rty years of his
life; and with that hope still before his eyes he died.

But years now have passed since Owen lived; the second New Harmony has
not yet been seen; the so-called rational system of education has not
yet transformed the impulses or the aims of men; and the communist of
today, with a history of two thousand years of failure behind him, in
the same pathetic confidence still looks for the realization of his
dreams to the communism of the future.

And yet, granting that communism were practicable, granting that Owen's
hopes had some prospect of fulfillment, the doctrine still embodies
evils that must make it forever inexpedient. The readers of Mr. Matthew
Arnold's works must have noticed the emphasis with which he dwells
on the instinct of expansion as a factor in human progress. It is
the refutation alike of communism and socialism that they thwart the
instinct of expansion; that they substitute for individual energy the
energy of the government; that they substitute for human personality
the blind, mechanical power of the State. The one system, as the other,
marks the end of individualism. The one system, as the other, would make
each man the image of his neighbor. The one system, as the other, would
hold back the progressive, and, by uniformity of reward, gain uniformity
of type.

I can look forward to no blissful prospect for a race of men that, under
the dominion of the State, at the cost of all freedom of action, at the
cost, indeed, of their own true selves, shall enjoy, if one will, a fair
abundance of the material blessings of life. Some Matthew Arnold of the
future would inevitably say of them in phase like that applied to the
Puritans of old: "They entered the prison of socialism and had the key
turned upon their spirit there for hundreds of years." Into that prison
of socialism, with broken enterprise and broken energy, as serfs under
the mastery of the State, while human personality is preferred to
unreasoning mechanism, mankind must hesitate to step. When they shall
once have entered within it, when the key shall have been turned upon
their spirit and have confined them in narrower straits than even
Puritanism could have done, it will be left for them to find, in
their blind obedience and passive submission, the recompense for the
singleness of character, the foresight, and the energy, that they have
left behind them.

In almost every phase of life, this doctrine of political altruists is
e