qually impracticable and pernicious. In its social results, it involves
the substitution of the community in the family's present position. In
its political aspects, it involves the absolute dominion of the State
over the actions and property of its subjects. Thus, though claiming
to be an exaltation of the so-called natural rights of liberty and
equality, it is in reality their emphatic debasement. It teaches
that thoughtless docility is a recompense for stunted enterprise. It
magnifies material good at the cost of every rational endowment. It
inculcates a self-denial that must result in dwarfing the individual
to a mere instrument in the hands of the State for the benefit of his
fellows. No such organization of society-no organization that fails
to take note of the fact that man must have scope for the exercise and
development of his faculties-no such organization of society can
ever reach a permanent success. However beneficent its motives, the
hypothesis with which it starts can never be realized. The aphorism
of Emerson, "Churches have been built, not upon principles, but upon
tropes," is as true in the field of politics as it is in the field of
religion. In a like figurative spirit, the followers of communism have
reared their edifice; and, looking back upon the finished structure,
seeking to discern the base on which it rests, the critic finds, not
principles, but tropes. The builders have appealed to a future that
has no warrant in the past; and fixing their gaze upon the distant
dreamland, captivated by the vision there beheld, entranced by its ideal
effulgence, their eyes were blinded to the real conditions of the human
problem they had set before them. Their enemies have not been slow to
note such weakness and mistake; and perhaps it may serve to clear up
misconceptions, perhaps it may serve to lessen cant and open the way
for fresh and vigorous thought, if we shall once convince ourselves
that altruism cannot be the rule of life; that its logical result is
the dwarfing of the individual man; and that not by the death of human
personality can we hope to banish the evils of our day, and to realize
the ideal of all existence, a nobler or purer life.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Altruist in Politics, by Benjamin Cardozo

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