Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 4.pdf/433

 dergo as complete an internal change as a caterpillar does when it becomes a moth. If you are afraid of so much change as that, it is better you should funk about it now than later. The whole system has to be changed, if we are to get rid of the masses of dull poverty that render our present state detestable to any sensitive man or woman. That, and no less, is the aim of all sincere Socialists: the establishment of a new and better order of society by the abolition of private property in land, in natural productions, and in their exploitation—a change as profound as the abolition of private property in slaves would have been in ancient Rome or Athens. If you demand less than that, if you are not prepared to struggle for that, you are not really a Socialist. If you funk that, then you must make up your mind to square your life to a sort of personal and private happiness with things as they are, and decide with my other friend that "it doesn't do to think about boots."

It is well to insist upon one central idea. Socialism is a common-sense, matter-of-fact proposal to change our conventional admission of what is or is not property, and to re-arrange the world according to these revised conceptions. A certain number of clever people, dissatisfied with the straightforwardness of this, have set themselves to put it in some brilliant obscure way; they will tell you that Socialism is based on the philosophy of Hegel, or that it turns on a theory of Rent, or that it is somehow muddled up with a sort of white Bogey called the Over-man, and all sorts of brilliant, nonsensical, unappetising things. The theory of Socialism, so far as English people are