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The question with which we are confronted to-day, and which our civilisation must either answer aright or perish, is not whether an individualist or a socialist state would be more conducive to the individual's self-realisation, but whether Christianity is right or wrong in its doctrine of the individual's paramount importance.
There must be "no friendship in business"; the weakest must go to the wall. Each man is an individualist fighting for his own hand; and to give as little as he can for as much as he can get is good policy for him, with precisely the same limitations as those that govern the trading of the retail merchant, tormented with the conflicting necessities of overcharging and underselling.
For radical democracy will not only be without danger, but useful and invaluable in the struggle of the progressive and collectivist capitalists against the retrogressive and individualist capitalists.
Along the lines of material progress, especially, the individualist has made good. Looking upon what has been achieved the modern democrat expects further improvement in society through individual betterment.
It would have been small consolation to Mr. Hardinge to know that this reply was taken from the individualist Spencer, who should have been his mainstay in the debate. But such things are common property and I had just as much right to take it from Spencer as he had to take it from George Eliot. There are a great number of tricks that may be practiced in debate.
For the egotist is he who makes claims upon others, and the Individualist will not desire to do that. It will not give him pleasure. When man has realised Individualism, he will also realise sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously. Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy.
I am aware that there are many extreme theorists of the individualist school who hold that all this is very wicked and very wrong, and that by leaving things to themselves they will get right. Well, my experience of the world is that things left to themselves don't get right.
My dealings with social politics being for the time exhausted, I devoted about five years 1895 to 1900 to the composition of three novels, A Human Document, The Heart of Life, and The Individualist, which were studies of the relation of religion to the passions, feelings, and foibles of which for most men the experiences of life consist.
We thought there were principles involved. Take it in the economic world, the individualist here with his theory, the socialist here with his; theories outlined like those in Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward"; a hundred advancers of these different schemes, each contending for mastery. And we feel that the welfare of civilization is at stake; and we stand for our great principles.
One man whom I sent to America made his fortune, but he was not a social democrat; he was a clerk who had embezzled, and who applied to me for assistance under the impression that I considered it rather meritorious to rob the till of a capitalist." "He was a practical Socialist, in fact," said Erskine. "On the contrary, he was a somewhat too grasping Individualist.
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