Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/209

 Rh effort and individual voices to give new life and new gladness to the world.

This leads me to my last word. If we are to judge aright the programme of Socialist promise we must compare it not merely with the society that exists, but with society as it too might become, though remaining based on the principles that now underlie it, as its units grew in morality and wisdom. I have tried to show the difficulties that beset the theory of Socialism. In my judgment they are insuperable. The organization suggested by it of a national, still more of an international, economy is impossible. This, if true, is final as far as its pretensions are concerned; but it does not throw us back hopelessly on an unimprovable anarchy. No economist known to me, however strong an upholder of the freedom of individual action and of individual development, has ever forgotten that man is a social animal. Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, but he also wrote The Moral Sentiments. Bastiat, the most absolute believer in laissez faire, conceived of the social harmony as the resultant of many free forces, just as in the celestial harmony the planets and suns are kept in their courses. The analogy is not fanciful. Each man's life is, indeed, a thing apart. From his birth onward he carries his powers and his responsibilities at his own peril till the time comes when, in Pascal's phrase, he must die alone; yet his career is only possible through a participation in labour, an interchange in services, a co-operation in toil with his fellow men. What might not the race become through the education of the individual man thus endowed with complete personal freedom, and using that freedom as his reason directs, now to work apart and then in union with his fellow or his fellows? I have not dwelt upon the moral difficulties that would impede the acceptance of Socialism, but it must be plain that the moral difficulties in the education of the individual must be less than those of the education of a community; it is easier to raise up units than to raise up masses of men; and whilst the final organization of society remains conceivable concurrently with the freedom of the individual, and has not, on the other hypothesis of Socialist domination, been presented in a conceivable shape, the ways and means towards the improvement of a free society are relatively easy and promising. We are dealing in these speculations, as I have already said, with long intervals of time, and the progress that has been made through slow ages bids us to be at once patient and hopeful. Consider what might be accomplished through a growth in