Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/15

Rh of opinion in this country to see what havoc would be played with our critics if we were to apply such a perverted logic to them and their creeds.

Socialism is the creed of those who, recognising that the community exists for the improvement of the individual and for the maintenance of liberty, and that the control of the economic circumstances of life means the control of life itself, seek to build up a social organisation which will include in its activities the management of those economic instruments such as land and industrial capital that cannot be left safely in the hands of individuals. This is Socialism. It is an application of mutual aid to polities and economics. And the Socialist end is liberty, the liberty of which Kant thought when he proclaimed that every man should be regarded as an end in himself and not as a means to another man’s end. The means and the end cannot be separated. Socialism proposes a change in social mechanism, but justifies it as a means of extending human liberty. Social organisation is the condition, not the antithesis, of individual liberty.

Round this conception of the State and community, of mutual aid and of social evolution, many interests cluster. It is like a city towards which roads run from all points of the compass—a pilgrims' way for the devout, a trade route for the merchant, a bridle path for the philosopher; and so we have many aspects of Socialism. We have, for instance, the Independent Labour Party