It is as old as ROBINSON CRUSOE;as old as man.Our race has not been strained for all these ages through that sieve of dangers that we call Natural Selection,to sit down with patience in the tedium of safety;the voices of its fathers call it forth.Already in our society as it exists,the bourgeois is too much cottoned about for any zest in living;he sits in his parlour out of reach of any danger,often out of reach of any vicissitude but one of health;and there he yawns.If the people in the next villa took pot-shots at him,he might be killed indeed,but so long as he escaped he would find his blood oxygenated and his views of the world brighter.If Mr.Mallock,on his way to the publishers,should have his skirts pinned to a wall by a javelin,it would not occur to him -at least for several hours -to ask if life were worth living;and if such peril were a daily matter,he would ask it never more;he would have other things to think about,he would be living indeed -not lying in a box with cotton,safe,but immeasurably dull.The aleatory,whether it touch life,or fortune,or renown -whether we explore Africa or only toss for halfpence -that is what I conceive men to love best,and that is what we are seeking to exclude from men's existences.Of all forms of the aleatory,that which most commonly attends our working men -the danger of misery from want of work -is the least inspiriting:it does not whip the blood,it does not evoke the glory of contest;it is tragic,but it is passive;and yet,in so far as it is aleatory,and a peril sensibly touching them,it does truly season the men's lives.Of those who fail,I do not speak -despair should be sacred;but to those who even modestly succeed,the changes of their life bring interest:a job found,a shilling saved,a dainty earned,all these are wells of pleasure springing afresh for the successful poor;and it is not from these but from the villa-dweller that we hear complaints of the unworthiness of life.Much,then,as the average of the proletariat would gain in this new state of life,they would also lose a certain something,which would not be missed in the beginning,but would be missed progressively and progressively lamented.Soon there would be a looking back:there would be tales of the old world humming in young men's ears,tales of the tramp and the pedlar,and the hopeful emigrant.And in the stall-fed life of the successful ant-heap -with its regular meals,regular duties,regular pleasures,an even course of life,and fear excluded -the vicissitudes,delights,and havens of to-day will seem of epic breadth.This may seem a shallow observation;but the springs by which men are moved lie much on the surface.
Bread,I believe,has always been considered first,but the circus comes close upon its heels.Bread we suppose to be given amply;the cry for circuses will be the louder,and if the life of our descendants be such as we have conceived,there are two beloved pleasures on which they will be likely to fall back:the pleasures of intrigue and of sedition.
In all this I have supposed the ant-heap to be financially sound.I am no economist,only a writer of fiction;but even as such,I know one thing that bears on the economic question -I know the imperfection of man's faculty for business.The Anarchists,who count some rugged elements of common sense among what seem to me their tragic errors,have said upon this matter all that I could wish to say,and condemned beforehand great economical polities.So far it is obvious that they are right;they may be right also in predicting a period of communal independence,and they may even be right in thinking that desirable.But the rise of communes is none the less the end of economic equality,just when we were told it was beginning.Communes will not be all equal in extent,nor in quality of soil,nor in growth of population;nor will the surplus produce of all be equally marketable.It will be the old story of competing interests,only with a new unit;and,as it appears to me,a new,inevitable danger.For the merchant and the manufacturer,in this new world,will be a sovereign commune;it is a sovereign power that will see its crops undersold,and its manufactures worsted in the market.
And all the more dangerous that the sovereign power should be small.Great powers are slow to stir;national affronts,even with the aid of newspapers,filter slowly into popular consciousness;national losses are so unequally shared,that one part of the population will be counting its gains while another sits by a cold hearth.But in the sovereign commune all will be centralised and sensitive.When jealousy springs up,when (let us say)the commune of Poole has overreached the commune of Dorchester,irritation will run like quicksilver throughout the body politic;each man in Dorchester will have to suffer directly in his diet and his dress;even the secretary,who drafts the official correspondence,will sit down to his task embittered,as a man who has dined ill and may expect to dine worse;and thus a business difference between communes will take on much the same colour as a dispute between diggers in the lawless West,and will lead as directly to the arbitrament of blows.So that the establishment of the communal system will not only reintroduce all the injustices and heart-burnings of economic inequality,but will,in all human likelihood,inaugurate a world of hedgerow warfare.Dorchester will march on Poole,Sherborne on Dorchester,Wimborne on both;the waggons will be fired on as they follow the highway,the trains wrecked on the lines,the ploughman will go armed into the field of tillage;and if we have not a return of ballad literature,the local press at least will celebrate in a high vein the victory of Cerne Abbas or the reverse of Toller Porcorum.At least this will not be dull;when I was younger,I could have welcomed such a world with relief;but it is the New-Old with a vengeance,and irresistibly suggests the growth of military powers and the foundation of new empires.
