s to ennoble the intimate personal
life, by checking and discouraging passions that at present run
rampant, and by giving wider scope for passions that are now thwarted
and subdued. The Socialist declares that life is now needlessly
dishonest, base and mean, because our present social organization,
such as it is, makes an altogether too powerful appeal to some of the
very meanest elements in our nature.

Not perhaps to the lowest. There can be no disputing that our present
civilization does discourage much of the innate bestiality of man;
that it helps people to a measure of continence, cleanliness and
mutual toleration; that it does much to suppress brute violence, the
spirit of lawlessness, cruelty and wanton destruction. But on the
other hand it does also check and cripple generosity and frank
truthfulness, any disinterested creative passion, the love of beauty,
the passion for truth and research, and it stimulates avarice,
parsimony, overreaching, usury, falsehood and secrecy, by making
money-getting its criterion of intercourse.

Whether we like it or not, we who live in this world to-day find we
must either devote a considerable amount of our attention to getting
and keeping money, and shape our activities--or, if you will, distort
them--with a constant reference to that process, or we must accept
futility. Whatever powers men want to exercise, whatever service they
wish to do, it is a preliminary condition for most of them that they
must, by earning something or selling something, achieve opportunity.
If they cannot turn their gift into some saleable thing or get some
propertied man to "patronize" them, they cannot exercise these gifts.
The gift for getting is the supreme gift--all others bow before it.

Now this is not a thing that comes naturally out of the quality of
man; it is the result of a blind and complex social growth, of this
set of ideas working against that, and of these influences modifying
those. The idea of property has run wild and become a choking
universal weed. It is not the natural master-passion of a wholesome
man to want constantly to own. People talk of Socialism as being a
proposal "against human nature," and they would have us believe that
this life of anxiety, of parsimony and speculation, of mercenary
considerations and forced toil we all lead, is the complete and final
expression of the social possibilities of the human soul. But, indeed,
it is only quite abnormal people, people of