The Month (Volume 108)

Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1906. Excerpt: ... A Pilgrim of Eternity III. THE AIM OF A SOCIALIST. One Friday afternoon I read the report of a speech by my friend the Unitarian minister in Chatham. In it he traced the social development of the earlier years in the nineteenth century; and he spoke of it as the triumph of an Individualism, which made self-help its watchword, but translated freedom into license for the strong. The struggle for existence and an unrestrained competition were to be the sole disposers of human destiny; but that meant freedom for the manufacturer alone, in whose interest there should be free trade, open markets, and factory slaves. Then arose Socialism to oppose the conquest of the helpless and to demand social improvement, claiming it as the duty of society and the right of human beings. The new movement, though it did not receive its name till 1838, proved mighty among all the currents of the century. At first it seemed a builder of fairy castles. Then it sought to realize independent communities with their property in common, and sometimes forgetting, with Plato, that women and children are persons, and not property. But the materialism of the age made the process appear merely physical and revolutionary. And denying the nation, as it had denied the family, it became international; till the more studious men began to see the possibility of orderly change within the historic State; and till Bismarck, a little later, claimed the actual State as the organ of the movement, when at last the tide of legislation rose in flood. But through all its stages--Utopian, Communist, Revolutionary, International, University, Bismarckian, and Parliamentary--it had heaved with the aspirations of the workmen and the poor. The following day I went to visit two old people in a slum. Their lot had touched me, for they had a...