But only less desirable as a citizen is his
nominal opponent and real ally, the man of fantastic vision who makes
the impossible better forever the enemy of the possible good.
We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme
individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism. Individual
initiative, so far from being discouraged, should be stimulated; and
yet we should remember that, as society develops and grows more
complex, we continually find that things which once it was desirable
to leave to individual initiative can, under the changed conditions,
be performed with better results by common effort. It is quite
impossible, and equally undesirable, to draw in theory a hard and fast
line which shall always divide the two sets of cases. This every one
who is not cursed with the pride of the closet philosopher will see,
if he will only take the trouble to think about some of our commonest
phenomena. For instance, when people live on isolated farms or in
little hamlets, each house can be left to attend to its own drainage
and water supply; but the mere multiplication of families in a given
area produces new problems which, because they differ in size, are
found to differ not only in degree but in kind from the old; and the
questions of drainage and water supply have to be considered from the
common standpoint.
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