New worlds for old: A plain account of modern socialismWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
New worlds for old: A plain account of modern socialism
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Socialism
"Observe how private enterprise supplies the streets with
milk. At 7.30 a milk cart comes lumbering along and delivers
milk at one house and away again. Half-an-hour later another
milk cart arrives and delivers milk, first on this side of the
street and then on that, until seven houses have been
supplied, and then he departs. During the next three or four
hours four other milk carts put in an appearance at varying
intervals, supplying a house here and another there, until
finally, as it draws towards noon, their task is accomplished
and the street supplied with milk.
"The time actually occupied by one and another of these
distributors of milk makes in all about an hour and forty
minutes, six men and six horses and carts being required for
the purpose, and these equipages rattle along one after the
other, all over the district, through the greater part of the
day, in the same erratic and extraordinary manner."
§ 4.
Our imaginary visitor would probably quite fail to grasp the reasons
why we do not forthwith shake off this obstructive and harmful idea of
Private Ownership, dispossess our Landowners and so forth as gently as
possible, and set to work upon collective housing and the rest of it.
And so he would "exit wondering."
But that would be only the opening of the real argument. A competent
Anti-Socialist of a more terrestrial experience would have a great
many very effectual and very sound considerations to advance in
defence of the present system.
He might urge that our present way of doing things, though it was
sometimes almost as wasteful as Nature when fresh spawn or pollen
germs are scattered, was in many ways singularly congenial to the
infirmities of humanity. The idea of property is a spontaneous product
of the mortal mind; children develop it in the nursery, and are
passionately alive to the difference of _meum_ and _tuum_, and its
extension to land, subterranean products and wild free things, even if
it is under analysis a little unreasonable, was at least singularly
acceptable to humanity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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