Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - Socialism To-day (1909).djvu/11

sudden change owing to force, or a sudden change owing to legislative action? To me, the first is quite unthinkable. We can cut off kings' heads after a few battles; we can change a Monarchy into a Republic, we can deprive people of their titles, and we can make similar superficial alterations, by force; but nobody who understands the power of habit and of custom in human conduct, who appreciates the fact that by far and away the greater amount of our action is begun, controlled, and specified by the system of social inter-relationships in which we live, move, and have out being: and, still more, nobody who understands the delicate and intricate complexity of production and exchange which keeps modern Society going, will dream for a single moment of changing it by any act of violence. As soon as that act is committed, every vital force in Society will tend to re-establish the relationships which we have been trying to end, and, what is more, these vital forces will conquer us in the form of a violent reaction—a counter revolution. On the morrow of a sudden change we would be fish out of water, and the fish will wriggle back to the water. We have had many interesting disquisitions published from time to time and in many languages about what is to happen on the morrow of the revolution. But it seems to me that whoever writes with scientific faithfulness on this subject can describe but two things—the inability of the wisest to foresee the provisions required for carrying on Society, and the gathering together of natural forces to re-establish the old conditions. When we cut off a newt's tail, a newt's tail grows on again.

Will, then, the change be brought about by a revolutionary Act of the Legislature? This is equally unthinkable to me owing to the resistance of habits of thought and action. Far be it from me to imply that this resistance amounts to immobility. In every form of life there is what I may call an internal accumulation of forces making for change. When these forces are released by the care of the scientific experimenter or by happy accident, they produce what appear to be sudden changes. At the moment, a school of Biologists, small in numbers but supported by some remarkable results, is drawing our attention to the rapidity of certain changes in the evolution of species. The Mutation Theory, supported by De Vries, and the practical experiments in economic horticulture, conducted by Burbank, claim and prove that, under favourable conditions, organisms execute, at a leap, substantial changes which show no tendency to revert to pre-existing forms, but are as fixed as these
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