as a collective interest instead of as
independent private owners. But in this little experiment in what was
really a sort of voluntary Socialism for particular ends, Mr. Lever
reckoned without another great system of private adventurers, the
halfpenny newspaper proprietors, who had hitherto been drawing large
sums from soap advertisement, and who had in fact been so far
parasitic on the public soap supply. One group of these papers at once
began a campaign against the "Soap Trust," a campaign almost as noisy
and untruthful as the anti-Socialist campaign. They accused Mr. Lever
of nearly every sort of cheating that can be done by a soap seller,
and anticipated every sort of oppression a private monopolist can
practise. In the end they paid unprecedented damages for libel, but
they stopped Mr. Lever's intelligent and desirable endeavours to
replace the waste and disorder of our existing soap supply by a simple
and more efficient organization. Mr. Lever cannot have forgotten these
facts; they were surely in the back of his mind when he wrote his
"Socialism and Business" paper, and it is a curious instance of the
unconscious limitations one may encounter in a mind of exceptional
ability that he could not bring them forward and apply them to the
problem in hand.

_Socialism is unbusinesslike._ See Chapter VIII., Secs. 2 and 3.

Sec. 4.

_Socialism would destroy freedom._ This is a more considerable
difficulty. To begin with it may be necessary to remind the reader
that absolute freedom is an impossibility. As I have written in my
_Modern Utopia_:--

"The idea of individual liberty is one that has grown in
importance and grows with every development of modern thought.
To the classical Utopists freedom was relatively trivial.
Clearly they considered virtue and happiness as entirely
separable from liberty, and as being altogether more important
things. But the modern view, with its deepening insistence
upon individuality and upon the significance of its
uniqueness, steadily intensifies the value of freedom, until
at last we begin to see liberty as the very substance of life,
that indeed it is life, and that only the dead things, the
choiceless things live in absolute obedience to law. To have
free play for one's individuality is, in the modern view, the
subjective triumph of existence, as survival in creative work
and offspring is its objective triumph. But for a