children and done and suffered less evil than any
Joint Stock Company on record. It was, however, a highly selected
community; for a genuine communist (roughly definable as an intensely
proud person who proposes to enrich the common fund instead of to spunge
on it) is superior to an ordinary joint stock capitalist precisely as an
ordinary joint stock capitalist is superior to a pirate. Further, the
Perfectionists were mightily shepherded by their chief Noyes, one of
those chance attempts at the Superman which occur from time to time in
spite of the interference of Man's blundering institutions. The
existence of Noyes simplified the breeding problem for the Communists,
the question as to what sort of man they should strive to breed being
settled at once by the obvious desirability of breeding another Noyes.

But an experiment conducted by a handful of people, who, after thirty
years of immunity from the unintentional child slaughter that goes on by
ignorant parents in private homes, numbered only 300, could do very
little except prove that Communists, under the guidance of a Superman
"devoted exclusively to the establishment of the Kingdom of God," and
caring no more for property and marriage than a Camberwell minister
cares for Hindoo Caste or Suttee, might make a much better job of their
lives than ordinary folk under the harrow of both these institutions.
Yet their Superman himself admitted that this apparent success was only
part of the abnormal phenomenon of his own occurrence; for when he came
to the end of his powers through age, he himself guided and organized
the voluntary relapse of the communists into marriage, capitalism, and
customary private life, thus admitting that the real social solution was
not what a casual Superman could persuade a picked company to do for
him, but what a whole community of Supermen would do spontaneously. If
Noyes had had to organize, not a few dozen Perfectionists, but the whole
United States, America would have beaten him as completely as England
beat Oliver Cromwell, France Napoleon, or Rome Julius Caesar. Cromwell
learnt by bitter experience that God himself cannot raise a people above
its own level, and that even though you stir a nation to sacrifice all
its appetites to its conscience, the result will still depend wholly on
what sort of conscience the nation has got. Napoleon seems to have
ended by regarding mankind as a troublesome pack of hounds only worth
keeping for t