The Boston Anarchists, perhaps, ought not, strictly speaking, to be
included in any account of socialism, for, unlike most contemporary
anarchists, they are not socialist, but extremely individualist; but
historically, it is worth noting, Boston Anarchism is the doctrine of a
disenchanted socialist, Josiah Warren, who had lived with Robert Owen at
New Harmony, and came to the conclusion that that experiment failed
because the individual had been too much sunk in the community, and no
room was left for the play of individual interests, individual rights,
and individual responsibilities. From Owen's communism, Warren ran to
the opposite extreme, and thought it impossible to individualize things
too much. He would abolish the State, and have the work of police and
defence done by private enterprise, like any other service. He issued
some books, tried to carry out his views by practical experiment, and,
though they failed, he has still a small band of believing disciples at
Boston, who publish a newspaper called _Liberty_, but have no
organization and no importance.
Henry George and his followers, too, perhaps ought not in strictness to
be classified among socialists. He would certainly repudiate such a
classification himself, and the United Labour Party, which he founded in
1886 to promote his views by political action, expelled the socialists
from membership in 1887. His actual practical proposal is nothing more
than a narrow and illusory plan of taxation; but he puts it forward so
expressly as the keystone of a new social system, as the remedy
prescribed by economic science itself for the complete regeneration of
society and the simultaneous removal of all existing social evils, that
he is not improperly placed among Utopian socialists. Does he not
promise us a new heaven and a new earth? And if he believes the State
can call the new heaven and the new earth into being by a mere turn in
the incidence of taxation, while most other contemporary socialists
think the State must first pull down all that now is and reconstruct the
whole on a new plan, is he, on account of this greater credulity of his,
to be considered a more, and not rather a less, sober and rational
speculator than they? He wants to abolish landlordism, while they want
to abolish landlordism and all other capitalism besides; and his views
may fairly be called partial or agrarian socialism. The United Labour
Party was founded mainly to promote Mr. George's panacea of the single
tax on such land values as arise from the growth of society apart from
individual exertion; but it includes other articles in its
programme--the municipalization of the supply of water, light, and heat;
the nationalization of all money, note issue, post, telegraphs,
railways, and savings banks; reduction of the hours of labour,
prohibition of child labour, suppression of the competition of prison
labour with honest labour; sanitary inspection of houses, factories, and
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