the future.

And yet, granting that communism were practicable, granting that
Owen's hopes had some prospect of fulfillment, the doctrine still
embodies evils that must make it forever inexpedient. The
readers of Mr. Matthew Arnold's works must have noticed the
emphasis with which he dwells on the instinct of expansion as a
factor in human progress. It is the refutation alike of
communism and socialism that they thwart the instinct of
expansion; that they substitute for individual energy the energy
of the government; that they substitute for human personality the
blind, mechanical power of the State. The one system, as the
other, marks the end of individualism. The one system, as the
other, would make each man the image of his neighbor. 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