When the feeding of school children is thrown as a charge against Socialism, we are proud to plead guilty. It is our glory that the only cities in the world that have no starving children behind school benches are those cities such as Lille, Ivry, Montlucon, etc., with a Socialist majority in the town councils, which removed the disgrace.
Such then were the arguments of this flag bearer of Individualism, who has supplied the opponents of Socialism with objections these thirty years. His individualist philosophy is now so thoroughly discredited as to call for no answer were it not for the fact pointed out by Huxley, that erroneous ideas do not die just simply because they have been killed.
It is not necessary to wheel into position the heavy artillery of Marx to overthrow this house of cards. Spencer is a sufficient reply to Spencer.
Here is the great contradiction. Spencer, the great biologist, says the brain is to the animal what the Government is to a society. (1) The more effectively and completely the brain controls the members composing the animal body, the higher its place in the organic scale. (2) The less effectively and completely the Government controls the members of the body politic the better will be the society.
Sociological literature has failed to produce any individualist champion able to reconcile this astonishing contradiction. And so there it stands plainly before the eyes of Mr. Spencer’s readers.
“Suppose,” says Professor Huxley, “that, in accordance with this view, each muscle were to maintain that the nervous system had no right to interfere with its contraction except to prevent it from hindering the contraction of another muscle; or each gland, that it had a right to secrete, so long as its secretion interfered with no other; suppose every separate cell were left free to follow its own “interest” and laissez-faire lord of all, what would come of the body physiological? The fact is that the sovereign power of the body thinks for the physiological organism, acts for it, and rules the individual components with a rod of iron. Even the blood corpuscles can’t hold a public meeting without being accused of “congestion”--and the brain, like other despots whom we have known, calls out at once for the use of sharp steel against them.”