324 
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 con 
stituted, 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 experi 
ment will be watched with great interest by many of us ; but 
the love of personal liberty, with all its accompanying draw 
backs, 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 inter 
ference of centralized authority. 
Nevertheless, these two ideas of Anarchism and of cen 
tralized 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.”