. The newspaper
appears to be in the opening throes of a period of fundamental change.
But I will not go into the future of the newspaper here. All these
suggestions are merely thrown out in the most tentative way to
indicate the nature of the field for study that lies open for any
intelligent worker to cultivate, and that Socialists have so far been
too busy to consider....
The same truth that controls must be divided and a competition at
least for honour and repute kept alive under Socialism, needs also to
be applied to schools and colleges, and all the vast machinery of
research. It is imperative that there should be overlapping and
competing organizations. An educated and prosperous community such as
we postulate for the Socialist State will necessarily be more alert
for interest and intellectual quality than our present "driven"
multitude; its ampler leisure, its wider horizons, will keep it
critical and exacting of what claims its attention. The rivalries of
institutions and municipalities will be part of the drama of life.
Under Socialism, with the extension of the educational process it
contemplates, universities and colleges must become the most prominent
of facts; nearly every one will have that feeling for some such place
which now one finds in a Trinity man for Trinity; the sort of feeling
that sent the last thoughts of Cecil Rhodes back to Oriel. Everywhere,
balanced against the Town Hall or the Parliament House, will be the
great university buildings and art museums, the lecture halls open to
all comers, the great noiseless libraries, the book exhibitions and
book and pamphlet stores, keenly criticized, keenly used, will teem
with unhurrying, incessant, creative activities.
And all this immense publicly sustained organization will be doing
greatly and finely what now our scattered line of Socialist
propagandists is doing under every disadvantage, that is to say it
will be developing and sustaining the social self-consciousness, the
collective sense of the State.
Sec. 5.
I am naturally preoccupied with the Mind of that Civilized State we
seek to make; because my work lies in this department. But while the
writer, the publisher and printer, the bookseller and librarian, and
teacher and preacher must chiefly direct himself to developing this
great organized mind and intention in the world, other sorts of men
will be concerned with parallel aspects of the Socialist synthesis.
The medical worker o
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