president's address — SECTION G (l.). 223 



seem the prudent policy to the bewildered citizen, who is told that his 

 only choice is between two clenched antagonisms, or between the devil 

 and the deep sea. Dr. Johnson advised that we should keep our minds 

 free from cant. Social science bids us avoid the contagion of hysteria. 



Socialism has passed through three stages during the last century, 

 and although enthusiasts and extremists may linger in the first or second 

 stage, political theory, and, in an increasing measure, political practice 

 are mainly concerned with the third stage. The Utopian socialism of 

 the early part of the nineteenth century was the work of imaginative 

 dreamers, or of reformers possessed by a single idea. Like the apocalyp- 

 tic visions of the early Christians, their schemes of social regeneration 

 and reconstruction were valuable mainly as signs of the times. The 

 second stage of socialism is that which is sometimes named scientific 

 socialism, but which ought rather to be called dogmatic socialism — 

 the socialism of abstract theory, the collectivism of Karl Marx and 

 his successors. The third stage is the stage of practical socialism, in 

 which the demands of the ideal theory are subordinated to the necessities 

 of the political situation, and the goal or " objective " of socialism is 

 put more or less in the background, appearing or disappearing according 

 to circumstances. 



Collectivism, or the doctrine of state absolutism, is both unhistori- 

 cal and unscientific. It is one of the most striking examples of a tre- 

 mendous generalisation, derived from grossly inadequate data. It is 

 based on a narrow and dogmatic reading of history, in accordance with 

 an a friori doctrine of value and a fictitious law of wages. What the 

 great protagonist of collectivism, Karl Marx, did was, in the first place, 

 to analyse with great thoroughness a particular period of modern 

 evolution — the transition from domestic production to what he called 

 capitalistic production — and to treat the results of this analysis as if 

 they expressed a universal law or tendency. He next proceeded to 

 make deductions from the supposed universal law, deductions as to 

 what history should be, how industry and capital and labor must 

 develop, in fact to build up a whole philosophy of social and political 

 life. If the facts of history do not fit into that philosophy, then so 

 much the worse for history. The logical collectivist will continue to 

 prophesy. With that consistency which is the essence of fanaticism 

 he demands the system, the whole system, and nothing but the system. 

 In the field of prophecy, as in the realm of fiction, events move smoothly 

 and quickly, once the necessary assumptions are made and inconvenient 

 difficulties ignored. Marxism leaves out half the factors in the social 

 problem, and so succeeds in representing the future course of history 

 as a uniform progress towards the collectivist state, which will in time 

 swallow up every form of economic organisation into its capacious 

 maw. 



As for its theory of value, coUectivists, generally, seem to be un- 

 aware that though it is the corner-stone of their temple, Marx himself 

 practically abandoned it before his death. The supposition was that 

 value is determined by quantity of labor. According to Engels, perhaps 

 the greatest intellectual force among the coUectivists, Marx admitted 



