However, the explanation is not really difficult to find.  It is simply this.  Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering.  They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them.  What is said by great employers of labour against agitators is unquestionably true.  Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them.  That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary.  Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilisation.  Slavery was put down in America, not in consequence of any action on the part of the slaves, or even any express desire on their part that they should be free.  It was put down entirely through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in Boston and elsewhere, who were not slaves themselves, nor owners of slaves, nor had anything to do with the question really.  It was, undoubtedly, the Abolitionists who set the torch alight, who began the whole thing.  And it is curious to note that from the slaves themselves they received, not merely very little assistance, but hardly any sympathy even; and when at the close of the war the slaves found themselves free, found themselves indeed so absolutely free that they were free to starve, many of them bitterly regretted the new state of things.  To the thinker, the most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the Vendee voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of feudalism.

It is clear, then, that no Authoritarian Socialism will do.  For while under the present system a very large number of people can lead lives of a certain amount of freedom and expression and happiness, under an industrial-barrack system, or a system of economic tyranny, nobody would be able to have any such freedom at all.  It is to be regretted that a portion of our community should be practically in slavery, but to propose to solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is childish.  Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work.  No form of compulsion must be exercised over him.  If there is, his work will not be good for him, will not be good in itself, and will not be good for others.  And by work I simply mean activity of any kind.

I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours.  Humanity has got beyond that stage, and reserves such a form of life for the people whom, in a very arbitrary manner, it chooses to call criminals.  But I confess that many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion.  Of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question.  All association must be quite voluntary.  It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine.