Harold J. Laski

His views, of course, were the natural expression of his own experience of life, and, without doubt, sincerely held; but they implied an inability imaginatively to understand alien experience which is pathetic in the limitation it involves.

And perhaps the supreme irony in the situation was the fact that to be tried as Communists was, for the defendants, perhaps the supreme test of truth to which their faith could be submitted.

When Plato, in the Laws, set out a revised version of his ideal policy for application to the real world about him, he surrendered his demand for the complete communism which had distinguished his Utopia.

But he was still emphatic enough about the need for equality to lay it down that no member of his state should possess property more than four times in amount of that owned by the poorest citizens.

Great economic inequalities are, as he saw, incompatible with a unity of interest in the community.

The lives of the few are too remote from the lives of the many for disagreement about social questions to be possible in terms of peace, if the ultimate organization of the society is not to be changed.

It is not only, as I have said, that men think differently who live differently; it is, essentially, that men think antagonistically who live so differently.

That antagonism is bound to result in violence unless the domination of the many by the few is almost complete, or is tempered by so continuous a flow of concession as results, in the end, in the effective mitigation of the inequality.

There cannot, in a word, be democratic government without equality; and without democratic government there cannot be freedom.

For the real meaning of democratic government is the equal weighing of individual claims to happiness by social institutions.

For the poor, their voluntary organizations evoke the same kind of impassioned loyalty as a nation struggling to be free is able to win from its members.

What Keir Hardie did for the miners of Ayrshire, what Sidney Hillman has done for the garment workers of America, are as epic and as creative, in their way, as the work of Garibaldi and Mazzini.

For me, at least, essentially that a society pervaded by the fact of unequality is bound to deny freedom and, therefore, to provoke conflict.

Its values will be so distorted, its apparatus for magnifying that distortion so complete, that it is blinded to the realities which confront it.

Think of the America of President Coleridge’s speeches, and the America as bitterly described by Mr Sinclair Lewis.

Remember that Treitzschke’s eulogy of blood and iron is a picture of the same Germany as that which Bebel and Liebkneckt sought to overthrow.

If we have a society of unequals, how can we agree either about means or ends?

And if this agreement is absent how can we, at least over a considerable period, hope to move on our way in peace?

An unequal society always lives in fear, and with a sense of impending disaster in its heart.

Everyone who seeks to penetrate below the surface sees some vast calamity ahead.

They fear the novelty and they seek to suppress it, in the belief that a bold front and an adequate severity will stem the tide of critical scepticism.

It is too late because the price of conciliation is the sacrifice of precisely the vested interests with which the government is in partnership.

So the ancient régime moves relentlessly to its destruction.

Their mental habits resemble nothing so much as the horrified timidity which persuaded Hobbes to find in despotism the only cure for social disagreement.

They are afraid of reason, for this involves an examination into their own prerogative and, as at least probable, a denunciation of the title by which it is preserved.