284 Evolution and Social B.efoi'Tn : 



The success of Socialism implies a tyranny as much 

 more dreadful than any that the world has liitherto seen 

 as our civilization is more complex than was the civilization 

 of the past. Imagine if you can the possibility of such 

 intellectual lives as that of Emerson, or those of which we 

 have just lieard told in this course of lectures, the lives 

 of Youmans and Gray. Imagine such a system organized 

 a thousand years ago, and imagine it successful. ^Modern 

 civilization becomes at once an impossibility. The knowl- 

 edge of the new world and of all that has come of it, nay, 

 the very knowledge of the existence of the Western Hem- 

 isphere, must be blotted out. But I am drawing too heavily 

 upon your imagination at least I have reached the limit 

 of my own. One can picture to himself the experiment 

 attempted, but he cannot think of it as enduring for a 

 moment. The very leaders of the movement would be 

 among the first to revolt against its decrees. Their strongest 

 characteristic is their unwillingness to submit to the condi- 

 tions surrounding them, their assurance that they are right 

 and that the majority are wrong. Think of Ferdinand 

 Lassalle or Karl Marx or William Morris submitting to be 

 ordered in all his affairs by a petty officer placed in au- 

 thority over him by the multitude which he glorifies ! 

 Some of them would be burned at the stake rather than 

 yield one jot of their inde])endence. 



I have alluded to Mi'. Bellamy because for the moment 

 he is the rejjresentative of the Socialist movement in 

 America, and he is said to have sold more than 300,000 

 copies of his book. He has attempted a picture of an ideal 

 society, as Plato in the "Kepublic," Sir Thomas More in 

 the " Utopia," Campanella in '' The City of the Sun," Lord 

 ]iacon in the "Xew Atlantis," Cabet in the "Voyage to 

 Icaria." It is })rincipally noteworthy for the horror Avith 

 which it inspires one who cluM-ishes the old idea, "Give me 

 liberty or give me death." His fitness for tlie discussion 

 of such a i)roblem as that Avhich he has undertaken to treat 

 is amusingly illustrated by his management of the marriage 

 question. He hugs himself witli delight at the improve- 

 ment of the race which is to result from the fact that the 

 finest men are to marry oidy the finest women, wholly ob- 

 livious of the fact that imless he revolutionizes human 

 nature he simply leaves all the rest and residue of the race 

 to many and multiply after their kind, and, if there is any 



