3.4.  A criticism of certain forms of socialism.

It is necessary to point out that a Socialism arising in this way out of the conception of a synthesis of the will and thought of the species will necessarily differ from conceptions of Socialism arrived at in other and different ways.  It is based on a self-discontent and self-abnegation and not on self-satisfaction, and it will be a scheme of persistent thought and construction, essentially, and it will support this or that method of law-making, or this or that method of economic exploitation, or this or that matter of social grouping, only incidentally and in relation to that.

Such a conception of Socialism is very remote in spirit, however it may agree in method, from that philanthropic administrative socialism one finds among the British ruling and administrative class.  That seems to me to be based on a pity which is largely unjustifiable and a pride that is altogether unintelligent.  The pity is for the obvious wants and distresses of poverty, the pride appears in the arrogant and aggressive conception of raising one’s fellows.  I have no strong feeling for the horrors and discomforts of poverty as such, sensibilities can be hardened to endure the life led by the “Romans” in Dartmoor jail a hundred years ago (See “The Story of Dartmoor Prison” by Basil Thomson (Heinemann—­1907).), or softened to detect the crumpled rose-leaf; what disgusts me is the stupidity and warring purposes of which poverty is the outcome.  When it comes to the idea of raising human beings, I must confess the only person I feel concerned about raising is H.G.  Wells, and that even in his case my energies might be better employed.  After all, presently he must die and the world will have done with him.  His output for the species is more important than his individual elevation.

Moreover, all this talk of raising implies a classification I doubt.  I find it hard to fix any standards that will determine who is above me and who below.  Most people are different from me I perceive, but which among them is better, which worse?  I have a certain power of communicating with other minds, but what experiences I communicate seem often far thinner and poorer stuff than those which others less expressive than I half fail to communicate and half display to me.  My “inferiors,” judged by the common social standards, seem indeed intellectually more limited than I and with a narrower outlook; they are often dirtier and more driven, more under the stress of hunger and animal appetites; but on the other hand have they not more vigorous sensations than I, and through sheer coarsening and hardening of fibre, the power to do more toilsome things and sustain intenser sensations than I could endure?  When I sit upon the bench, a respectable magistrate, and commit some battered reprobate for trial for this lurid offence or that, or send him or her to prison for drunkenness or such-like indecorum, the doubt drifts into my mind which of us after all is indeed getting nearest to the keen edge of life.  Are I and my respectable colleagues much more than successful evasions of that?  Perhaps these people in the dock know more of the essential strains and stresses of nature, are more intimate with pain.  At any rate I do not think I am justified in saying certainly that they do not know...