ABSTRACT
The new book on Socialism by Mr. William Morris and Mr. Bax is a very good example of the comparative easewith which the undisturbed reformer can make taking and attractive his golden schemes. Here are no awkward questions to be answered, no difficult problems constantly recurring and the destructive criticism passesuncriticised,the constructive narrative flows evenly along. The book follows the historical method, and contains a review of the whole history of European society in a very brief compass, for though there are many pages there is little print. 'A neat rivulet of text meanders through a meadow of margin,' as on Sir Benjamin Backbite's beautiful quarto page. This historical review has been done so many times that we confess we think it was scarce worth while to perform the task again. The only new matter is in the briefIntroduction and in the last chapter, which is called 'Socialism Triumphant,' and as these open a window into the Socialist mind they are worth attention. The Introduction in eighteen pages convicts modern life of hypocrisy and sham 'in its family relations, morality, religion, politics, and art.' It reads more like the diatribe ofa dyspeptic than the writing ofa poet and a metaphysician, and though it ends on a note of hope (in the prospect of Socialism), the final consolation is hardly more convincing than the dyspeptic's trust that to-morrow his indigestion will be gone. Out ofvery bad things are to come forth very good. The special characteristic of modern society, it appears, is universal hypocrisy. This is evident in 'our present family of blood relationship,' where the brotherhood of blood almost extinguishes the senseofduty in friendship, and where, ifa strange child be adopted, 'the
proceeding is cloaked by change ofname, assumption of mystery, and abundance of unconscious ceremonial.' This last is one of the freshest and most ingenious grievanceswe have encountered! The ties ofkinship must give way before the 'reason' ofmature life, and it were hypocrisy for the maturely reasonable man to allow them to restrain any personal desire or taste. Yet these stern writers would make some allowance; they would allow us to wear 'a light and easy yoke ofsentiment,' since even maturity admits that 'it is not unreasonable' to wish to 'pay back with some little kindness' those who have cherished us before reason and maturity came, and 'not unreasonable, too, to look with some special sentiment on brothers and sisters,' becausewe lived familiarly with them 'when they and veewere innocent and undeveloped' !The conclusion of the whole matter is:
We presunle the Socialists desire that affection arising from kinship should be no stronger than the affection felt for the race, except for the 'light and easy yoke ofsentiment,' which itself will disappear when the municipal nursery receives the infant, and boys and girls live familiarly with those of other parents in innocent undevelopment. Yet all art, which is the true record of humanity, attests that the love of child for parent and of parent for child is elemental, and the grave and beautiful piety which the Latins built upon the claims ofkinship still restrains and humanises men not undeveloped and not innocent. Human nature may be affected by changes in the conditions of life, but the elemental emotions are to-day what they were when Homer wrote, and we very much doubt whether even the abolition of pocket-money, and the teaching of the solidarity of mankind by a representative of the State, will make a boy forget that his mother bore him. But for fear ofseeming irreverent we should accuse the Socialists of a joke when they talk so glibly of changing human nature, brutalised and degraded as it is, in their eyes, by the influence of commercialism; but we presume this miracle of change is a serious article of their optimistic faith.
