Page:The Criterion - Volume 4.djvu/23

Rh tend to dissolve the State. For the true unity of the State is a moral unity. He points out that under communism (1) industry would be discouraged, because the natural relation between work and its reward would be upset. He saw clearly enough that the communistic principle is economically unsound, and is opposed to human nature. (2) The ‘magic of property’ would disappear from life. The loss would be not merely the loss of a selfish—though natural and universal—pleasure, for there is nothing that is more pleasant than to afford gratification or assistance to one’s friends, and this is possible only if our property is our very own’. If communism, he adds, were a wise system, it would have been put into practice by his time. It has been left for the folly of the modern world to prove the good sense of antiquity.

The sort of legislation proposed by Plato, he continues, has a plausible and philanthropic air, and makes easy converts of the sentimental, especially if its ideals are combined with attacks on the evils of society, which are represented as due to the absence of communism. ‘All these evils, however, are due not to the absence of communism but to the evil passions of human nature.’ (II., 5.) Every word of this is as exactly true to-day as when it was written; and when he tells us that disputes are commoner between partners in a joint estate than between neighbours on separate estates, we are reminded that one of the reasons of the failure of the Building Guild was the quarrelsomeness of its members. He concludes that communism is ‘impossible’—a conclusion which modern experiments have abundantly verified.

With regard to proposals to limit or equalize individual properties by law, he has some wise words. ‘Those who frame such laws should remember what they tend to forget—that a legislator who limits the amount of property should also limit the number of children clearly then he must aim not only at equalizing properties but at limiting their amount. And yet if he fix a moderate