Читать книгу Pictures of the Socialistic Future (freely adapted from Bebel) онлайн

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In these days of social and political introspection, mankind, if not governed, is largely influenced by ideals, and ideals are provided for us by the Liberal and by the Socialist parties. Conservatism, which, after all, is the habitual attitude of the English nation, seems to hold the balance, and stands for no special ideal, but rather for the practical experience which notes that reformers’ dreams are not always fulfilled, and that it is salutary, in the first instance at any rate, to look askance at things which are new.

The ideal of the Liberal leads him to look for a regeneration of our social economy through a fuller development of the economic competence of the individual. This is the fundamental conception of the Liberal creed, of which a somewhat imperfect expression (so, at least, it is now said by those who have been taught by events), under the title of the Manchester school or the school of laissez-faire, exercised so wide an influence during the greater part of last century. The instructed Liberal will now admit that complete individual freedom, the goal of the earlier visionaries, though a thing to be sought and desired, is not a thing to be obtained per saltum by a society which has behind it a long record of subjection—through periods of customary communism, serfdom, militarism, and the personal incompetencies of character which these entail. Progress he regards as the gradual disentanglement and emancipation of the race from these influences. The mere fact that we have reached a point when the generous conceptions of Socialism have been accepted as welcome aspirations of our social conscience is, to the liberal philosopher, proof of the advance and improvement of human character, under a system in which the desire of personal freedom has been the chief formative and disentangling influence. Society, he will argue, is merely the environment within which, through the discipline of the ages, human individuality is seeking to learn the rule which will give it the opportunity of attaining its fullest expression. To the enthusiast for liberty—the true Liberal—the valuable thing is the free experience of the individual and the discipline which that teaches.