utive organizations which do ten times over the
work that might be done by one. Competing stores needlessly occupy the
time of hundreds of thousands of employees in a mixture of idleness and
industry. An inconceivable quantity of human effort is spent on
advertising, mere shouting and display, as unproductive in the social
sense as the beating of a drum. Competition breaks into a dozen
inefficient parts the process that might conceivably be carried out,
with an infinite saving of effort, by a single guiding hand.

The socialist looking thus at the world we live in sees in it nothing
but waste and selfishness and inefficiency. He looks so long that a mist
comes before his eyes. He loses sight of the supreme fact that after
all, in its own poor, clumsy fashion, the machine does work. He loses
sight of the possibility of our falling into social chaos. He sees no
longer the brink of the abyss beside which the path of progress picks
its painful way. He leaps with a shout of exultation over the cliff.

And he lands, at least in imagination, in his ideal state, his Utopia.
Here the noise and clamor of competitive industry is stilled. We look
about us at a peaceful landscape where men and women brightly clothed
and abundantly fed and warmed, sing at their easy task. There is enough
for all and more than enough. Poverty has vanished. Want is unknown. The
children play among the flowers. The youths and maidens are at school.
There are no figures here bent with premature toil, no faces dulled and
furrowed with a life of hardship. The light of education and culture has
shone full on every face and illuminated it into all that it might be.
The cheerful hours of easy labor vary but do not destroy the pursuit of
pleasure and of recreation. Youth in such a Utopia is a very springtime
of hope: adult life a busy and cheery activity: and age itself, watching
from its shady bench beneath a spreading tree the labors of its
children, is but a gentle retrospect from which material care has passed
away.

It is a picture beautiful as the opalescent colors of a soap bubble. It
is the vision of a garden of Eden from which the demon has been
banished. And the Demon in question is the Private Ownership of the
Means of Production. His name is less romantic than those of the wonted
demons of legend and folklore. But it is at least suitable for the
matter-of-fact age of machinery which he is supposed to haunt and on
which he casts his evil spell. Le