PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

I take the word "fallacy" in the sense in which it is employed by Bentham1:-"By the name of fallacy, it is common to designate any argument employed, or topic suggested, for the purpose, or with a probability, of producing the effect of deception of causing some erroneous opinion to be entertained by any person to whose mind such argument may have been presented.'

In the following pages my object has been to reduce to their true value the socialistic fallacies with which a number of able, but frequently unscrupulous, men, amuse the idle and attract the multitude. They do not even possess the merit of having originated either their arguments or their systems. They are plagiarists, with some variations, of all the communist romances inspired by Plato. Their greatest pundits, Marx and Engels, have built up their theories upon a sentence of Saint Simon and three phrases of Ricardo.2

What has become of the Utopias of Fourier and

1 "The Book of Fallacies." Introduction. Sect. I. 2 See infra, Book III., chap. 3.

of Cabet, of Louis Blanc's organisation of labour, of Proudhon's bank of exchange, of Lassalle's question of the right to work and of the iron law of wages, and of Karl Marx' and Engels' Communistic Manifesto? As soon as you attempt a discussion with Socialists, they tell you that "the Socialism which you are criticising is not the true one." If you ask them to give you the true one, they are at a loss, thereby proving that, if they are agreed upon the destruction of capitalist society, they do not know what they would substitute for individual property, exchange and wages.

In

June, 1906, M. Jaurès promised to bring forward within four or five months propositions for legislation which should supply a basis for collectivist society. He takes good care not to formulate them because he foresees the risk to which he would be exposing himself, despite the incomplete development in him of a sense of the ridiculous.

No Socialist has succeeded in explaining the conditions for the production, remuneration and distribution of capital in a collectivist system. No Socialist has succeeded in determining the motives for action which individuals would obey. When pressed for an answer, they allege that human nature will have been transformed.

This introduces a difficulty; for, if I am hungry or thirsty, can someone else, in a collectivist society, give me relief? When Denys the Tyrant had a stomach-ache, he never succeeded in handing it on to a slave. Torquemada, by torturing and burning heretics and Jews, was able to prevent the expression of ideas; he never succeeded in changing The individual remains a constant quantity. While leaving out of account the fact that the more the individual develops, the stronger will be the resistance he offers to every kind of repression, collectivists end in a government by police on the model of those of the Incas in Peru or the Jesuits

one.

in Paraguay. "The proletarian class will govern,' says Karl Marx, but he does not explain how. Mr. Carl Pearson, one of the "intellectuals" of Socialism who has the courage of his convictions, recently said: "Socialists have to inculcate that spirit which would give offenders against the State short shrift and the nearest lamp-post." The reader will be referred hereafter to another quotation which proves that, in a slightly modified form, this is also the opinion of M. Deslinières.

While awaiting this happy consummation, the Stuttgart Congress has reaffirmed, on August 20th, 1907, that he only can be recognised as a true Socialist who adheres to the struggle of classes. According to this conception, the wish of one class constitutes law; audacious minorities will oppress intimidated majorities, and the social war is to rage permanently. These Socialists transfer all the conceptions of a warlike civilisation to economic society; the individual who is enrolled among their troops owes passive obedience to his leaders, and the independents are enemies to be received with the classic option of "your money or your life!" Socialism is a hierarchy on a military basis, imported from Germany, as M. Charles Andler proclaims.4 When they reserve all their energies against their fellow-citizens, the supporters of the struggle of classes are logical; for it is not worth troubling to take from a neighbour who would defend himself that which will be within reach of their hands on the day when they attain to power. The French Socialists show how they will employ their power, by celebrating the anniversary of the Commune; and those of them--such as the leaders

1 See infra, Book I., chaps. ii. and v.

2 Carl Pearson, "Ethics of Free Thought," p. 324 (quoted by Robert Flint, "Socialism," p. 334).

3 See infra, Book IX., chap. iv. M. Deslinières is the author of the Code Socialiste.

4 Communist Manifesto, vol. ii., p. 178.

of the General Confederation of Labour-who claim to be practical, put before their levies as an ideal, a general strike, accompanied by the destruction of industrial property and plant, short circuits, explosions of gas and of dynamite, and the derailment and holding up of trains.

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Mr. James Leatham, in a pamphlet entitled "The Class War,' says that "the Independent Labour Party is the only Socialist party in Europe, probably in the world, which does not accept, but explicitly repudiates, the principle of the class war." But the Social Democratic Federation, founded by Mr. William Hyndman, which in 1907 became the Social Democratic party, "proclaims and preaches the class war.' The Independent Labour Party is unable to adhere to this totidem verbis. By the force of circumstances, its programme confines it to practical matters, since it admits of the power of confiscation of private property. The Labour Party, which from 1900 to 1906 was known as the Labour Representation Committee and now forms the Parliamentary Labour Party, does not dissemble as to its programme. At the eighth annual conference at Hull in January, 1908, the following resolution was endorsed by 514,000 votes 469,000:

to

That in the opinion of the Conference the time has arrived when the Labour Party should have a definite object, the socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange, to be controlled by a democratic state in the interests of the entire Community; and the complete emancipation of Labour from the domination of capitalism and landlordism with the establishment of social and economic equality between the sexes.”

Even if a large majority be not associated with this declaration, the Labour Party has absorbed the Trade Union group in the House of Commons,

1 1907.

2 "The Social Democratic Federation: its objects, its principles, and its works," 1907.