affections, the appeal of this great constructive project is equally strong. You want security and liberty!

Here it is, safe from the greed of trust and landlord; here is investment with absolute a.s.surance and trading with absolute justice; this is the only safe way to build your own house in perfect security, to make your own garden safe for yourself and for your children's children, the only way in which you can link a hundred million kindred wills in loyal co-operation with your own, and that is to do it not for yourself alone and for your children alone, but for all the world--all the world doing it also for you--to join yourself to this great making of a permanent well-being for mankind.

And here, finally, let me set out a sort of programme of Constructive Socialism, as it seems to be shaping itself in the minds of contemporary Socialists out of the Fabianism of the eighties and nineties, in order that the reader may be able to measure this fuller and completer proposition against the earlier Administrative Socialism whose propositions are set out in Chapter XI., -- 1. All those are incorporated in this that follows--there is no contradiction whatever between them, but there is amplification; new elements are taken into consideration, once disregarded difficulties have been faced and partially resolved.

First, then, the Constructive Socialist has to do whatever lies in his power towards _the enrichment of the Socialist idea_. He has to give whatever gifts he has as artist, as writer, as maker of any sort to increasing and refining the conception of civilized life. He has to embody and make real the State and the City. And the Socialist idea, constantly restated, refreshed and elaborated, has to be made a part of the common circle of ideas; has to be grasped and felt and a.s.similated by the whole ma.s.s of mankind, has to be made the basis of each individual's private morality. That mental work is the primary, most essential function of Constructive Socialism.

And next, Constructive Socialism has in every country to direct its energies and attention to _political reform_, to the scientific reconstruction of our representative and administrative machinery so as to give power and real expression to the developing collective mind of the community, and to remove the obstructions to Socialization that are inevitable where inst.i.tutions stand for ”interests” or have fallen under the sway of aggressive private property or of narrowly organized cla.s.ses. Governing and representative bodies, advisory and investigatory organizations of a liberal and responsive type have to be built up, bodies that shall be really capable of the immense administrative duties the secular abolition of the great bulk of private owners.h.i.+p will devolve upon them.

Thirdly, the constructive Socialist sets himself to forward _the resumption of the land by the community_, by increased control, by taxation, by death duties, by purchase and by partially compensated confiscation as circ.u.mstances may render advisable, and so to make the munic.i.p.ality the sole landlord in the reorganized world.

And meanwhile the constructive Socialist goes on also with the work of _socializing the main public services_, by transferring them steadily from private enterprise to munic.i.p.al and State control, by working steadily for such transfers and by opposing every party and every organization that does not set its face resolutely against the private exploitation of new needs and services.

There are four distinct systems of public service which could very conveniently be organized under collective owners.h.i.+p and control now, and each can be attacked independently of the others. There is first the need of public educational machinery, and by education I mean not simply elementary education, but the equally vital need for great colleges not only to teach and study technical arts and useful sciences, but also to enlarge learning and sustain philosophical and literary work. A civilized community is impossible without great public libraries, public museums, public art schools, without public honour and support for contemporary thought and literature, and all these things the constructive Socialist may forward at a hundred points.

Then next there is the need and opportunity of organizing the whole community in relation to health, the collective development of hospitals, medical aid, public sanitation, child welfare, into one great loyal and efficient public service. This, too, may be pushed forward either as part of the general Socialist movement or independently as a thing in itself by those who may find the whole Socialist proposition unacceptable or inconvenient.

A third system of interests upon which practical work may be done at the present time lies in the complex interdependent developments of transit and housing, questions that lock up inextricably with the problem of re-planning our local government areas. Here, too, the whole world is beginning to realize more and more clearly that private enterprise is wasteful and socially disastrous, that collective control, collective management, and so on to collective enterprise and owners.h.i.+p of building-land, houses, railways, tramways and omnibuses, give the only way of escape from an endless drifting entanglement and congestion of our mobile modern population.

The fourth department of economic activity in which collectivism is developing, and in which the constructive Socialist will find enormous scope for work, is in connection with the more generalized forms of public trading, and especially with the production, handling and supply of food and minerals. When the lagging enterprise of agriculture needs to be supplemented by endowed educational machinery, agricultural colleges and the like; when the feeble intellectual initiative of the private adventure miner and manufacturer necessitates a London ”Charlottenburg,” it must be manifest that State initiative has altogether out-distanced the possibilities of private effort, and that the next step to the public authority instructing men how to farm, prepare food, run dairies, manage mines and distribute minerals, is to cut out the pedagogic middleman and undertake the work itself. The State education of the expert for private consumption (such as we see at the Royal School of Mines) is surely too ridiculous a sacrifice of the community to private property to continue at that.

The further inevitable line of advance is the transfer from private to public hands by purchase, by competing organizations or what not, of all those great services, just as rapidly as the increasing capacity and experience of the public authority permits.

This briefly is the work and method of Constructive Socialism to-day.

Under one or other head it can utilize almost every sort of capacity and every type of opportunity. It refuses no one who will serve it. It is no narrow doctrinaire cult. It does not seek the best of an argument, but the best of a world. Its worst enemies are those foolish and litigious advocates who antagonize and estrange every development of human Good Will that does not pay tribute to their vanity in open acquiescence. Its most loyal servants, its most effectual helpers on the side of art, invention and public organization and political reconstruction, may be men who will never adopt the Socialist name.

CHAPTER XIV

SOME ARGUMENTS _AD HOMINEM_

-- 1.

Before I conclude this compact exposition of modern Socialism, it is reasonable that the reader should ask for some little help in figuring to himself this new world at which we Socialists aim.

”I see the justice of much of the Socialist position,” he will say, ”and the soundness of many of your generalizations. But it still seems to remain--generalizations; and I feel the need of getting it into my mind as something concrete and real. What will the world be _like_ when its state is really a Socialist one? That's my difficulty.”

The full answer to that would be another book. I myself have tried to render my own personal dream in a book called _A Modern Utopia_,[26]