Such a substitute for civilization, however, is the opposite of a
return to the individualism of Nature or to a primeval communism. It
presupposes the highest mastery of man over matter and social unity
among all mankind co-operating as nation-states and federations of
states.
As regards external government and law, it is the antithesis of Mr.
Carpenter's proposal that they should disappear, because they are the
travesty of inward government and order. On the contrary, I hope that
external government, animated by the general will of a social
democratic commonwealth and vested in representatives sensitively
accountable to an alert and intelligent public opinion, will appear to
my listeners not as a travesty, but as the very incarnation of that
inward government and order which every individual man must feel to be
the law of his own being unless he has lost his manhood's centrality. A
crushing indictment of Mr. Carpenter's modern movement back to Nature
is to be found in the fact that it has declined instead of advancing
during the twenty-six years since he wrote. Probably fewer persons in
England preach salvation by sandals and sunbaths to-day than did a
quarter of a century ago, while the sandals themselves and sunbaths
have become but items among the general products of industry and
governmental hygiene. The sunbath is only one of the many remedies
prescribed to the poor by doctors impanelled by the British state, and
the sandals are better made by machinery than by the hands of poetic
hermits.
But while the vision of philosophical anarchy has been fading away,
whole nations on a gigantic scale have been subjecting the power of
trusts and monopolies to the general will of the community. In America
you have changed your federal law and many of your state constitutions,
in order that the right of the common will to dictate may be
unquestioned, and that no occasion for lawless violence need ever arise
through any legal barrier to the full assertion of the mind of the
common life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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