or on the side of anarchism, he would unhesitatingly choose the former.
Morris' apprehensions about anarchism were deep and instinctive. He dreaded the doctrine all the more because he agreed with Anarchists in a great measure in their general affirmation of freedom, and in their belief in voluntary as opposed to compulsory co-operation. But their denial of social authority and discipline, their strong assertion of individual rather than of social rights, their emphasis of the sovereignty or autonomy of the individual, and their constant tendency to view society as the enemy instead of the friend of man, and, while declaring men to be on the whole individually good and trustworthy, at the same time ceaselessly to rail against organised society as inherently wicked and tyrannical, were notions alien alike to his temperament and his reason. He had no patience with the idea that men, apart from the environment of society—its education, customs, and co-operation—were naturally unselfish, amiable, or God-like creatures; nor that 'free' from organised society they could attain any human eminence or happiness. Neither the 'freedom' of Rousseau's 'Man in a State of Nature,' nor that of Thoreau's 'Solitude in the Woods,' appealed to him. He saw that all things that pleased him in life—work, art, literature, fellowship, civic courage and social custom—were the outcome of men associating with, not of men separating themselves from, their fellows, either in work or woe.
In fine, he was a Socialist, not an Anarchist. He believed that man was a social being whose welfare depended on the welfare of Society and on his sharing in its common rights and freedom, not on his striving to assert his own separate powers or inclinations.
Nevertheless, Morris liked many of the Anarchists personally. He shared, as I have said, their desire for freedom as against all class or arbitrary rule. In many ways, too, he shared with men like Edward Carpenter and Bernard Shaw their disregard of habits and conventions
