Chapter VI, Doctrinal Contradictions of the Socialists.

Their Aspirations Retrogressive—Collective Ownership—Advice to Mr. Henry George—Suppression of Contracts—Suppression of Personal Decisions—Servile Labour—Organisation on the Military Type.

You Socialists wish to return to the collective proprietorship of primitive peoples, or of those people who are the slowest in their evolution. Mr. Henry George has written a book upon the nationalisation of the land. He is an American. The United States possess immense territories which they are constantly engaged in denationalising and in converting into private properties. Why does he not begin by asking his fellow-countrymen to leave some thousands of square miles of land in a state of nationalisation and go there himself and endeavour to recommence the experience which answered so ill with our Utopians in Texas? This substitution, collective for individual proprietorship, would suffice to test the retrogressive character of your ideas.

You wish to substitute authoritative arrangements for contracts; personal service for service measured by the things produced. You wish to eliminate personal initiative from economic life. Henceforth, by the laws which, according to you, are protective of labour, you wish to limit the working capacity of individuals, and to condemn to idleness the vigorous man, who, to augment his resources, is desirous of using his faculties and his powers; you wish to prohibit women from working so as to keep them in primitive subjection, under hypocritical pretexts of health and morality; you wish for the suppression of all piece-work, so as to remove all initiatory spirit and the chance of increased profit from the intelligent worker, and to reduce him to the state of a mechanical appendage to his trade; in industries you wish to suppress everything that means personal thought on his part, so as to convert him into a sort of passive piece of machinery. Into your ideal society you transport a military organisation. But this organisation involves a hierarchy, discipline, and passive obedience, and crushes all activity. Instead of competition, which is the regulator of free labour, you give as a motive power the restraints of servile labour.