And above all John Stuart Mill had spoken very
respectfully of Socialism in his "Political Economy," which then held
unchallenged supremacy as an exposition of the science. If, he wrote,
"the choice were to be made between Communism[1] with all its chances,
and the present state of society with all its sufferings and injustices,
if the institution of private property necessarily carried with it as a
consequence that the produce of labour should be apportioned as we now
see it almost in inverse proportion to labour, the largest portions to
those who have never worked at all, the next largest to those whose work
is almost nominal, and so in descending scale, the remuneration
dwindling as the work grows harder and more disagreeable until the most
fatiguing and exhausting bodily labour cannot count with certainty on
being able to earn even the necessities of life; if this or Communism
were the alternative, all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism
would be but as dust in the balance."[2] And again in the next
paragraph: "We are too ignorant, either of what individual agency in its
best form or Socialism in its best form can accomplish, to be qualified
to decide which of the two will be the ultimate form of human society."
More than thirty years had passed since this had been written, and
whilst the evils of private property, so vividly depicted by Mill,
showed no signs of mitigation, the remedies he anticipated had made no
substantial progress.
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