Page:Bierce - Collected Works - Volume 09.djvu/42

38 but a patient to be restrained. He is sick. You cannot cure him; it is useless to say to him: "Thou ailest here and there"; it is useless to say anything to him but " Thou shalt not." His unreason is what he is a socialist with. That, too, is the cause of his inefficiency in the competitions of life, for which, naturally, he would substitute something " more nearly to the heart's desire"— an order of things in which all would share the rewards of efficiency. Always it is the incapable who most loudly preaches the gospel of Equality and Fraternity — which, being interpreted, means stand and deliver and look pleasant about it. In the Cave of Adullam the credentialing shibboleth is " Love me, damn you, as I love myself."

A distinguishing feature of socialism as we have the happiness to know it in this country is its servitude to anarchism. In theory the two are directly antithetical. They are the North and the South Pole of political thought, leagues and leagues removed from zones of intellectual fertility. Anarchism says: "Ye shall have no law"; socialism: "Law is all that ye shall have." They "pool their issues" and make common cause, but let them succeed in their work of destruction and their warfare