al capacities, that the social
revolution must guarantee daily bread to all. After bread has been
secured, leisure is the supreme aim.

No doubt, nowadays, when hundreds and thousands of human beings are in
need of bread, coal, clothing, and shelter, luxury is a crime; to
satisfy it, the worker's child must go without bread! But in a society
in which all have the necessary food and shelter, the needs which we
consider luxuries to-day will be the more keenly felt. And as all men do
not and cannot resemble one another (the variety of tastes and needs is
the chief guarantee of human progress) there will always be, and it is
desirable that there should always be, men and women whose desire will
go beyond those of ordinary individuals in some particular direction.

Everybody does not need a telescope, because, even if learning were
general, there are people who prefer to examine things through a
microscope to studying the starry heavens. Some like statues, some like
pictures. A particular individual has no other ambition than to possess
a good piano, while another is pleased with an accordion. The tastes
vary, but the artistic needs exist in all. In our present, poor
capitalistic society, the man who has artistic needs cannot satisfy them
unless he is heir to a large fortune, or by dint of hard work
appropriates to himself an intellectual capital which will enable him to
take up a liberal profession. Still he cherishes the _hope_ of some day
satisfying his tastes more or less, and for this reason he reproaches
the idealist Communist societies with having the material life of each
individual as their sole aim. "In your communal stores you may perhaps
have bread for all," he says to us, "but you will not have beautiful
pictures, optical instruments, luxurious furniture, artistic jewelry--in
short, the many things that minister to the infinite variety of human
tastes. And you suppress the possibility of obtaining anything besides
the bread and meat which the commune can offer to all, and the drab
linen in which all your lady citizens will be dressed."

These are the objections which all communist systems have to consider,
and which the founders of new societies, established in American
deserts, never understood. They believed that if the community could
procure sufficient cloth to dress all its members, a music-room in which
the "brothers" could strum a piece of music, or act a play from time to
time, it was enough. They forg