In a sense, no doubt, the average man liked it all--the sense in which
men like to break the ice in the Serpentine for a swim. He had willed
it. He felt that when it was over it would be a good thing to have done.
But he also saw, perhaps with surprise, that there were many men who
liked it wholly, without any juggling with future and pluperfect tenses.
They liked to have their hours of rising and going to bed settled by
colonel or Soviet rather than face for themselves this distracting
problem in self-government. They liked meals which they did not choose,
and which might not be good, but which came up of themselves, in their
season, like grass. They liked quarters which they might perhaps have to
share with brethren too weak to carry their liquor and not too wise to
essay great feats of the kind, but which, anyhow, did not have to be
sought for, rented, furnished, and, on every Monday, paid for with a
separate pang. They liked, at any rate as the lesser evil, work which
was no subject of either collective or individual bargain, but came out
of the sky, like the weather, usually open to objection, but sometimes
not.
Perhaps you concluded, after a time, that there must be some
temperaments communistic or socialistic by nature, like the "souls
Christian by nature" of the theologians. You might even have suspected
that in all this wide field of dispute the most fundamental difference
is not between the intrinsic and absolute merits of the individualistic
and of the communistic State, but between two contrasted human
types--the type which is actually happiest in communal messes and
dormitories and playgrounds and forced labour and State-fixed pay in a
State-chosen career, and the type which exults in even the smallest
separate cottage and garden, as a lion rejoices in his own den; the type
which cooks its mutton with a special rapture in an exclusive oven,
however imperfect, and sallies forth rejoicing, as the bridegroom goeth
out from his chamber, to angle for the dearest market for the labour of
its hands and the cheapest for its victuals. So that the only ideal
solution might be to cut up the world, or each of its States, into two
hemispheres, as trains are divided into "non-smoking" and "smoking." A
little difficult, perhaps; but then it is difficult to make either breed
be happy in the other's paradise.
II
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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