Читать книгу The Goose-step: A Study of American Education онлайн

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Most significant of all to me personally, I was unaware that the modern revolutionary movement existed. I was all ready for it, but I was as much alone in the world as Shelley a hundred years before me. I knew, of course, that there had been Socialism in ancient times, for I had read Plato, and been amused by his quaint suggestions for the reconstruction of the world. Also I knew that there had been dreamers and cranks in America who went off and tried to found Utopian commonwealths. It was safe for me to be told about these experiments, because they had failed. I had heard the names of Marx and Lassalle, and had a vague idea of them as dreadful men, who met in the back rooms of beer-gardens, and conspired, and made dynamite bombs, and practised free love. That they had any relationship to my life, that they had anything to teach me, that they had founded a movement which embraced all the future—of this I was as ignorant as I was of the civilization of Dahomey, or the topography of the far side of the moon.