Socialism and Sense Author:William Hill Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: all their pictures. As Byron has written, " The mind can make substances, and people planets of its own with beings brighter than have been, and give its breath ... more »to forms which can out-live all flesh;" and London is flooded with the literature of political fantasy. The blue-book has been superseded by the fairy-tale, and if you may believe the Politicians of the Balloon, Plato's " Republic," Sir Thomas More's "Utopia," Bacon's "NewAtlantis," and many other famous works of a noble imagination, are to breathe and live at last in the Twentieth Century ! The Position of the Grab-and-Govern-All School. There is not tune here for a full-blooded disquisition on a subject so large and complex as Socialism of the Grab-and-Govern-all school; but as I agree with Mr. Blatchford, the cleverest apostle of Collectivism in this country, that " the important thing now is to make people understand what Socialism is," and as by the confession of Mr. Fabian Shaw the members of Socialist societies, " from the nature of the recruiting that goes on," "are often more ignorant of the real meaning of Socialism than any other section of the community" (Labour Leader, May 18th, 1895), we may profitably spend an hour or so upon an examination of some of its aspects. Let me grant at once that there is much that captivates in it. From the economic and ethical point of view, its literary champions present very skilfully a very strong case; although in large part this case (as is too often forgotten) is the case of the Badical as well as the Socialist. Of course, the Socialist case grows the stronger when, under the stress of adverse criticism, its champions, like sensible Englishmen, become illogical, disavow the cialism (which d from Corn- in cupboard, re that liberty i ever the very narkable a...« less