more thoroughly communistic Utopias for ever.

A Utopia such as this present one, written in the opening of the
Twentieth Century, and after the most exhaustive discussion--nearly
a century long--between Communistic and Socialistic ideas on the one
hand, and Individualism on the other, emerges upon a sort of
effectual conclusion to those controversies. The two parties have so
chipped and amended each other's initial propositions that, indeed,
except for the labels still flutteringly adhesive to the implicated
men, it is hard to choose between them. Each side established a good
many propositions, and we profit by them all. We of the succeeding
generation can see quite clearly that for the most part the heat and
zeal of these discussions arose in the confusion of a quantitative
for a qualitative question. To the onlooker, both Individualism and
Socialism are, in the absolute, absurdities; the one would make men
the slaves of the violent or rich, the other the slaves of the State
official, and the way of sanity runs, perhaps even sinuously, down
the intervening valley. Happily the dead past buries its dead, and
it is not our function now to adjudicate the preponderance of
victory. In the very days when our political and economic order is
becoming steadily more Socialistic, our ideals of intercourse turn
more and more to a fuller recognition of the claims of individuality.
The State is to be progressive, it is no longer to be static, and
this alters the general condition of the Utopian problem profoundly;
we have to provide not only for food and clothing, for order and
health, but for initiative. The factor that leads the World State
on from one phase of development to the next is the interplay of
individualities; to speak teleologically, the world exists for the
sake of and through initiative, and individuality is the method
of initiative. Each man and woman, to the extent that his or her