The great state : essays in construction / by H.G. Wells [and others].

Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The great state : essays in construction / by H.G. Wells [and others]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tributed property which is the basis of family autonomy. Both are movements against the an- cient life, and nothing is more absurd than the misrepresentation which presents either as a con- servative force. They are two divergent schools with a common disposition to reject the old and turn towards the new. The Individualist professes a faith for which he has no rational evidence, that the mere abandonment of traditions and controls must ultimately produce a new and beautiful social order; while the Socialist, with an equal liberalism, regards the outlook with a kind of hopeful dread and insists upon an elaborate legal readjustment, a new and untried scheme of social organisation to replace the shattered and weakening Normal Social Life. Both these movements, and indeed all movements that are not movements for the subjugation of in- novation and the restoration of tradition, are vague in the prospect they contemplate. They produce no definite forecasts of the quality of the future towards which they so confidently indicate the way. But this is less true of modern socialism than of its antithesis, and it becomes less and less true as socialism, under an enormous torrent of criticism, slowly washes itself clean from the mass of partial statement, hasty misstatement, sheer error and presumption, that obscured its first emergence. But it is well to be very clear upon one point at this stage, and that is, that this present time is not