elf-seeking man. Secrecy,
subterfuge and the private gain; these are the enemies of Socialism
and the adversaries of Science. At times, I will admit, both Socialist
and scientific man forget this essential sympathy. You will find
specialized scientific investigators who do not realize they are, in
effect, Socialists, and Socialists so dull to the quality of their own
professions, that they gird against Science, and are secretive in
policy. But such purblind servants of the light cannot alter the
essential correlation of the two systems of ideas.

Now the Socialist, inspired by this conception of a possible frank and
comprehensive social order to which mean and narrow ends must be
sacrificed, attacks and criticizes the existing order of things at a
great number of points and in a great variety of phraseology. At all
points, however, you will find upon analysis that his criticism
amounts to a declaration that there is wanting a sufficiency of
CONSTRUCTIVE DESIGN. That in the last resort is what he always comes
to.

He wants a complete organization for all those human affairs that are
of collective importance. He says, to take instances almost haphazard,
that our ways of manufacturing a great multitude of necessary things,
of getting and distributing food, of conducting all sorts of business,
of begetting and rearing children, of permitting diseases to engender
and spread are chaotic and undisciplined, so badly done that here is
enormous hardship, and there enormous waste, here excess and
degeneration, and there privation and death. He declares that for
these collective purposes, in the satisfaction of these universal
needs, mankind presents the appearance and follows the methods of a
mob when it ought to follow the method of an army. In place of
disorderly individual effort, each man doing what he pleases, the
Socialist wants organized effort and a plan. And while the scientific
man seeks to make an orderly map of the half-explored wilderness of
fact, the Socialist seeks to make an orderly plan for the
half-conceived wilderness of human effort.

That and no other is the essential Socialist idea.

But do not let this image mislead you. When the Socialist speaks of a
plan, he knows clearly that it is impossible to make a plan as an
architect makes a plan, because while the architect deals with dead
stone and timber, the statesman and Socialist deal with living and
striving things. But he seeks to make a plan as one des