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
The Socialist's remedy for this squalid state of affairs is plain and
simple. Medicine is a public service, an honourable devotion; it
should no more be a matter of profit-making than the food-supply
service or the house-supply service--or salvation. It should be a part
of the organization of a civilized State to have a Public Health
service of well-paid, highly-educated men distributed over the country
and closely correlated with public research departments and a reserve
of specialists, who would be as ready and eager to face dangers and to
sacrifice themselves for honour and social necessity as soldiers or
sailors. I believe every honourable man in the medical profession
under forty now would rather it were so. It is, indeed, a transition
from private enterprise to public organization that is already
beginning. We have the first intimation of the change in the
appearance of the medical officer of health, underpaid, overworked and
powerless though he is at the present time. It cannot be long before
the manifest absurdity of our present conditions begins a process of
socialization of the medical profession entirely analogous to that
which has changed three-fourths of the teachers in Great Britain from
private adventurers to public servants in the last forty years.
And that is the aim of Socialism all along the line; to convert one
public service after another from a chaotic profit-scramble of
proprietors amidst a mass of sweated employees into a secure and
disciplined service, in which every man will work for honour,
promotion, achievement and the commonweal.
I write a "secure and disciplined service," and I intend by that not
simply an exterior but an interior discipline. Let us have done with
this unnatural theory that men may submit unreservedly to the guidance
of "self-interest." Self-interest never took a man or a community to
any other end than damnation. For all services there is necessary a
code of honour and devotion which a man must set up for himself and
obey, to which he must subordinate a number of his impulses. The must
is seconded by an internal imperative. Men and women _want_ to have a
code of honour. In the army, for example, there is among the officers
particularly, a tradition of courage, cleanliness and good form, more
imperative than any law; in the little band of men who have given the
world all that we mean by science, the little host of volunteers and
underpaid workers who have achieved the triumphs of research, there is
a tradition of self-abnegation and of an immense, painstaking,
self-forgetful veracity. These traditions work. They add something to
the worth of every man who comes under them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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