Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/190

 186 the critical newspaper—especially the daily one—might be suppressed altogether in the intellectual and moral interest of the public, for there is no more melancholy spectacle to-day than the party press, with its misrepresentations, its suppressions, and its tongue in its cheek—unless it be the spectacle of those who read it and believe it.

The supposition of our critics is that the "powers that be" under Socialism will be all powerful and that, whilst remaining quite sane, they will be oppressively tyrannical. They will stamp out hostile opinion. They will not permit a whisper of criticism. They will govern like a South American president with an army at his back, with venial judges on the bench, and with political police in their communes. In other words, they will have forgotten all the world's experience of how to make governments stable, they will have ceased to appreciate the safety of free speech and of open criticism, they will have departed from the axiom that civic peace is maintained by the liberty to discuss and to grumble. One must grant this extraordinary revolution in the art and science of government, this unthinkable loss of capacity on the part of governors, before one can even conceive the objection with which I am dealing. And be it noted in the passing, when one has granted that, one has destroyed the political conditions of freedom under which alone Socialism can not only exist, but actually come into existence. My answer to the objection, therefore, is that its very concep-