Page:Henry Mayers Hyndman and William Morris - A Summary of the Principles of Socialism (1884).djvu/56

 production for profit continue, based upon wage-slavery below, no change for the better can be wrought. As capitalism saps all healthy social relations and reduces even the closest connection between the sexes to a mere question of bargain and sale, so it threatens to destroy the springs of all art, that is of the external beauty of life, and to reduce the world to a state of barbarism; a threat which can only be met by the demands of social order for the communising of exchange and the means of production, so that labour may be freed from the merely useless toil in which it is to a large extent at present employed, so that while machinery is used for performing labour repulsive to men, the intelligence of the workmen may be made available for the higher needs of the community, so that the greater and better part of productive labour may become a voluntary, reasonable and pleasureable exercise of the human faculties, instead of a compulsory, degrading and unhappy struggle for existence, human in nothing save its suffering, the tragedy of the battle against starvation,

How then would individuality, that unceasing cry of the bore and the dullard, be stunted by a system which should leave full play to the highest faculties of every man in return for trifling, pleasant social labour, nay, which should develope those faculties for all classes far more than they are developed to-day? Under such a system, where mankind collectively controlled their means of production, with machinery ever improving by the genius of their fellows, but used for instead of against the mass of the human race, men would at length be really free in every sense