How we reckon up accounts with the one-sided utopias of the partisans. THERE have been many periods when men did not think it possible to make life in the community reach much higher levels than it had attained, without working a change upon human nature. The working of this change has been one of the chief preoccupations of religion; but no one can pretend that it has met, during the historic period, with any overwhelming success. In the eighteenth century men became impatient with the ministrations of institutional religion, and sought to effect an improvement in the common life by a different method—by improving the political, economic, and social mechanisms of society. Up to this time the only method that had seemed feasible for improving the technique of social organization was the mandate of law. Although Aristotle, for instance, predicted that slavery would come to an end on the condition that the shuttle should weave by itself and the lyre play without human hand, no one in the Greek community of his time saw very much likelihood of improvement through mechanical inventions or wholesale innovations in agriculture; and no one, apparently, concerned himself seriously with the mechanical side of affairs. It was the same during the Middle Age. If the men of that time were not exuberantly happy over their For all the activities that men engage in we have separate words. This is a great misfortune; for in using these words we tend to believe that each action takes place in a separate compartment. Instead of beginning with a whole man interacting in a whole community, we are likely to consider only a partial man in a partial community, and by a mental sleight of hand, before we know it, we have let the part stand for the whole. It is this sort of abstraction, I believe, that has been responsible for a good deal of fallacious thinking with regard to the place of industry in the community. The economists seem to have made the error first by talking of a creature whom they called the Economic Man, a creature who had no instincts but those of construction and acquisition, no habits but of working and saving, and no other ultimate purpose than to become such a captain of industry as would make him a candidate for the biographic sketches of Mr. Samuel Smiles, and his present successors in the newspapers and popular magazines. Now this Economic Man was the embodiment of honest labor and rapacious greed. Out of the better quality, Karl Marx painted the picture of the faithful Our business here is not to examine the various programs that were offered during the last century in answer to these problems; merely to catalog them with the barest explanation of their purpose would be an imposing task, were it not for the fact that it has been neatly done for us by Mr. Savel Zimand. It is enough to see here the common element in capitalism, copartnery, State Socialism, Guild Socialism, Co-operation, Communism, Syndicalism, the One Big Union, Trades Unionism, and the like; whether these movements represent actual facts, like capitalism, copartnery, or trades unionism, or whether they are simply projections, like Syndicalism and the One Big Union. If our excursion through the classic utopias has been of any use, it must have shown us how pathetic is this notion that the key to a good society rests simply on the ownership and control of the industrial plant of the community. Is it any less absurd when we confess that In his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Friedrich Engels made a plea for a realistic method of thought, which limited itself to a here and now, as against what he derided as the utopian method, the attempt on the part of a single thinker to give a detailed picture of the society of the future. Yet at the present time it is easy to see that if the utopian socialism of Owen has been ineffective, the realistic socialism of Marx has been equally ineffective; for while Owen's kind of socialism We know these disoriented reformers, these disillusioned revolutionaries, these tired radicals; we could mention names if it were not so needless and so cruel. Apart from anything else, their original mistake was to keep their problem within the compartment of politics and economics, instead of venting it to the wide world. They forgot that the adjustment of some single activity or institution, without respect to the rest, begged the very difficulty they were- trying to overcome. If they were anti-militarists, they saw the world simply as an armed camp; if they were socialists, they saw it as a gigantic mechanism of exploitation; and alas! they saw only so much of the world as would conveniently fit within these diagrams. The world is perhaps an armed camp and a mechanism of exploitation; it is all that and much more; but any attempt to deal with it on a wholesale plan by eliminating all the qualifying elements in the problem is bound to encounter the brute nature of things; and if the nature of things is essentially antagonistic, the reform itself will fail. To say all this is to emphasize the obvious. If any further emphasis were needed it would be necessary only to compare the doctrines of Marx, as expounded by Lenin at the beginning of the Russian Revolution, and There was still another weakness that characterized all the partisan utopias of the nineteenth century. That weakness was their externalism. If the mediæval thinkers were convinced that, on the whole, nothing could be done to rectify men's institutions, while men themselves were so easily bitten by corruption, their successors in the nineteenth century committed the opposite kind of error and absurdity: they believed that human nature was unsocial and obstreperous only because the church, the state, or the institution of property perverted every human impulse. Men like Rousseau, Bentham, Godwin, Fourier, and Owen might be miles apart from one another in their criticism of society, but there was an underlying consensus in their belief in human nature. They looked upon human institutions as altogether external to men; these were so many straitjackets that cunning rulers had thrown over the community to make sane and kindly people behave like madmen; and they could conceive of changing the institutions without changing the habits and redirecting the impulses of the people by whom and for whom they had been created. If one devised neat political constitutions, with plenty of checks and balances, or laid out pauper colonies and invited the countryside to make use of them—well, all would be to the good. There was, it is true, one great exception to this notion that institutions might be reformed without, in that process, making over men. I refer to the belief Between our programs, our utopias, and their fulfillment there has usually dropt a thick veil of personalities; and were the plan itself the collaborate product of the best minds of the race; as Mr. H. G. Wells satirically pictured in Boon, it would still have to take its chances with the wild asses of the devil that human weakness, apathy, greed, lust for power, might release. Walt Whitman said of Carlyle that behind the tally of his work and genius stood the stomach, and gave a sort of casting vote. So one may say of every social movement, that behind the tally of its theoretic background and its concrete programs stand human beings—hale and sick, neurotic and stable, well-intentioned and malicious—and give the casting vote. Anyone who has read an important book, and then met the author, who has respected an apparently significant social movement, and then met the leaders behind the scenes, will realize how frequent is the difficulty of reconciling theoretic agreement with the inaccessibilities and prejudices and repugnances of particular personalities. No one can join the work of even the most trivial sort of committee—be it a delegation to It would be so easy, this business of making over the world, if it were only a matter of creating machinery. There has probably never been lacking the sort of energy and talent that is needed for this sort of work; and at any rate, during the last three centuries, with the growth of technology, the mechanical services at the command of our engineers and organizers are huge and adequate. Unfortunately, we are still in the same Let me now anticipate the answer which this criticism will probably meet. To some people it will seem that the current movements for reform are inevitably secular; that they have no business to concern themselves with the ultimate faith of men; that they inevitably deal with a limited here and now, a dollar more of wages, a drop less of liquor, a touch more of uniformity, and so forth. In short, our partial utopias need not concern themselves with any of the questions that have to do with the life of the spirit. The simple answer to this crude philosophy is—so much the worse for them. The breach between the institutions that deal with the material life and those that deal with the ideal life results either in a complete dissociation, by which each set of institutions becomes paralytic and imbecile; or, as so often happens, in a capitulation of the spiritual power to the temporal, and its complete engrossment in temporal ends. I am aware that these phrases, "spiritual" and "temporal," have a certain old-fashioned smell; but they precisely express my meaning: it is plain that every community contains the corresponding institutions—one group being devoted to values and the other to means. When our reforms are not touched by a sense of values, the result is that purely temporal ends are taken as ultimate, There is a final criticism of the partial utopias: our one-sided reforms have had this fatal defect—they are one-sided. This partisanship was expressed by their relation to the facts upon which their programs were based, and in their attitude towards the people who were to be affected by them. The mood of partisanship has been that of a lawyer who is getting up an argument and is looking for such facts as will bolster up his case. That mood is inimical to free and intelligent thought: its object is rhetorical triumph. Now it happens that in all the matters which intimately concern a community, a person's attitude towards the facts not merely seems more important than the facts themselves, but seems so deucedly important that the facts are ignored. The attitude of a group of Southern whites who will lynch a negro on the report that he has raped a white woman before they investigate the truth of the assertion is a bestial exaggeration of a very natural human tendency. Men are built for action This weakness arises out of an almost instinctive tendency towards partisanship; and it is one of the reasons that partisanship continues. If nothing else prevents groups from getting together, their failure to agree about the facts, and their lack of a method for getting at the facts and focussing them, is responsible. If an examination of the facts did nothing else, it might Now for Catholic and Protestant in Mr. St. John Ervine's play one may substitute Democrat and Republican, White Guard and Red Guard, Socialist and Financier, Prohibitionist and anti-Prohibitionist and For the most part the second method has been indefatigably used. In the political state the partisans make a great show of the gulf which separates the political party in power from that which is outside, and every other interest in life is supposed to be secondary to this abysmal cleavage. In relatively crude communities,1