Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 July 1884 — Communism. [ARTICLE]

Communism.

The machinery of communism, like existing social machinery, has to be framed out of existing human nature; and the defects of existing ’human nature will generate in the one the same evils as in the other. The love of power, the selfishness, the injustice, the untruthfulness, which often in comparatively short times bring private organizations to disaster, will inevitably, where their effects accumulate from generation to generation, work evils far greater and less remediable; since, vast and complex and possessed of all the resources the administrative organization once developed and consolidated, they must become irresistible. And if there needs proof that the periodic exercise of electoral power would fail to prevent this, it suffices to instance the French Government, which, purely popular in origin, and subject from time to time to popular judgment, nevertheless tramples on the freedom of citizens to an extent which the English delegates to the late Trades Union Congress say “is a disgrace to, and an anomaly in, a republican nation. ” — Herbert Spencer, in the Contemporary Review.