The Florence daily tribune., 1899-08-05
SOCIALISM VS.. INDIvrDuALIsrl

3;40 in the morning, to be gone
three or four days, and though my
time is short and | have much to
do, suppose l ought to make a
short reply to com munication
that appears i'll your issue of this
evening
Your correspondent, like Griest
and Hickey and the rest, makes
the mistake of concluding that all
who differ with him are necessarily
idiots and ignoramuses. Now, |
know some bright men who are So
cialists; but | also know men who
are as logical, as fair minded and as
profoundly learned as Mr.. Peil,
who do not believe in socialism, at
all. When socialist says of you,
as Mr. Peil says of me, that you
are 'ten years behind the times,
even in ignorance do not let it
disturb you, for they do not stop
at that, They do not stop at
knowing more than you, or |, or
any body else; they, in the com
pleteness of their learning and the
magnitude of their understanding,
arraign the best results of centu-
ries of civilization as Stupid err
ror" and rank blockheadism, and
even pity the ignorance of God,
Himself, for the creative blunder
He has made of man, and of His
great, universal, all-pervading COM
petitive system, which is as funda-
mental as nature, itself, and against
which socialists rail so much.
cannot take time or space to
answer all Mr.. Peil's questions,
but, as each embodies all the rest,
/ will undertake to answer one.
Suppose" says Mr.. Peil, that
two men had to get cart up hill.
Would they get it up any sooner
if one tried to push it up while the
other tried to push itdown?" Ger
tainly not. But make the suppo-
sition fit the case. Suppose there
are thousand men on Mr.. Peil's
hill-each man with a cart. If
they were all democrats they would
each hitch a horse to his cart and
go on up the hill in the quiet, old
fashioned way, each attending to
his own cart and none interfering
with another. If they were repub-
leans, ten of them would form a
trust and the trust would yank the
thousand buggies up the hill by
steam or electricity, and keep nine
hundred of the buggies to pay for
the transportation of the other
hundred. If they were socialists,
they would say: "These carts
can't go up that hill without some
mems carts getting ahead of some
other mems carts, so we'll leave the
whole push at the bottom of the hill
where we'll all be free and equal. :"
Socialism is not good even as a
theory. To say we are going to
have no more competition is equiv
alent to saying we are going to
have no more am billions, no aspira-
tions, no desire to excel, to sur
pass, to achieve. 1t is equivalent
to saying we are going to have no
more men-nothing but an emas-
culated worldful of joblot angels.
Such consummation is not only
undesirable; it is impossible. The
student of human nature knows
that you can no more take the
competitive instinct, the vim, the
cunning, the sel6shness, the spirit
of conquest, out of the nature of
men than you can take the blue
out of their eyes, or the red out of
their hair. And we don't want it
taken out of them. Life is bat
tie. Existence Is fight didn't
make it that way; | am simply tell
ing you that it is that way. 1t is
so throughout nature. The fight
begins with Heterogeneous that
Mr.. Peil has never seen; it follows
on up through fish, flesh and fowl,
and if Mr.. Peil will read scripture
he will find that it has infected
l. IL