Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/105

 Rh It has been lost sight of, and the people who live there now have never even heard its name. All the other similar experiments have died too, not because, as their hostile critics are so fond of assuring us, human nature could not stand them, but because their sociological method was wrong.

There is another difference between the two phases of the Socialist movement, which is an aspect of the one I have been explaining. The old, with the exception of Saint-Simonianism, saw social regeneration coming through the commune, the new sees it coming through the state. In this respect, all the error is not with the old. We shall have no Fourier Phalansteries, but no Socialist movement can now exist without a programme of municipalisation. The state is not only the government at Whitehall. It is the city, the town, the village, the family as well. That part of utopian Socialism is being refitted into the modern movement.

The weakness of the utopian method became very evident to a generation engaged in political conflict. Both France and Germany had to deal with unpopular governments, and England had to go through the long Reform agitation so that democracy might take the place of Family rule. Only America, with its wide unsettled plains, its slack social organisation and untrammelled freedom, was in a position to offer even a temporary success to utopianism. The political movement in Europe impinged upon the Socialist movement, changed its character, hardened its