740 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



grades of officers, by whom obedience would have to be insisted upon, 

 since otherwise neither order nor efficient work could be insured. So 

 that each would stand toward the governing agency in the relation of 

 slave to master. 



" But the governing agency would be a master which he and others 

 made and kept constantly in check, and one which therefore would not 

 control him or others more than was needful for the benefit of each 

 and all." 



To which reply the first rejoinder is that, even if so, each member 

 of the community as an individual would be a slave to the community 

 as a whole. Such a relation has habitually existed in militant com- 

 munities, even under ^<m-popular forms of government. In ancient 

 Greece the accepted principle was that the citizen belonged neither 

 to himself nor to his family, but belonged to his city the city being 

 with the Greek equivalent to the community. And this doctrine, 

 proper to a state of constant warfare, is a doctrine which socialism 

 unawares reintroduces into a state intended to be purely industrial. 

 The services of each will belong to the aggregate of all ; and for 

 these services such returns will be given as the authorities think 

 proper. So that even if the administration is of the beneficent kind 

 intended to be secured, slavery, however mild, must be the outcome 

 of the arrangement. 



A second rejoinder is that the administration will presently become 

 not of the intended kind, and that the slavery will not be mild. The 

 socialist speculation is vitiated by an assumption like that which viti- 

 ates the speculations of the " practical " politician. It is assumed that 

 officialism will work as it is intended to work, which it never does. 

 The machinery of communism, like existing social machinery, has to 

 be framed out of existing human nature ; and the defects of existing 

 human nature will generate in the one the same evils as in the other. 

 The love of power, the selfishness, the injustice, the untruthfulness, 

 which often in comparatively short times bring private organizations 

 to disaster, will inevitably, where their effects accumulated from gen- 

 eration to generation, work evils far greater and less remediable ; since 

 vast and complex and possessed of all the resources, the administrative 

 organization once developed and consolidated must become irresisti- 

 ble. And, if there needs proof that the periodic exercise of electoral 

 power would fail to prevent this, it suffices to instance the French 

 Government, which, purely popular in origin, and subject from time 

 to time to popular judgment, nevertheless tramples on the freedom of 

 citizens to an extent which the English delegates to the late Trades- 

 Union Congress say " is a disgrace to, and an anomaly in, a republican 

 nation." 



The final result would be a revival of despotism. A disciplined 

 army of civil officials, like an army of military officials, gives supreme 

 power to its head a power which has often led to usurpation, as in 



