have a faint hope that some of these fallacies will be abandoned
by the workmen when their destructive results can no longer be
concealed. But sentimentalism seems to be incurable. It erects
irrationality into an act of religious faith, gives free rein to the
emotion of pity, and thinks that it is imitating the Good Samaritan by
robbing the Priest and Levite for the benefit of the man by the
road-side. The sentimentalist shows a bitter hatred against those who
wish to cure an evil by removing its causes. A good example is the
language of writers like Mr. Chesterton about eugenics and population.
If social maladies were treated scientifically, the trade of the
emotional rhetorician would be gone.

We have seen that democracy--the rule of majorities--has been
discredited and abandoned in action, though officially we all bow down
before it. Another popular delusion is that the chief change in the last
fifty years has been a conversion of the world from individualism to
socialism. In the language of the Christian socialists, who wish to
combine the militant spirit and organisation of medieval Catholicism
with a bid for the popular vote, we have 'rediscovered the Corporate
Idea.' But if we take socialism, not in the narrower sense of
collectivism, which would be an economic experiment, but in the wider
sense of a keen consciousness of the solidarity of the community as an
organic whole, there is very little truth in the commonly held notion
that we have become more socialistic. It is easy to see how the idea has
arisen. It became necessary to find some theoretical justification for
raising taxes, no longer for national needs, but for the benefit of the
class which imposed them; and this justification was found in the theory
that all wealth belongs to 'the State,' and may be justly divided up as
'the State'--that is to say, the majority of the voters--may determine.
Whenever the question arises of voting new doles to the dominant section
of the people at the expense of the minority, our new political
philosophers profess themselves fervent socialists. But true socialism,
which is almost synonymous with patriotism, is as conspicuously absent
in those who call themselves socialists as it is strong in those who
repudiate the title. This paradox can be easily proved. The most
socialistic enterprise in which a nation ever engages is a great war. A
nation at war is conscious of its corporate unity and its common
interests, as it i