atreds and antagonisms will advance
the reign of love at most only a very little, only so far as it will
simplify and make plain certain issues. It may very possibly not
advance the reign of love at all, but rather shatter the order we have.
Socialism, as I conceive it, and as I have presented it in my book, "New
Worlds for Old," seeks to change economic arrangements only by the way,
as an aspect and outcome of a great change, a change in the spirit and
method of human intercourse.

I know that here I go beyond the limits many Socialists in the past,
and some who are still contemporary, have set themselves. Much Socialism
to-day seems to think of itself as fighting a battle against poverty and
its concomitants alone. Now poverty is only a symptom of a profounder
evil and is never to be cured by itself. It is one aspect of divided
and dispersed purposes. If Socialism is only a conflict with poverty,
Socialism is nothing. But I hold that Socialism is and must be a battle
against human stupidity and egotism and disorder, a battle fought
all through the forests and jungles of the soul of man. As we get
intellectual and moral light and the realization of brotherhood, so
social and economic organization will develop. But the Socialist may
attack poverty for ever, disregarding the intellectual and moral factors
that necessitate it, and he will remain until the end a purely economic
doctrinaire crying in the wilderness in vain.

And if I antagonize myself in this way to the philanthropic Socialism of
kindly prosperous people on the one hand and to the fierce class-hatred
Socialism on the other, still more am I opposed to that furtive
Socialism of the specialist which one meets most typically in the
Fabian Society. It arises very naturally out of what I may perhaps call
specialist fatigue and impatience. It is very easy for writers like
myself to deal in the broad generalities of Socialism and urge their
adoption as general principles; it is altogether another affair with
a man who sets himself to work out the riddle of the complications of
actuality in order to modify them in the direction of Socialism. He
finds himself in a jungle of difficulties that strain his intellectual
power to the utmost. He emerges at last with conclusions, and they are
rarely the obvious conclusions, as to what needs to be done. Even the
people of his own side he finds do not see as he sees; they are, he
perceives, crude and ignorant.

Now I hold t