ss it is inspired by a higher
public spirit of the individual citizen than we have yet managed to
achieve.

And of the world of to-day, be it remembered, elective democratic
control covers only a part of the field. Under socialism it covers it
all. To-day in our haphazard world a man is his own master; often indeed
the mastership is but a pitiful thing, little more than being master of
his own failure and starvation; often indeed the dead weight of
circumstance, the accident of birth, the want of education, may so press
him down that his freedom is only a mockery. Let us grant all that. But
under socialism freedom is gone. There is nothing but the rule of the
elected boss. The worker is commanded to his task and obey he must. If
he will not, there is, there can only be, the prison and the scourge, or
to be cast out in the wilderness to starve.

Consider what it would mean to be under a socialist state. Here for
example is a worker who is, who says he is, too ill to work. He begs
that he may be set free. The grave official, as Mr. Bellamy sees him,
looks at the worker's tongue. "My poor fellow," says he, "you are indeed
ill. Go and rest yourself under a shady tree while the others are busy
with the harvest." So speaks the ideal official dealing with the ideal
citizen in the dream life among the angels. But suppose that the worker,
being not an angel but a human being, is but a mere hulking, lazy brute
who prefers to sham sick rather than endure the tedium of toil. Or
suppose that the grave official is not an angel, but a man of hateful
heart or one with a personal spite to vent upon his victim. What then?
How could one face a regime in which the everlasting taskmaster held
control? There is nothing like it among us at the present day except
within the melancholy precincts of the penitentiary. There and there
only, the socialist system is in operation.

Who can deny that under such a system the man with the glib tongue and
the persuasive manner, the babbling talker and the scheming organizer,
would secure all the places of power and profit, while patient merit
went to the wall?

Or turn from the gray officials to the purple citizens of the soap
bubble commonwealth of socialism. All work, we are told, and all receive
their remuneration. We must not think of it as money-wages, but, all
said and done, an allotted share of goods, marked out upon a card,
comes pretty much to the same thing. The wages that the citizens rece