474 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL CHAP. 



System was slavery, and that though it fed and clothed 

 its members they would have none of it ? Not one of the 

 Irish workers left it voluntarily. Numbers applied for 

 admittance for whom there was no room ; and the only 

 words they could find strong enough to express their 

 approval were, that Ralahine had become " a little heaven 

 upon earth " under the new system, while under the old 

 one " it was a hell ! " Now the Ralahine experiment was 

 pure socialism. It was voluntary co-operation for the 

 good of all. All benefited equally ; all worked to the 

 best of their ability ; all fared alike. They lived together, 

 worked together, and played together; and even those 

 who would have been idlers and loafers if they could, did 

 not go away, did not declare they could not stand the 

 slavery, but remained, and worked on happily with the 

 rest. The purely academic objection, the critic's idea of 

 what he thinks would happen, is directly contradicted by 

 the appeal to facts. 



6. We come now to the last refuge of the individualist, 

 an objection urged even by many who can find nothing 

 but praise for the ideals of socialism. It is, that we are 

 not good enough for such an ideal system ; that we must 

 alter human nature before a co-operative commonwealth 

 (which is the brief definition of socialism) is possible. 

 Here again we have bold assertion without any attempt, 

 or the shadow of an attempt, at proof. All moralists, 

 students of human nature, and social workers know well 

 that a very large proportion of crime is not due to any 

 exceptional badness of the criminals, but either to ex- 

 ceptional temptation or the character of the surroundings 

 in childhood and youth. They know, and we all know, 

 that the men and women who pass through life unstained 

 by conspicuous vice or actual crime owe their immunity 

 in a large number, perhaps in a majority of cases, to their 

 happy surroundings and freedom from temptation, and 

 not to any superiority of character to many of those who. 

 after a first offence, are irresistibly driven by our vile 

 systems of punishment and our still viler social environ- 

 ment to a life of crime. Look at the cases of what is 

 termed kleptomania now and then occurring among men 



