admit that Socialism will destroy it. It is possible, given
certain conditions, for men to be nearly absolutely free in speech, in
movement, in conduct; enormously free, that is, as compared with our
present conditions, in a Socialist State established upon the two
great propositions I have formulated in Chapters III. and IV. So that
the statement that Socialism will destroy freedom is a baseless one of
no value as a general argument against the Socialist idea.

Sec. 5.

_Socialism would reduce life to one monotonous dead level!_ This in a
world in which the majority of people live in cheap cottages, villa
residences and tenement houses, read halfpenny newspapers and wear
ready-made clothes!

_Socialism would destroy Art, Invention and Literature._ I do not know
why this objection is made, unless it be that the objectors suppose
that artists will not create, inventors will not think, and no one
write or sing except to please a wealthy patron. Without his opulent
smile, where would they be? Well, do not let us be ungrateful; the
arts owe much to patronage. Go to Venice, go to Florence, and you will
find a glorious harvest of pictures and architecture, sown and reaped
by a mercantile plutocracy. But then in Rome, in Athens, you will find
an equal accumulation made under very different conditions. Reach a
certain phase of civilization, a certain leisure and wealth, and art
will out, however the wealth may be distributed. In certain sumptuous
directions art flourishes now, and would certainly flourish less in a
Socialist State; in the gear of ostentatious luxury, in private
furniture of all sorts, in palace building, in the exquisite
confections of costly feminine adornment, in the luxurious binding of
books, in the cooking of larks, in the distinguished portraiture of
undistinguished persons, in the various refinements of prostitution,
in the subtle accommodations of mystic theology, in jewellery. It is
quite conceivable that in such departments Socialism will discourage
and limit aesthetic and intellectual effort. But no mercantile
plutocracy could ever have produced a Gothic cathedral, a folk-lore, a
gracious natural type of cottage or beautiful clothing for the common
people, and no mercantile plutocracy will ever tolerate a literature
of power. If the coming of Socialism destroys arts, it will also
create arts; the architecture of private palaces will give place to an
architecture of beautiful common homes, cottag