e stall-fed life of the successful
ant-heap--with its regular meals, regular duties, regular pleasures, an
even course of life, and fear excluded--the vicissitudes, delights, and
havens of to-day will seem of epic breadth. This may seem a shallow
observation; but the springs by which men are moved lie much on the
surface. Bread, I believe, has always been considered first, but the
circus comes close upon its heels. Bread we suppose to be given amply;
the cry for circuses will be the louder, and if the life of our
descendants be such as we have conceived, there are two beloved
pleasures on which they will be likely to fall back: the pleasures of
intrigue and of sedition.

In all this I have supposed the ant-heap to be financially sound. I am
no economist, only a writer of fiction; but even as such, I know one
thing that bears on the economic question--I know the imperfection of
man's faculty for business. The Anarchists, who count some rugged
elements of common-sense among what seem to me their tragic errors, have
said upon this matter all that I could wish to say, and condemned
beforehand great economical polities. So far it is obvious that they are
right; they may be right also in predicting a period of communal
independence, and they may even be right in thinking that desirable. But
the rise of communes is none the less the end of economic equality, just
when we were told it was beginning. Communes will not be all equal in
extent, nor in quality of soil, nor in growth of population; nor will
the surplus produce of all be equally marketable. It will be the old
story of competing interests, only with a new unit; and, as it appears
to me, a new, inevitable danger. For the merchant and the manufacturer,
in this new world, will be a sovereign commune; it is a sovereign power
that will see its crops undersold, and its manufactures worsted in the
market. And all the more dangerous that the sovereign power should be
small. Great powers are slow to stir; national affronts, even with the
aid of newspapers, filter slowly into popular consciousness; national
losses are so unequally shared, that one part of the population will be
counting its gains while another sits by a cold hearth. But in the
sovereign commune all will be centralised and sensitive. When jealousy
springs up, when (let us say) the commune of Poole has overreached the
commune of Dorchester, irritation will run like quicksilver throughout
the body politic; each man