ism in
practice, my friend._

X

OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM CONSIDERED

I feel sure that the time will come when people will find it
difficult to believe that a rich community such as our's,
having such command over external nature, could have submitted
to live such a mean, shabby, dirty life as we do.--_William
Morris._

Morality and political economy unite in repelling the
individual who consumes without producing.--_Balzac._

The restraints of Communism would be freedom in comparison
with the present condition of the majority of the human
race.--_John Stuart Mill._

I promised at the beginning of this discussion, friend Jonathan, that
I would try to answer the numerous objections to Socialism which you
set forth in your letter, and I cannot close the discussion without
fulfilling that promise.

Many of the objections I have already disposed of and need not,
therefore, take further notice of them here. The remaining ones I
propose to answer--except where I can show you that an answer is
unnecessary. For you have answered some of the objections yourself, my
friend, though you were not aware of the fact. I find in looking over
the long list of your objections that one excludes another very often.
You seem, like a great many other people, to have set down all the
objections you had ever heard, or could think of at the time,
regardless of the fact that they could not by any possibility be all
well founded; that if some were wise and weighty others must be
foolish and empty. Without altering the form of your objections,
simply rearranging their order, I propose to set forth a few of the
contradictions in your objections. That is fair logic, Jonathan.

First you say that you object to Socialism because it is "the clamor
of envious men to take by force what does not belong to them." That is
a very serious objection, if true. But you say a little further on in
your letter that "Socialism is a noble and beautiful dream which human
beings are not perfect enough to realize in actual life." Either one
of the objections _may_ be valid, Jonathan, but both of them cannot
be. Socialism cannot be both a noble and a beautiful dream, too
sublime for human realization, and at the same time a sordid envy--can
it?

You say that "Socialists are opposed to law and order and want to do
away with all government," and then you say in another objection that
"Socialists want to make us al