



Produced by Fritz Ohrenschall and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net






       *       *       *       *       *

    +-----------------------------------------------------------+
    | Transcriber's Note:                                       |
    |                                                           |
    | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has     |
    | been preserved.                                           |
    |                                                           |
    | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For     |
    | a complete list, please see the end of this document.     |
    |                                                           |
    +-----------------------------------------------------------+

       *       *       *       *       *




TWENTIETH CENTURY SOCIALISM




TWENTIETH CENTURY
SOCIALISM

_WHAT IT IS NOT; WHAT IT IS:
HOW IT MAY COME_


BY
EDMOND KELLY, M.A., F.G.S.

Late Lecturer on Municipal Government at Columbia University,
in the City of New York

Author of "Government or Human Evolution,"
"Evolution and Effort," etc., etc.




LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK
LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1911




Copyright, 1910

BY

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.


First Edition, May, 1910
Reprinted, November, 1910
May, 1911


THE SCIENTIFIC PRESS
ROBERT DRUMMOND AND COMPANY
BROOKLYN, N.Y.




INTRODUCTION


I

No one whose intellectual parts are in working order believes that the
industrial world will go back to an unorganized individualistic
production and distribution of wealth. No one whose moral sense is
awake desires to see the chief means of production owned and
controlled by a small number of monstrously wealthy men, however great
their ability or good their intentions. Nevertheless, most persons of
moral sense and normal mentality are disturbed when one suggests in so
many words that if industry cannot henceforth be individualistic and
should not be owned and controlled by the Big Few, it will,
apparently, have to be owned and controlled by the Many. This
paradoxical psychology possibly indicates that we queer human beings
do our real thinking and perform our occasional feats of moral
self-examination in lucid intervals, alternating with states of
mind--and conscience--which were better not described in non-technical
language.

Edmond Kelly was a man whose lucidity was not interrupted. It was a
necessity of his nature to think clearly and coherently. Not less
necessary was it for him to think comprehensively, for his sympathy
was boundless. Every phase of life interested him. He found nothing
but meanness contemptible; and nothing but injustice moved him to
hate. To such a mind the partial view is intolerable. A fact must be
seen from every side and its relations to other facts must be traced
out. From his earliest manhood Mr. Kelly looked upon the struggle for
existence as both evolution and effort. Accepting the Darwinian
explanation of life, he yet could not admit that man is powerless to
control his fate. Physical evolution shades into physiological, and
physiological evolution into psychological. Effort, foresight, and
directed effort are products of evolution, but having been produced,
they become forces in further evolution. In the higher evolution of
man, they have become principal forces. From the moment that Mr. Kelly
grasped this thought his mind was busy with it through all the years
of his exceedingly active life, mastering its implications, examining
it in its social or collective, no less than in its individual aspect,
and forecasting the chief lines of constructive effort by an
enlightened mankind industrially and politically organized for the
most effective cooperation.

Yet it was not until a few years before his death that Mr. Kelly
became a declared Socialist. The slow advance to his ultimate
conclusions was characteristic. Though his mind moved swiftly, his
intellectual integrity compelled him to examine every position as he
went on. Because of these qualities his books form a series,
consecutive in premisses and argument; a logical sequence
corresponding to their chronological order. Thus, in his early work,
"Evolution and Effort," Mr. Kelly was content to do thoroughly one
particular thing, namely, to demonstrate that the Spencerian
philosophy of evolution could be accepted without committing mankind
to the practical programme of _laissez faire_, upon which Mr. Spencer
himself so strongly insisted. This work Mr. Kelly did so well that
there is no need for anyone to do it over, and it provided a firm
foundation for his further constructive efforts. _The Popular Science
Monthly_, which was then, under the editorship of Professor Edward L.
Youmans, unreservedly committed to Spencerian views, acknowledged that
it was the most telling attack upon what Professor Huxley had called
"administrative nihilism" that had been made in any quarter. The main
ideas of "Evolution and Effort" were elaborated and clinched in the
two large volumes on "Government or Human Evolution," and were
concretely applied to pressing practical questions in the unsigned
book, "A Programme for Workingmen."

Each of the two volumes on "Government" was devoted, as "Evolution and
Effort" had been, to establishing firmly a specific proposition. When
Mr. Kelly began writing the first volume, which bore the sub-title
"