I know that here I go beyond the limits many Socialists in the past, and some who are still contemporary, have set themselves.  Much Socialism to-day seems to think of itself as fighting a battle against poverty and its concomitants alone.  Now poverty is only a symptom of a profounder evil and is never to be cured by itself.  It is one aspect of divided and dispersed purposes.  If Socialism is only a conflict with poverty, Socialism is nothing.  But I hold that Socialism is and must be a battle against human stupidity and egotism and disorder, a battle fought all through the forests and jungles of the soul of man.  As we get intellectual and moral light and the realization of brotherhood, so social and economic organization will develop.  But the Socialist may attack poverty for ever, disregarding the intellectual and moral factors that necessitate it, and he will remain until the end a purely economic doctrinaire crying in the wilderness in vain.

And if I antagonize myself in this way to the philanthropic Socialism of kindly prosperous people on the one hand and to the fierce class-hatred Socialism on the other, still more am I opposed to that furtive Socialism of the specialist which one meets most typically in the Fabian Society.  It arises very naturally out of what I may perhaps call specialist fatigue and impatience.  It is very easy for writers like myself to deal in the broad generalities of Socialism and urge their adoption as general principles; it is altogether another affair with a man who sets himself to work out the riddle of the complications of actuality in order to modify them in the direction of Socialism.  He finds himself in a jungle of difficulties that strain his intellectual power to the utmost.  He emerges at last with conclusions, and they are rarely the obvious conclusions, as to what needs to be done.  Even the people of his own side he finds do not see as he sees; they are, he perceives, crude and ignorant.

Now I hold that his duty is to explain his discoveries and intentions until they see as he sees.  But the specialist temperament is often not a generalizing and expository temperament.  Specialists are apt to measure minds by their speciality and underrate the average intelligence.  The specialist is appalled by the real task before him, and he sets himself by tricks and misrepresentations, by benevolent scoundrelism in fact, to effect changes he desires.  Too often he fails even in that.  Where he might have found fellowship he arouses suspicion.  And even if a thing is done in this way, its essential merit is lost.  For it is better, I hold, for a man to die of his disease than to be cured unwittingly.  That is to cheat him of life and to cheat life of the contribution his consciousness might have given it.