272 SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITIES 



be complete, for what we have to do with at present is their 

 characteristic errors. 



Now, it has seemed to me that the social theory of 

 modern times promises in no way to tell more beneficially 

 on our practice than in exposing and removing these errors. 

 It shows the Individualist that he cannot do without 

 society, and even that he must not seek to narrow its 

 enterprise as if it were a bad thing in itself. It shows 

 the Socialist that the private will, so far from needing 

 limitation, needs expansion in the only way in which the 

 will can be expanded namely, by being enabled to con- 

 ceive larger fields of enterprise, and made more free to 

 carry them out. Nay, modern theory goes further though 

 we cannot stop to show how at present it reveals the 

 interesting and apparently paradoxical fact that social and_ 

 individual enterprise grow together : that the communities 



where the individuals have the largest and freest manhood_ 



are precisely those which do most for their citizens^ What 

 a rich growth of fruitless discussion, which bursts forth 

 with such amazing vitality whenever a city or a State 

 projects anything new, would disappear were this truth 

 seen and believed! 



The real source of the errors on both sides is the same ; 

 or, in other words, both errors are branches which spring 

 from the same trunk. Both the Individualist and the 



Socialist regard the State or civic community, and the indi- 

 viduals who constitute it, as more or less exclusive and 

 independent of^aclTotEir. The correction of their errors 

 comes from recognizing more fully that the State or the 

 city and its citizens have only one life ; so that each in 

 repressing its opposite is destroying- itself. In other words, 

 the Individualist must be brought to see that his de- 



