problem
in its last analysis is nothing more than the problem of combining and
harmonizing social and individual interests and actions springing
therefrom.

In dealing with this social problem, the problem of how to secure
harmony of social and individual interests and actions, it is necessary
first of all to recognize that both motives are equally important and
necessary agents of human progress. The idea largely prevails that
Socialists ignore the individual motive and consider only the social
motive, just as the ultra-individualists have erred in an opposite
discrimination. The Socialist ideal has been conceived to be a great
bureaucracy. Mr. Anstey gave humorous and vivid expression to this idea
in _Punch_ some years ago, when he represented the citizens of the
Socialist state as being all clothed alike, known only by numbers,
strangers to all the joys of family life, plodding through their
allotted tasks under a race of hated bureaucrats, and having the solace
of chewing gum in their leisure time as a specially paternal provision.
Some such mental picture must have inspired Herbert Spencer's "Coming
Slavery," and it must be confessed that the early forms of Socialism
which consisted mainly of detailed plans of cooeperative commonwealths
afforded some excuse for the idea. Most intelligent Socialists, if
called upon to choose between them, would probably prefer to live in
Thibet under a personal despotism, rather than under the hierarchies of
most of the imaginary commonwealths which Utopian Socialists have
depicted.

Even in the later propaganda of the modern political Socialist movement,
there has been more than enough justification for those who regard
Socialism as impossible except under a great bureaucracy. In numberless
Socialist programmes and addresses Socialism has been defined as meaning
"The social ownership and control of all the means of production,
distribution, and exchange." Critics of Socialism are not to be
seriously blamed if they take such "definitions" at their face value and
interpret them quite literally. It is not difficult to see that in order
to place "all means of production, distribution, and exchange" under
social ownership and control, the creation of such a bureaucracy as the
world has never seen would be necessary. A needle is a means of
production quite as much as an electric power machine in a factory is,
the difference being in their degrees of efficiency. A jackknife is,
likewi