find Mr.
Mallock, for example, going about arranging his syllogisms, extracting
his opponent's "self-contradictions," and disposing of Socialism with
stupendous self-satisfaction in all the magazines. He disposes of
Socialism quite in the spirit of the young mediaeval scholar returning
home to prove beyond dispute that "my cat has ten tails" and, given a
yard's start, that a tortoise can always keep ahead of a running man.
The essential fallacy is always to declare that either a thing is A or
it is not A; either a thing is green or it is not green; either a
thing is heavy or it is not heavy. Unthinking people, and some who
ought to know better, fall into that trap. They dismiss from their
minds the fact that there is a tinge of green in nearly every object
in the world, and that there is no such thing as pure green, unless it
be just one line or so in the long series of the spectrum; they forget
that the lightest thing has weight and that the heaviest thing can be
lifted. The rest of the process is simple and has no relation whatever
to the realities of life. They agree to some hard and fast impossible
definition of Socialism, permit the exponent to extract absurdities
therefrom as a conjurer gets rabbits from a hat, and retire with a
conviction that on the whole it is well to have had this disturbing
matter settled once for all.

[14] See "Scepticism of the Instrument," the Appendix to _A
Modern Utopia_. (Chapman & Hall.)

For example, the Anti-Socialist declares that Socialism "abolishes
property." He makes believe there is a hard absolute thing called
"property" which must either be or not be, which is now, and which
will not be under Socialism. To any person with a philosophical
education this is a ridiculous mental process, but it seems perfectly
rational to an untrained mind--and that is the usual case with the
Anti-Socialist. Having achieved this initial absurdity, he then asks
in a tone of bitter protest whether a man may not sleep in his own
bed, and is he to do nothing if he finds a coal-heaver already in
possession when he retires? This is the method of Mr. G. R. Sims, that
delightful writer, who from altitudes of exhaustive misunderstanding
tells the working-man that under Socialism he will have--I forget his
exact formula, but it is a sort of refrain--no money of his own, no
home of his own, no wife of his own, no hair of his own! It is
effective nonsense in its way--but nonsense nevertheless.