Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1837-1901; Liberalism -- Great Britain
Socialism so conceived has in essentials nothing to do with
democracy or with liberty. It is a scheme of the organization of life by
the superior person, who will decide for each man how he should work,
how he should live, and indeed, with the aid of the Eugenist, whether he
should live at all or whether he has any business to be born. At any
rate, if he ought not to have been born--if, that is, he comes of a
stock whose qualities are not approved--the Samurai will take care that
he does not perpetuate his race.
Now the average Liberal might have more sympathy with this view of life
if he did not feel that for his part he is just a very ordinary man. He
is quite sure that he cannot manage the lives of other people for them.
He finds it enough to manage his own. But with the leave of the
Superior he would rather do this in his own way than in the way of
another, whose way may be much wiser but is not his. He would rather
marry the woman of his own choice, than the one who would be sure to
bring forth children of the standard type. He does not want to be
standardized. He does not conceive himself as essentially an item in a
census return. He does not want the standard clothes or the standard
food, he wants the clothes which he finds comfortable and the food which
he likes. With this unregenerate Adam in him, I fear that the Liberalism
that is also within him is quite ready to make terms. Indeed, it incites
him to go still further. It bids him consider that other men are, on the
whole, very like himself and look on life in much the same way, and when
it speaks within him of social duty it encourages him to aim not at a
position of superiority which will enable him to govern his fellow
creatures for their own good, but at a spirit of comradeship in which he
will stand shoulder to shoulder with them on behalf of common aims.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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