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SOCIALISM  IN  ENGLAND.

they  will  never  consent  to  have  the  Collectivist  experiment  tried
upon  them.  They  have  always  shown  a  jealousy,  in  the  main  a
wholesome  one,  of  State  interference  ;  and  though  more  inclined
of  late  to  trust  officialism  in  some  matters,  they  will  never  consent
to  surrender  to  any  government,  however  democratically  constituted, ­
  the  entire  regulation  of  the  whole  economy  of  life.
Possibly  the  Germans,  who  have  long  been  accustomed  to  a
bureaucratic  régime—an  excellent  one  of  its  kind—may  submit
to  the  growth  of  State  Socialism  among  them,  and  the  experiment ­
  will  be  watched  with  great  interest  by  many  of  us  ;  but
the  love  of  personal  liberty,  with  all  its  accompanying  drawbacks, ­
  and  the  sense  of  self-reliance,  are  too  deeply  engraved  in
the  English  nature  to  render  possible  even  the  modified  form
of  State  help  likely  to  be  adopted  in  Germany.
Indeed,  the  feelings  I  speak  of,  though  more  noticeable
with  us,*  are  not  confined  to  Englishmen  ;  they  are  shared  in
a  greater  or  less  degree  by  the  whole  civilized  world  ;  and  a
true  analysis  would,  I  think,  show  that  it  is  these  feelings  which
have  driven  many  of  those  most  profoundly  dissatisfied  with
the  present  social  régime  to  adopt  the  principle  of  Anarchism
or  Amorphism—a  principle  which  Mr.  Hyndman  justly  calls
“  Individualism  run  mad  ”—rather  than  any  form  of  centralized
or  authoritarian  Collectivism  or  Communism.  Bakunin,  in
fact,  bears  the  same  relation  to  Karl  Marx  that  Herbert
Spencer  does  to  the  modern  State  Socialist  Though  starting
with  a  very  different  estimate  of  the  present  régime,  and
moving  on  a  very  different  plane,  they  each  represent  a  revolt
from  what  they  severally  think  would  be  an  excessive  interference ­
  of  centralized  authority.
Nevertheless,  these  two  ideas  of  Anarchism  and  of  centralized ­
  Socialism,  though  separated  theoretically  by  the  whole
diameter  of  economic  being,  if  reduced  to  practice  in  the
*  The  difference  between  the  English  and  the  French  workman  was  once
more  brought  into  strong  relief  at  the  Working  Men’s  Conference  held  at
Paris  last  year,  and  attended  by  Messrs.  Proadhurst,  .Shipton,  and  others,  as
delegates  from  the  Trades  Unions.  The  English  official  report  states  that
at  one  time  the  Conference  looked  as  though  it  would  fail  :  “The  point  of
difference  was  the  extent  to  which  the  State  should  be  asked  to  protect
labour.”