These plans vary from the
mildest of reforms--and from "the public collective ownership of land
and capital and the public collective management of all industries"
with the recognition of certain private rights--to the taking of all
land and capital absolutely from private control, the abolishing of
the right to hold private property, the giving up of the marriage
relation, the suppression of the church and the renunciation of the
government.
The trouble with extreme schemes of this sort is that they seek in the
end to abolish the individual and private rights, even in
marriage. But all social and moral health and wealth is but the
aggregate of individual health and wealth. No community and no class
of men are better than the men who compose them. If there are evils in
the present system they would continue, in a magnified form, in the
new. There is here the old political fallacy, made over into a new
social fallacy, that by mere putting of the ballot into every man's
hands the government would be purified of all its evils. We must begin
with the individual to purify him before the state or society can be
made much better. It is the levelling down, the bringing the better
working man to the rate of work and quality of the poorer, which is
sought, rather than the levelling up. The common goods scheme was
tried early in the career of the Christian Church and it failed to
work because of the element of selfishness which came in (Acts 2:
44,45; 4:34; compare 5:1-11); this has been the cause of the breaking
up of numerous social and communistic settlements and communities.
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