The Profit of Reform
then proceed to give daily demonstrations of its miraculous omniscience, to say nothing of its omnipotence. Meanwhile, it is the duty of the faithful to build up the power of the State, to reduce the area of expression for baneful and heretical individualistic thought, so that when resistance to the State becomes fatuous there will be none competent to administer its grandeur properly except the learned bishops of the church.
For that reason we find socialists aligned with nonbelievers in the prosecution of reforms which promise to improve the power of the State. But they are not reformers. Their interest in reform stems from expediency; the reform is simply a tactical maneuver that fits in with their grand strategy.
The reformer is also a dedicated person, but the object of his devotion is not a completely revised political order, only a specific improvement in the going one. His enthusiasm may read panacea possibilities into his proposal, but he is primarily interested in correcting a specific evil, real or imaginary. He asks for a law, with necessary sanctions, that will compel people to change their wicked habits, that will effect social justice, that will abolish scarcities and create abundances, that will even harness wayward nature. Whatever it is that he hopes to achieve, his espousal is characterized by a strong sense of morality and the conviction that political power is the corrective moral instrument.
Whether or not the administration of the law, if the reformer succeeds in having it enacted, does produce the results he believed it would, or makes for evils worse than the one he sought to correct, the net effect is to increase political power, to weaken social power. The residuary legatee of all reforms is the State. So that the reformer turns out to be an 112
