believes in effect may be trusted to the spontaneous
and planless activities of people of goodwill, and nothing but state
intervention can effectively impede its attainment. And curiously close
to this extreme optimistic school in its moral quality and logical
consequences, though contrasting widely in the sinister gloom of its
spirit, is the socialism of Karl Marx. He declared the contemporary
world to be a great process of financial aggrandisement and general
expropriation, of increasing power for the few and of increasing
hardship and misery for the many, a process that would go on until at
last a crisis of unendurable tension would be reached and the social
revolution ensue. The world had, in fact, to be worse before it could
hope to be better. He contemplated a continually exacerbated Class War,
with a millennium of extraordinary vagueness beyond as the reward of
the victorious workers. His common quality with the Individualist lies
in his repudiation of and antagonism to plans and arrangements, in his
belief in the overriding power of Law. Their common influence is the
discouragement of collective understandings upon the basis of the
existing state. Both converge in practice upon _laissez faire_. I would
therefore lump them together under the term of Planless Progressives,
and I would contrast with them those types which believe supremely in
systematised purpose.

The purposeful and systematic types, in common with the Individualist
and Marxist, regard the Normal Social Life, for all the many thousands
of years behind it, as a phase, and as a phase which is now passing, in
human experience; and they are prepared for a future society that may be
ultimately different right down to its essential relationships from the
human past. But they also believe that the forces that have been
assailing and disintegrating the Normal Social Life, which have been, on
the one hand, producing great accumulations of wealth, private freedom,
and ill-defined, irresponsible and socially dangerous power, and, on the
other, labour hordes, for the most part urban, without any property or
outlook except continuous toil and anxiety, which in England have
substituted a dischargeable agricultural labourer for the independent
peasant almost completely, and in America seem to be arresting any
general development of the Normal Social Life at all, are forces of wide
and indefinite possibility that need to be controlled by a collective
effort impl