vocation half a dozen times, he will not travel very long before he finds that to which he is adapted, and in which he can successfully compete with others.
| Communist |
But admitting this, don’t you believe there will always be some who can produce more than their brothers? What is to prevent their obtaining advantages over the less fortunate? |
| Individualist |
Certainly I do believe there are such differences in ability, but that they will lead to the iniquity you fear I deny. Suppose A does produce more than B, does he in anyway injure the latter so long as he does not prevent B from applying his own labor to exploit nature, with equal facilities as himself, either by self-employment or by contract with others? |
| Communist |
Is that what you call right? Will that produce mutual fellowship among human beings? When I see that you are enjoying things which I cannot hope to get, what think you will be my feelings toward you? Shall I not envy and hate you, as the poor do the rich today? |
| Individualist |
Why, will you hate a man because he has finer eyes or better health than you? Do you want to demolish a person’s manuscript because he excels you in penmanship? Would you cut the extra length from Samson’s hair, and divide it around equally among all short-haired people? Will you share a slice from the poet’s genius and put it in the common storehouse so everybody can go and take some? If there happened to be a handsome woman in your neighborhood who devotes her smiles to your brother, shall you get angry and insist that they be “distributed according to the needs” of the Commune? The differences in natural ability are not, in freedom, great enough to injure anyone or disturb the social equilibrium. No one man can produce more than three others; and even granting that much, you can see that it would never create the chasm which lies between Vanderbilt and the switchman on his tracks. |
| Communist |
But in establishing equal justice, Communism would prevent even the possibility of injustice. |
| Individualist |
Is it justice to take from talent to reward incompetency? Is it justice to virtually say that the tool is not to the toiler, nor the product to the producer, but to others? Is it justice to rob toil of incentive? The justice you seek lies not in such injustice, where material equality could only be attained at the dead level of mediocrity. As freedom of contract enlarges, the nobler sentiments and sympathies invariably widen. With freedom of access to land and to capital, no glaring inequality in distribution could result. No workman rises far above or sinks much below the average day’s labor. Nothing but the power to enslave through controlling opportunity to utilize labor force could ever create such wide differences as we now witness. |
| Communist |
Then you hold that your system will practically result in the same equality Communism demands. Yet, granting that, it will take a hundred years, or a thousand, perhaps, to bring it about. Meanwhile people are starving. Communism doesn’t propose to wait. It proposes to adjust things here and now; to arrange matters more equitably while we are here to see it, and not wait till the sweet impossible sometime that our great-great-grandchildren may see the dawn of. Why can’t you join in with us and help us to do something? |
| Individualist |
Yea, we hold that comparative equality will obtain, but prearrangement, institution, “direction” can never bring the desired result—free society. Waving the point that any arrangement is a blow at progress, it really is an impossible thing to do. Thoughts, like things, grow. You cannot jump from the germ to perfect tree in a moment. No system of society can be instituted today which will apply to the demands of the future; that, under freedom will adjust itself. This is the essential difference between Communism and cooperation. The one fixes, adjusts, arranges things, and tends to the rigidity which characterizes the cast off shells of past societies; the other trusts to the unfailing survival of the fittest, and the broadening of human sympathies with freedom; the surety that that which is in the line of progress tending toward the industrial ideal, will, in a free field, obtain by force of its superior attraction. Now, you must admit, either that there will be under freedom, different social arrangements in different societies, some Communistic, others quite the reverse, and that competition will necessarily rise between them, leaving to results to determine which is the best, or you must crush competition, institute Communism, deny freedom, and fly in the face of progress. What the world needs, my friend, is not new methods of instituting things, but abolition of restrictions upon opportunity. |
Some Nihilists I Have Met
The word nihilist is so generally associated with darkness, secrecy, dynamite, assassination and blood, that had someone whispered five minutes before the encounter, “You are about to meet a genuine Russian nihilist,” I should, no doubt, have hastily retreated to the shelter of law-abiding domiciles, far from the dirty, tortuous, downtown quarter, where, amidst a labyrinth of alleys and deceitful little streets that mockingly led against walls, and then turned back into one another, I found myself one snowy afternoon, picking my way somewhat disgustedly with no very clear idea concerning my exact whereabouts.
One thing, however, was sure, I had been appointed on a committee to secure musical talent for a concert shortly to be given by a certain society, the proceeds of which were to be used for the purchase of turkeys for people who otherwise could not properly celebrate the Christmas feast. Having learned through devious channels of a new violin-wonder whose services were to be had for a reasonable consideration, I had at length obtained his address and gone in pursuit of him. It was indeed a pursuit. For half an hour I chased skulking lampposts, that on being captured mockingly stood forth without the shadow of a letter
