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

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This Herr Richter has done in an admirable manner. A very complete verisimilitude is sustained throughout his story, and the humour never degenerates into farce. He is as serious as was Defoe in his description of Robinson Crusoe, and if the reality of the picture is less convincing, that is due, not to the unskilfulness of the author, but to the incongruous and unthinkable nature of the Socialist theory, when attempt is made to reduce it to practical details.

On one other point the attention of the reader should dwell. Those controversialists, who, so to speak, argue with their feet on the solid earth, are under a disadvantage, as compared with their aerial and cloud-encompassed opponents, in that they accept the society of to-day as necessarily the father of the society of to-morrow. They recognise the defects and inequalities of the existing system, but the best remedy they can offer is admittedly a gradual and imperfect one. On the other hand, the Socialist is not fettered by any need to refer to defects which may arise in his Utopia. Experience has never had an opportunity of testing its principles in the concrete, and it is difficult to criticise a fabric which is still in the womb of the future. The Socialist future is recommended to us as a land of milk and honey, but how is human kind to be driven to and shepherded in these pastures? “When I am King,” said honest Jack Cade, “there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them in one livery, that they may agree like brothers, and worship me, their lord.” In the modern instance, this lordship of Jack Cade, the political “boss,” is kept studiously in the background, but the point is all important; for without discipline and regulation, and force at the back of it, and of the most rigid and exacting kind, the machinery of Socialism will not work at all. We are weary of accounts of the equity and beneficence of the Socialist State, but complete silence is observed as to its darker possibilities and to the infraction of our liberties which it necessarily implies. This is a legitimate point for criticism, and Herr Richter has worked it out hypothetically—the only way in which it is possible for us to do so—and with grave and laborious industry.