Now it seems to me that a religious faith such as I have set forth in the second Book, and a clear sense of our community of blood with all mankind, must necessarily affect both our loving and our hatred.  It will certainly not abolish hate, but it will subordinate it altogether to love.  We are individuals, so the Purpose presents itself to me, in order that we may hate the things that have to go, ugliness, baseness, insufficiency, unreality, that we may love and experiment and strive for the things that collectively we seek—­power and beauty.  Before our conversion we did this darkly and with our hate spreading to persons and parties from the things for which they stood.  But the believer will hate lovingly and without fear.  We are of one blood and substance with our antagonists, even with those that we desire keenly may die and leave no issue in flesh or persuasion.  They all touch us and are part of one necessary experience.  They are all necessary to the synthesis, even if they are necessary only as the potato-peel in the dust-bin is necessary to my dinner.

So it is I disavow and deplore the whole spirit of class-war Socialism with its doctrine of hate, its envious assault upon the leisure and freedom of the wealthy.  Without leisure and freedom and the experience of life they gave, the ideas of Socialism could never have been born.  The true mission of Socialism is against darkness, vanity and cowardice, that darkness which hides from the property owner the intense beauty, the potentialities of interest, the splendid possibilities of life, that vanity and cowardice that make him clutch his precious holdings and fear and hate the shadow of change.  It has to teach the collective organization of society; and to that the class-consciousness and intense class-prejudices of the worker need to bow quite as much as those of the property owner.  But when I say that Socialism’s mission is to teach, I do not mean that its mission is a merely verbal and mental one; it must use all instruments and teach by example as well as precept.  Socialism by becoming charitable and merciful will not cease to be militant.  Socialism must, lovingly but resolutely, use law, use force, to dispossess the owners of socially disadvantageous wealth, as one coerces a lunatic brother or takes a wrongfully acquired toy from a spoilt and obstinate child.  It must intervene between all who would keep their children from instruction in the business of citizenship and the lessons of fraternity.  It must build and guard what it builds with laws and with that sword which is behind all laws.  Non-resistance is for the non-constructive man, for the hermit in the cave and the naked saint in the dust; the builder and maker with the first stroke of his foundation spade uses force and opens war against the anti-builder.

3.6.  The preliminary social duty.

The belief I have that contributing to the development of the collective being of man is the individual’s general meaning and duty, and the formulae of the Socialism which embodies this belief so far as our common activities go, give a general framework and direction how a man or woman should live. (I do throughout all this book mean man or woman equally when I write of “man,” unless it is manifestly inapplicable.)