nts are simple, the
commodities produced are few, and the opposition of vested interests
would be _nil_. In spite of all these great advantages, the Socialist
leaders prefer introducing Socialism into old countries where the
confiscation of the existing property seems a shorter way to wealth
than work, and where confiscation will have the most satisfactory
results to the despoilers.

We have seen that the various Socialistic organisations agree on
hardly one point in their constructive policy. However, they
absolutely agree in their main purpose--spoliation. On that point
there is absolute unanimity among all the British Socialists, and they
condemn State Socialism (see Chapter XXXII.) because State Socialism
would not mean confiscation and general division. Besides, it would
not enable the Socialist leaders to overturn the State and to seize
the reins of Government. British Socialism is purely destructive in
character, and if Socialism should ever be established in Great
Britain it would lead not to national co-operation, but to civil war
among the various Socialistic sections for the spoils, and to a series
of sanguinary _coups d'etat_ similar to those which arose out of the
great French Revolution.

The "scientific" proposal of transferring all private property to the
State, and of using that property for the common good, merely
circumscribes the word and act of confiscation and of general
division. Therefore we may say that Socialism has no scientific basis,
unless we choose to call science a collection of fallacies expressed
in involved terms so as to deceive the simple. Karl Marx was not a
scientist but a professional demagogue and revolutionist, and his
merit from the Socialists' point of view consists only in this, that
he elaborated a formula of roundabout spoliation and general division,
which he took from his Anarchist predecessors, and gave it a much
needed, though rather transparent, cloak of scientific respectability.

Socialism is, in the first place, a business proposition. Therefore,
if it were practical, it should appeal particularly to business men.
However, it is noteworthy that the loudest champions of British
Socialism are not business men, of whom but few are to be found in the
Socialist ranks, but pushing writers in search of self-advertisement,
whose special domain is the highly spiced and the sensational, writers
who, knowing that many people mistake eccentricity for genius and
paradoxical