So much for Socialism.
The individualist has a very different story to tell.
From the point of view of Individualism, however elaborate the structure of the society you erect, it can only, after all, be built up of individuals, and its whole worth must depend on the quality of those individuals.
If they are not fully developed and finely tempered by high responsibilities and perpetual struggles, all social effort is fruitless, it will merely degrade the individual to the helpless position of a parasite.
The individual is born alone; he must die alone; his deepest passions, his most exquisite tastes, are personal; in this world, or in any other world, all the activities of society cannot suffice to save his soul.
Thus it is that the individual must bear his own burdens, for it is only in so doing that the muscles of his body grow strong and that the energies of his spirit become keen. It is by the qualities of the individual alone that work is sound and that initiative is possible. All trade and commerce, every practical affair of life, depend for success on the personal ability of individuals.
6It is not only so in the everyday affairs of life, it is even more so on the highest planes of intellectual and spiritual life. The supreme great men of the race were termed by Carlyle its "heroes," by Emerson its "representative men," but, equally by the less and by the more democratic term, they are always individuals standing apart from society, often in violent opposition to it, though they have always conquered in the end. When any great person has stood alone against the world it has always been the world that lost. The strongest man, as Ibsen argued in his Enemy of the People, is the man who stands most alone. "He will be the greatest,"