SOCIALISM AND SHAM.

Northern Advocate, 28 June 1924, Page 12 (Supplement)

SOCIALISM AND SHAM.

THE JOYLESS UTOPIA. (By Winston Churchill, in the uSunday C'ironicle.") What an easy it is to be ?. Socialistic orator! The method is simple; the theme so wide and varied. You take the world as it is to-day, ibis .struggling human scene; .this structure such as it is, that has been painfully and gradually built up from barbarism. From this you pic 7 c out every evil, every injustice, every inequality, every misfortune that catckes the eye. you nay are the fruits of the capitalist system.

A nian is poor; that is the capitalist l system. He is unemployed; wQwit can I you expect under the capitalist system? There are slums end housing shortage; anotl'er phase of •'■apitalism. Children are unhealthy or underfed. Disease, sorrow, anxiety c*ist their shadow over the household. It is all the fault of the capitalist system. W.iat you do not mention is that there are more than twenty million people living in this island who would not he in the work', and certainly could not stay here, but for the capitalist system. UTOPIA—WITH A HITOH. The problem of keeping alive this 'extra twenty millions by world-wide trade, massed capital, a-ad established credit, is swept hurriedly into the background, end the nudience is invited to turn its eyes from this world of sin and vice to the delectable picture of a new world and a new order, where everyone will receive more and give less, whersublime wisdom and godlike efficiency will inspire the julers, where self-inter-est, personal proSt, private possession will play no part in human action, and where all will dwell together side oy side in perfect a quality and brotherhood.

That, we are told, is Socialism. Way should we not choose it? Why be poor and want, why bo sick and suffer, why be wearied and work, when <ill we have to do is to put a cross on a voting pnp'jr and enter broadly and swiftly and peacefully into a serene and glorious existence? There is only one hitch; the difficulty is to get people to believe it. They are so unimaginative; they don't see whore the money is to come from. If there is to be less work, shorter hours, longer holidays, they do not understand why there should be more to distribute. They don't see where the brains are to I come from to manage everybody's life fairs and to regulate everybody's life in a satisfactory manner by Government departments. industrial Selfishness. They don't remember often to have met men and women in their daily lives • who were entirely superior to personal 1 interests or to the interests of those whom they lovo and cherish. Even Socialists, they see, have private interests, and hold very tenacious-" ly to them. Their private life seems to be governed by no rule of conduct higher than that of other people. Certainly they are often more quarrelsome, liiore envious, less good comrades, less good citizens, than the average man and woman. The great trade unions use their monopoly, power, and combined force to extract wages at the cost of the community for higher than can be obtained by the great mass of unorganised labour. Unskilled men, weir organised, and with a pull on the labour market, ■ preach Socialism and brotherhood while they are extracting for themselves wages higher than can be gained by the skilled engineer or the working journalist. Evidently selfishness, self-seeking, self-interest, have not been wholly eliminated even from the ranks of the elect. An industrial system where a thousand grades and distinctions are strenuously insisted upon by groups and classes of men, from which women, in spite of their proved efficiency, lave over large areas of employment been entirely shut -out, in which the most laborious and, disagreeable work is often the least well paid—such a syp- I tern would only yield itself with ;;r<rit obstinacy to the rule of perfect justice and absolute equality. INCONGRUITIES. i The leaders of the Socialist move- | ment themselves have hardly succeeded in shaking themselves free from personal considerations. The Socialist Lord Privy Seal asks the House of Commons to raise his salary from £2000 to £5000 a year—a proceeding perfectly proper on the capitalist hypothesis, but hardly in harmony with Socialist idealism. -Mr Bernard Shaw, that sparkling intellectual and brilliant champion of the Socialist Utopia, squealed like ii rabbit when subjected to the mill Lloyd-Georgian super tax. Even Mr Mosley, the latest recruit has not yet divested himself of his unearned increments and quit the life of elegance and luxury in which he has his being. Plain people, confronted with these incongruities, ask themselves whether t'ho Socialist vision is really practical i politics, whether in fact, Socialists 'ire entirely sincere, whether their Xew World is not simply the Old World with the colour and freedom taken out of it, and with new masters and new penalties substituted under new names for those we have now?

After all, it is a very serious thing in making a plan for the government of men to leave out "human nature a3 we know it and see it overy day in our lives. The laws under which we live, tho structure of . society upon which our culture and civilisation, stand. have not been invented by an assembly of theorists or moralists. They have grown up over hundreds and over thousands of years by. the interplay of force and the workings of human nature.