Functional socialism

98 FUNCTIONAL SOCIALISM

pictured various capitalist magnates daintily dangling from a row of lamp-posts. Sweetness and light nicely spiced with bloodthirstiness. This latter strain came, I suspect, from Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Most of us have mixed motives. Thus, a man may say that the great thing he wants he can’t have; therefore he will strive for the next best which he can have, if he bends himself to the task. The finer type aims high and won’t lower his target.

Did not he magnify the mind, show clear Just what it all meant?

He would not discount life, as fools do here, Paid by instalment.

It is in these mixed motives, particularly the almost universal willingness to accept the second best, that our rulers, not forgetting literary tapers and tadpoles, find some kind of balance and trend and so order our lives and their circulations. We may be sure, or darkness has for ever closed upon us, that, as we evolve a sane economy, so will our desires and ambitions rise in vision and quality. For the more secure our economic position, the greater the chance of our men and women to realize the best, happily no longer content with the second best. Our hungers, our wishes, our ambitions, are conditioned by the vicissitudes of life. In sheer physical scarcity, human nature may manifest itself in no alluring light; in the plenitude of a common wealth we may discover that man is only a little