ts to meet the needs of people
who want to be singers or actors or writers,--in other words, who do not
want to work. They may sing or act as much as they like, provided that
enough other people will hand over enough of their food cards to keep
them going. But if no one wants to hear them sing or see them act they
may starve,--just as they do now. Here the author harks back
unconsciously to his nineteenth century individualism; he need not have
done so; other socialist writers would have it that one of the
everlasting boards would "sit on" every aspiring actor or author before
he was allowed to begin. But we may take it either way. It is not the
major point. There is no need to discuss the question of how to deal
with the artist under socialism. If the rest of it were all right, no
one need worry about the artist. Perhaps he would do better without
being remunerated at all. It is doubtful whether the huge commercial
premium that greets success to-day does good or harm. But let it pass.
It is immaterial to the present matter.

One comes back to the essential question of the structure of the
commonwealth. Can such a thing, or anything conceived in its likeness,
possibly work? The answer is, and must be, absolutely and emphatically
no.

Let anyone conversant with modern democracy as it is,--not as its
founders dreamed of it,--picture to himself the operation of a system
whereby anything and everything is controlled by elected officials, from
whom there is no escape, outside of whom is no livelihood and to whom
all men must bow! Democracy, let us grant it, is the best system of
government as yet operative in this world of sin. Beside autocratic
kingship it shines with a white light; it is obviously the portal of the
future. But we know it now too well to idealize its merits.

A century and a half ago when the world was painfully struggling out of
the tyranny of autocratic kingship, when English liberalism was in its
cradle, when Thomas Jefferson was composing the immortal phrases of the
Declaration of Independence and unknown patriots dreamed of freedom in
France,--at such an epoch it was but natural that the principle of
popular election should be idealized as the sovereign remedy for the
political evils of mankind. It was natural and salutary that it should
be so. The force of such idealization helped to carry forward the human
race to a new milestone on the path of progress.

But when it is proposed to entrust to the