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The brutal individualist falls into the same error into which despots fall when they declare war out of personal pique or tax the people to build themselves a pyramid, not discerning their country's interests, which they might have appropriated, from interests of their own which no one else can share.
But these imperial rescripts and these papal encyclicals because it is impossible to leap over or suppress the phases of the social evolution could only result abortively in our bourgeois, individualist and laissez faire world.
In his private life he was an individualist whose sympathies were limited to the narrow circle of his dependants; he was a trader and a financier whose humanitarian instincts were subordinated to a code of purely commercial morality, and who valued equity chiefly because it presented the line of least resistance and facilitated the conduct of his industrial operations.
The adoption of this principle of 'farming' had in fact led to gross abuses both in gaols and in workhouses; but it was, as I have said, in harmony with the whole 'individualist' theory. The committee recommended a different plan; and the result was the foundation of Millbank penitentiary, opened in 1816. Bentham ultimately received £23,000 by way of compensation in 1813.
Oscar Wilde stopped where the religion of Goethe began; he was far more of a pagan and individualist than the great German; he lived for the beautiful and extraordinary, but not for the Good and still less for the Whole; he acknowledged no moral obligation; in commune bonis was an ideal which never said anything to him; he cared nothing for the common weal; he held himself above the mass of the people with an Englishman's extravagant insularity and aggressive pride.
Nobody is such an individualist as the man who advocates equality!" Blake smiled. "That seems to sound all right," he said; "but it doesn't remove the lover." The good-humored scepticism at last forced a way to Billy's susceptibilities. "Look here," he said, crossly, "if hearing's not believing, perhaps seeing is! Look at these pictures; they're not particularly modern or banal."
To the eighteenth-century Liberal, to the old-fashioned nineteenth-century Liberal, that is to say to all professed Liberals, brought up to be against the Government on principle, this organised clairvoyance will be the most hateful of dreams. Perhaps, too, the Individualist would see it in that light. But these are only the mental habits acquired in an evil time.
Oscar Wilde stopped where the religion of Goethe began; he was far more of a pagan and individualist than the great German; he lived for the beautiful and extraordinary, but not for the Good and still less for the Whole; he acknowledged no moral obligation; "in commune bonis" was an ideal which never said anything to him; he cared nothing for the common weal; he held himself above the mass of the people with an Englishman's extravagant insularity and aggressive pride.
It is natural that in an individualist environment, a world of free competition, in which every individual sees in every other if not an adversary, at least a competitor, anti-social egoism should be the tendency which is inevitably most highly developed, as a necessary result of the instinct of self-preservation, especially in these latest phases of a civilization which seems to be driven at full steam, compared to the pacific and gentle individualism of past centuries.
We are all making our particular contribution to the common vision, and some of us are able to say in one way and some in another what this vision is; but it is going to take a supreme catholic, summing-up individualist, a great man or artist a man who is all of us in one to express for Crowds, and for all of us together, where we want to go, what we think we are for, and what kind of a world we want.
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