t him be once exorcised and the ills of
humanity are gone. And the exorcism, it appears, is of the simplest.
Let this demon once feel the contact of state ownership of the means of
production and his baneful influence will vanish into thin air as his
mediaeval predecessors did at the touch of a thimbleful of holy water.

This, then, is the socialist's program. Let "the state" take over all
the means of production--all the farms, the mines, the factories, the
workshops, the ships, the railroads. Let it direct the workers towards
their task in accordance with the needs of society. Let each labor for
all in the measure of his strength and talent. Let each receive from all
in the measure of his proper needs. No work is to be wasted: nothing is
to be done twice that need only be done once. All must work and none
must be idle: but the amount of work needed under these conditions will
be so small, the hours so short, and the effort so slight, that work
itself will no longer be the grinding monotonous toil that we know
to-day, but a congenial activity pleasant in itself.

A thousand times this picture has been presented. The visionary with
uplifted eyes, his gaze bent on the bright colors of the floating
bubble, has voiced it from a thousand platforms. The earnest youth
grinding at the academic mill has dreamed it in the pauses of his
studious labor. The impassioned pedant has written it in heavy prose
smothering its brightness in the dull web of his own thought. The
brilliant imaginative mind has woven it into romance, making its colors
brighter still with the sunlight of inspired phantasy.

But never, I think, has the picture of socialism at work been so ably
and so dexterously presented as in a book that begins to be forgotten
now, but which some thirty years ago took the continent by storm. This
was the volume in which Mr. Edward Bellamy "looked backward" from his
supposed point of vantage in the year 2000 A. D. and saw us as we are
and as we shall be. No two plans of a socialist state are ever quite
alike. But the scheme of society outlined in "Looking Backward" may be
examined as the most attractive and the most consistent outline of a
socialist state that has, within the knowledge of the present writer,
ever been put forward. It is worth while, in the succeeding chapter to
examine it in detail. No better starting point for the criticism of
collectivist theories can be found than in a view of the basis on which
is suppo