ttenburg," it must be manifest that State
initiative has altogether out-distanced the possibilities of private
effort, and that the next step to the public authority instructing men
how to farm, prepare food, run dairies, manage mines and distribute
minerals, is to cut out the pedagogic middleman and undertake the work
itself. The State education of the expert for private consumption
(such as we see at the Royal School of Mines) is surely too ridiculous
a sacrifice of the community to private property to continue at that.
The further inevitable line of advance is the transfer from private to
public hands by purchase, by competing organizations or what not, of
all those great services, just as rapidly as the increasing capacity
and experience of the public authority permits.

This briefly is the work and method of Constructive Socialism to-day.
Under one or other head it can utilize almost every sort of capacity
and every type of opportunity. It refuses no one who will serve it. It
is no narrow doctrinaire cult. It does not seek the best of an
argument, but the best of a world. Its worst enemies are those foolish
and litigious advocates who antagonize and estrange every development
of human Good Will that does not pay tribute to their vanity in open
acquiescence. Its most loyal servants, its most effectual helpers on
the side of art, invention and public organization and political
reconstruction, may be men who will never adopt the Socialist name.

CHAPTER XIV

SOME ARGUMENTS _AD HOMINEM_

Sec. 1.

Before I conclude this compact exposition of modern Socialism, it is
reasonable that the reader should ask for some little help in figuring
to himself this new world at which we Socialists aim.

"I see the justice of much of the Socialist position," he will say,
"and the soundness of many of your generalizations. But it still seems
to remain--generalizations; and I feel the need of getting it into my
mind as something concrete and real. What will the world be _like_
when its state is really a Socialist one? That's my difficulty."

The full answer to that would be another book. I myself have tried to
render my own personal dream in a book called _A Modern Utopia_,[26]
but that has not been so widely read as I could have wished, it does
not appeal strongly enough, perhaps, to the practical every-day side
of life, and here I may do my best to give very briefly some
intimation of a few of the differences that would