The one
system, as the other, would hold back the progressive, and, by
uniformity of reward, gain uniformity of type.
I can look forward to no blissful prospect for a race of men
that, under the dominion of the State, at the cost of all freedom
of action, at the cost, indeed, of their own true selves, shall
enjoy, if one will, a fair abundance of the material blessings of
life. Some Matthew Arnold of the future would inevitably say of
them in phase like that applied to the Puritans of old: "They
entered the prison of socialism and had the key turned upon their
spirit there for hundreds of years." Into that prison of
socialism, with broken enterprise and broken energy, as serfs
under the mastery of the State, while human personality is
preferred to unreasoning mechanism, mankind must hesitate to
step. When they shall once have entered within it, when the key
shall have been turned upon their spirit and have confined them
in narrower straits than even Puritanism could have done, it will
be left for them to find, in their blind obedience and passive
submission, the recompense for the singleness of character, the
foresight, and the energy, that they have left behind them.
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