If bishops carry the term off to one quarter, philosophers carry it to another. Some identify socialism with the associative principle generally, and see it manifested in the growth of one form of organization as much as in the growth of another, or at most they may limit it to the intervention of the associative principle in things industrial, and in that event they would consider a joint-stock company, or a co-operative store, or perhaps a building like Queen Anne's Mansions, or the common-stair system of Scotland, to be as genuine exhibitions of socialism as the collectivism or anarchism of the Continental factions or the State monopolies of Prince Bismarck. But a joint-stock company is no departure from—it is rather an extension of—the present régime of private property, free competition, and self-interest; and why should it be described by the same name as a system whose chief pretension is to supersede that régime by a better? Another very common definition of socialism—perhaps the most common of all, and the last to which I shall refer here—is that socialism is the general principle of giving society the greatest possible control over the life of the individual, in contradistinction to the opposite principle of individualism, which is taken to be the principle of giving the individual the greatest possible immunity from the control of society. Any extension of the authority of the State, any fresh regulation of the transactions of individual citizens, is often pronounced to be socialistic without asking what the object or nature of the regulations may be. Socialism is identified with any enlargement, and individualism with any contraction, of the functions of government. But the world has not been made on this socialist principle alone, nor on this individualist principle alone, and it can neither be explained nor amended by means of the one without the other. Abstractions of that order afford us little practical guidance. The socialists of real life are not men who are bent on increasing Government control for the mere sake of increasing Government control. There are broad tracts of the individual's life they would leave free from social control; they would give him, for example, full property in his house and furniture during his lifetime, and the right to spend his income, once he had earned it, in his own way. Their scheme, if carried out, might be found to compel them to restrict this latter right, but their own desire and belief undoubtedly is that the individual would have more freedom of the kind then than he has now. They seek to extend Government control only because, and only so far as, they believe Government control to be necessary and fitted to realize certain theories of right and well-being which they think it incumbent on organized society to realize; and consequently the thing that properly characterizes their position is not so much the degree of their confidence in the powers of the State as the nature of the theories of right for which they invoke its intervention. And just as socialists do not enlarge the bounds of authority from the mere love of authority, so their opponents do not resist the enlargement from the mere hatred of authority. They raise no controversy about the abstract legitimacy of Government encroachments on the sphere of private capital or of legal enlargements of the rights or privileges of labour. There is no socialism in that; the socialism only comes in when the encroachments are made on a field where Government administration is unlikely to answer, and where the rights conferred are rights to which labour can present no just and reasonable claim.

It will be objected that this is to reduce socialism to a mere matter of more or less. The English economists, it will be said, practised a little socialism, because they allowed the use of State means to elevate the condition of the working classes, or to provide for the wants of the general community; and the Continental Social Democrats only practise a little more socialism when they cry for a working-class State or for the progressive nationalization of all industries. But in practical life the measure is everything. So many grains of opium will cure; so many more will kill. The important thing for adjusting claims must always be to get the right measure, and the objection to socialistic schemes is precisely this, that they take up a theory of distributive justice which is an absolutely wrong measure, or else some vague theory of disinheritance which contains no measure at all. They would nationalize industries without paying any respect to their suitability for Government management, simply because they want to see all industries nationalized; and they would grant all manner of compensating advantages to the working class as instalments of some vague claim, either of economic right from which they are alleged to have been ousted by the system of capitalism, or of aboriginal natural right from which they are said to have been disinherited by the general arrangements of society itself. What distinguishes their position and makes it socialism is therefore precisely this absence of measure or of the right measure, and one great advantage of the English doctrine of social politics which I have expounded, is that it is able to supply this indispensable criterion. That doctrine would limit the industrial undertakings of the State to such as it possessed natural advantages for conducting successfully, and the State's part in social reform to securing for the people the essential conditions of all humane living, of all normal and progressive manhood. It would interfere, indeed, as little as possible with liberty of speculation, because it recognises that the best way of promoting social progress and prosperity is to multiply the opportunities, and with the opportunities the incentives, of talent and capital; but, while giving the strong their head, in the belief that they will carry on the world so far after them, it would insist on the public authority taking sharp heed that no large section of the common people be suffered to fall permanently behind in the race, to lose the very conditions of further progress, and to lapse into ways of living which the opinion of the time thinks unworthy of our common humanity. Now State socialism disregards these limits, straying generally far beyond them, and it may not improperly be defined as the system which requires the State to do work it is unfit to do in order to invest the working classes with privileges they have no right to get.

The term State socialism originated in Germany a few years ago to express the antithesis not of free, voluntary, or Christian socialism, as seems frequently to be imagined here, but of revolutionary socialism, which is always considered to be socialism proper, because it is the only form of the system that is of any serious moment at the present day. State socialism has the same general aims as socialism proper, only it would carry out its plans gradually by means of the existing State, instead of first overturning the existing State by revolution and establishing in its place a new political organization for the purpose, the Social Democratic Republic. There are socialists who fancy they have but at any moment to choose a government and issue a decree, as Napoleon once did—"Let misery be abolished this day fortnight"—and misery would be abolished that day fortnight. But the State socialists are unable to share this simple faith. They are State socialists not because they have more confidence in the State than other socialists, but because they have less. They consider it utterly futile to expect a democratic community ever to be able to create a political executive that should be powerful enough to carry through the entire socialistic programme. Like the Social Conservatives of all countries, like our own Young England party, for example, or the Tory Democrats of the present generation, they combine a warm zeal for popular amelioration with a profound distrust of popular government; but when compared with other socialists, they take a very sober view of the capacity of government of any kind; and although they believe implicitly in the "Social Monarchy of the Hohenzollerns," they doubt whether the strongest monarchy the world has ever seen would be strong enough to effect a socialistic reconstruction of the industrial system without retaining the existence for many centuries to come of the ancient institutions of private property and inheritance.

All that is at least very frankly acknowledged by Rodbertus, the remarkable but overrated thinker whom the State socialists of Germany have chosen for their father. Rodbertus was always regarded as a great oracle by Lassalle, the originator of the present socialist agitation, and his authority is constantly quoted by the most eminent luminary among the State socialists of those latter days, Professor Adolph Wagner, who says it was Rodbertus that first shed on him "the Damascus light that tore from his eyes the scales of economic individualism." Rodbertus had lived for a quarter of a century in a political sulk against the Hohenzollerns. Though he had served as a Minister of State, he threw up his political career rather than accept a constitution as a mere royal favour; he refused to work under it or recognise it by so much as a vote at the polls. But when the power of the Hohenzollerns became established by the victories of Königgrätz and Sedan, and when they embarked on their new policy of State socialism, Rodbertus developed into one of their most ardent worshippers. Their new social policy, it is true, was avowedly adopted as a corrective of socialism, as a kind of inoculation with a milder type of the disease in order to procure immunity from a more malignant; but Bismarck contended at the same time that it was nothing but the old traditional policy of the House of Prussia, who had long before placed the right of existence and the right of labour in the statute-book of the country, and whose most illustrious member, Frederick the Great, used to be fond of calling himself "the beggars' king." Under these circumstances Rodbertus came to place the whole hope of the future in the "Social Monarchy of the Hohenzollerns," and ventured to prophesy that a socialist emperor would yet be born to that House who would rule possibly with a rod of iron, but would always rule for the greatest good of the labouring class. Still, even under a dynasty of socialist emperors Rodbertus gave five hundred years for the completion of the economic revolution he contemplated, because he acknowledged it would take all that time for society to acquire the moral principle and habitual firmness of will which would alone enable it to dispense with the institutions of private property and inheritance without suffering serious injury.

In theory Rodbertus was a believer in the modern social democratic doctrine of the labourer's right to the full product of his labour—the doctrine which gives itself out as "scientific socialism," because it is got by combining a misunderstanding of Ricardo's theory of wages with a misunderstanding of the same economist's theory of value—and which would abolish rent, interest, profit, and all forms of "labourless income," and give the entire gross product to the labourer, because by that union of scientific blunders it is made to appear that the labourer has produced the whole product himself. Rodbertus, in fact, claimed to be the author of that doctrine, and fought for the priority with Marx, though in reality the English socialists had drawn the same conclusions from the same blunders long before either of them; but author or no author of it, his sole reason for touching the work of social reform at all was to get that particular claim of right recognised. Yet for five hundred years Rodbertus will not wrong the labourers by granting them their full rights. He admits that without the assistance of the private capitalist during that interval labourers would not produce so much work, and therefore could not earn so much wages as they do now; and consequently, in spite of his theories, he declines to suppress rent and interest in the meantime, and practically tells the labourers they must wait for the full product of labour till the time comes when they can produce the full product themselves. That is virtually to confess that while the claim may be just then, it is unjust now; and although Rodbertus never makes that acknowledgment, he is content to leave the claim in abeyance and to put forward in its place, as a provisional ideal of just distribution more conformable to the present situation of things, the claim of the labourer to a progressive share, step for step with the capitalist, in the results of the increasing productivity given to labour by inventions and machinery. He thought that at present, so far from getting the whole product of labour, the labourer was getting a less and less share of its products every day, and though this can be easily shown to be a delusive fear, Rodbertus's State socialism was devised to counteract it.

For this purpose the first requisite was the systematic management of all industries by the State. The final goal was to be State property as well as State management, but for the greater part of five centuries the system would be private property and State management. Sir Rowland Hill and the English railway nationalizers proposed that the State should own the lines, but that the companies should continue to work them; Rodbertus's idea, on the contrary, is that the State should work, but not own. But then the State should manage everything and everywhere. Co-operation and joint-stock management were as objectionable to him as individual management. He thought it a mere delusion to suppose, as some socialists did, that the growth of joint-stock companies and co-operative societies is a step in historical evolution towards a socialist régime. It was just the opposite; it was individual property in a worse form, and he always told his friend Lassalle that it was a hopeless dream to expect to bring in the reign of justice and brotherhood by his plan of founding productive associations on State credit, because productive societies really led the other way, and created batches of joint-stock property, which he said would make itself a thousand times more bitterly hated than the individual property of to-day. One association would compete with another, and the group on a rich mine would use their advantage over the group on a poor one as mercilessly as private capitalists do now. Nothing would answer the end but State property, and nothing would conduce to State property but State management.

The object of all this intervention, as we have said, is to realize a certain ideal or standard of fair wages—the standard according to which a fair wage is one that grows step by step with the productive capacity of the country; and the plan Rodbertus proposes to realize it by is practically a scheme of compulsory profit-sharing. He would convert all land and capital into an irredeemable national stock, of which the present owners would be constituted the first or original holders, which they might sell or transfer at pleasure but not call up, and on which they should receive, not a fixed rent or rate of interest, but an annual dividend varying with the produce or profits of the year. The produce of the year was to be divided into three parts: one for the landowners, to be shared according to the amount of stock they respectively held; a second for the capitalists, to be shared in the same way; and the third for the labourers, to be shared by them according to the quantity of work they did, measured by the time occupied and the relative strain of their several trades. This division was necessarily very arbitrary in its nature; there was no principle whatever to decide how much should go to the landowners, and how much to capitalists, and how much to labourers; and although there was a rule for settling the price of labour in one trade as compared with the price of labour in another, it is a rule that would afford very little practical guidance if one came to apply it in actual life. At all events, Rodbertus himself toiled for years at a working plan for his scheme of wages, but though he always gave out that he had succeeded in preparing one, he steadily refused to disclose it even to trusted admirers like Lassalle and Rudolph Meyer, on the singular pretext that the world knew too little political economy as yet to receive it, and at his death nothing of the sort seems to have been discovered among his papers. Is it doing him any injustice to infer that he had never been able to arrive at a plan that satisfied his own mind as to its being neither arbitrary nor impracticable?

Now this is a good specimen of State socialism, because it is so complete and brings out so decisively the broad characteristics of the system. In the first place, it desires a progressive and indiscriminate nationalization of all industries, not because it thinks they will be more efficiently or more economically managed in consequence of the change, but merely as a preliminary step towards a particular scheme of social reform; in the next place, that scheme of social reform is an ideal of equitable distribution which is demonstrably false, and is admittedly incapable of immediate realization; in the third place, a provisional policy is adopted in the meanwhile by pitching arbitrarily on a certain measure of privileges and advantages that are to be guaranteed to the labouring classes by law as partial instalments of rights deferred or compensations for rights alleged to be taken away.

It may be that not many State socialists are so thoroughgoing as Rodbertus. Few of them possibly accept his theory of the labourer's right—which is virtually that the labourer has a right to everything, all existing wealth being considered merely an accumulation of unpaid labour—and few of them may throw so heavy a burden on the State as the whole production and the whole distribution of the country. But they all start from some theory of right that is just as false, and they all impose work on the State which the State cannot creditably perform. They all think of the mass of mankind as being disinherited in one way or another by the present social system, perhaps through the permission of private property at all, perhaps through permission of its inequalities. M. de Laveleye, indeed, goes a step further back still. In an article he has contributed on this subject to the Contemporary Review, he uses as his motto the saying of M. Renan that Nature is injustice itself, and he would have society to correct not merely the inequalities which society may have itself had a share in establishing, but also the inequalities of talent or opportunity which are Nature's own work. Accordingly, M. de Laveleye describes himself as a State socialist, because he thinks "the State ought to make use of its legitimate powers for the establishment of the equality of conditions among men in proportion to their personal merit." Equality of conditions and personal merit are inconsistent standards, but if they were harmonious, it would be beyond the power of the State to realize them for want of an effective calculus of either.

Few State socialists, however, profess the purpose of correcting the differences of native endowment; for the most part, when they found their policy on any theoretic idea at all, they found it on some idea of historical reparation. In this country, socialist notions always crop up out of the land. German socialists direct their attack mainly on capital, but English socialism fastens very naturally on property in land, which in England is concentrated into unnaturally few hands: and a claim is very commonly advanced for more or less indefinite compensation to the labouring class on account of their alleged disinheritance, through the institution of private property, from their aboriginal or natural rights to the use of the earth, the common possession of the race. That is the ground, for example, which Mr. Spencer takes for advocating land nationalization, and Mr. Chamberlain for his various claims for "ransom." The last-comer is held to have as good a right to the free use of the earth as the first occupant; and if society deprives him of that right for purposes of its own, he is maintained to be entitled to receive some equivalent, as if society does not already give the new-comer vastly more than it took away. His chances of obtaining a decent living in the world, instead of being reduced, have been immensely multiplied through the social system that has resulted from the private appropriation of land. The primitive economic rights whose loss socialists make the subject of so much lamentation are generally considered to be these four: (1) the right to hunt; (2) the right to fish; (3) the right to gather nuts and berries; and (4) the right to feed a cow or sheep on the waste land. Fourier added a fifth—which was certainly a right much utilized in early times—the right of theft from people over the border of the territory of one's own tribe. Let that right be thrown in with the rest; then the claim with which every English child is alleged to be born, and for which compensation is asked, is the claim to a thirty-millionth part of the value of these five aboriginal uses of the soil of England; and what is that worth? Why, if the "prairie value" of the soil is estimated at the high figure of a shilling the acre per annum, it would only give every inhabitant something under half a crown, and when compensation is demanded for the loss of this ridiculous pittance, one calls to mind what immensely greater compensations the modern child is born to. Civilization is itself a social property, a common fund, a people's heritage, accumulating from one generation to another, and opening to the new-comer economic opportunities and careers incomparably better and more numerous than the ancient liberties of fishing in the stream or nutting in the forest. The things actually demanded for the poor in liquidation of this alleged claim may often be admissible on other grounds altogether, but to ask them in the name of compensation for the loss of those primitive economic rights—even though it was done by Spencer or Cobden—is certainly State socialism.

Mr. Chamberlain's famous "ransom" speeches are an example of that. There was nothing socialist about the substance of his proposals. He expressly disclaimed all sympathy with the idea of equality of conditions; he hesitated about applying the graduated taxation principle to anything but legacies; he explicitly said he would do nothing to discourage the cumulative principle in the rich, or the habit of industry in the poor; he asked mainly for free schools, free libraries, free parks, and other things of a like character; but then he asked for them as a penalty for wrong-doing, instead of an obligation of ability—as a ransom to be paid by the rich, or by society generally, for having ousted the poor out of their aboriginal rights. Mr. Chamberlain merely pled for useful social reforms in a socialistic spirit.

The favourite theory on which the German State socialists proceed seems to be that men are entitled to an equalization of opportunities, to an immunity, as far as human power can secure it, from the interposition of chance and change. That at least is the view of Professor Adolph Wagner, whose position on the subject is of considerable consequence, because he is the economist-in-ordinary to the German Government, and has been Prince Bismarck's principal adviser in connection with all his recent social legislation. Professor Wagner may be taken as the most eminent and most authoritative exponent of the theory of State socialism, and he recently developed his views on the subject afresh in some articles in the Tübingen Zeitschrift für die Gesammten Staatswissenschaften for 1887, on "Finanz-politik und Staatsozialismus." According to Wagner, the chief aim of the State at present—in taxation and in every other form of its activity—ought to be to alter the national distribution of wealth to the advantage of the working class. All politics must become social politics; the State must turn workman's friend. For we have arrived at a new historical period; and just as the feudal period gave way to the absolutist period, and the absolutist period to the constitutional, so now the constitutional period is merging in what ought to be called the social period, because social ideas are very properly coming more and more to influence and control everything, alike in the region of production, in the region of distribution, and in the region of consumption. Now, according to Wagner, the business of the State socialist is simply to facilitate the development of this change—to work out the transition from the constitutional to the social epoch in the best, wisest, and most wholesome way for all parties concerned. He rejects the so-called "scientific socialism" of Marx and Rodbertus and Lassalle, and the practical policy of the social democratic agitation; and he will not believe either that a false theory like theirs can obtain a lasting influence, or that a party that builds itself on such a theory can ever become a real power. But, at the same time, he cannot set down the socialistic theory as a mere philosophical speculation, or the socialistic movement as merely an artificial product of agitation. The evils of both lie in the actual situation of things; they are products—necessary products, he says—of our modern social development; and they will never be effectually quieted till that development is put on more salutary lines. They have a soul of truth in them, and that soul of truth in the doctrines and demands of radical socialism is what State socialism seeks to disengage, to formulate, to realize. It is quite true, for example, that the present distribution of wealth, with its startling inequalities of accumulation and want, is historically the effect, first, of class legislation and class administration of law; and second, of mere blind chance operating on a legal régime of private property and industrial freedom, and a state of the arts which gave the large scale of production decided technical advantages. In one of his former writings, Professor Wagner contended that German peasants lived to this day in mean thatched huts, simply because their ancestors had been impoverished by feudal exactions and ruined by wars which they had no voice in declaring; and he seems to be now as profoundly impressed with the belief that the present liberty allowed to unscrupulous speculators to utilize the chances and opportunities of trade at the cost of others is producing evils in no way less serious, which ought to be checked effectively while there is yet time. So long as such tendencies are left at work, he says it is idle trying to treat socialism with any cunning admixture of cakes and blows, or charging State socialists with heating the oven of social democracy. State socialists, he continues, comprehend the disease which Radical socialists only feel wildly and call down fire to cure, and they are as much opposed to the purely working-class State of the latter, as they are to the purely constitutional State of our modern Liberalismus vulgaris, as Wagner calls it.

The true Social State lies, in his opinion, between the two. What the new social era demands—the era which is already, he thinks, well in course of development, but which it is the business of State socialism to help Providence to develop aright—is the effective participation of poor and rich alike in the civilization which the increased productive resources of society afford the means of enjoying; and this is to be brought about in two ways: first, by a systematic education of the whole people according to a well-planned ideal of culture, and second, by a better distribution of the income of society among the masses. Now, to carry out these requirements, the idea of liberty proper to the constitutional era must naturally be finally discarded, and a very large hand must be allowed to the public authority in every department of human activity, whether relating to the production, distribution, or consumption of wealth. In the first place, in order to destroy the effect of chance and of the utilization of chances in creating the present accumulations in private hands, it is necessary to divert into the public treasury as far as possible the whole of that part of the national income which goes now, in the form of rent, interest, or profit, into the pockets of the owners of land and capital, and the conductors of business enterprises. Wagner would accordingly nationalize (or municipalize) gradually so much of the land, capital, and industrial undertakings of the country as could be efficiently managed as public property or public enterprises, and that would include all undertakings which tend to become monopolies even in private hands, or which, being conducted best on the large scale, are already managed under a form of organization which, in his opinion, has most of the faults and most of the merits of State management—viz., the form of joint-stock companies. He would in this way throw on the Government all the great means of communication and transport, railways and canals, telegraphs and post, and all banking and insurance; and on the municipalities all such things as the gas, light, and water supply. Although he recognises the suitability of Government management as a consideration to be weighed in nationalizing an industry, he states explicitly that the reason for the change he proposes is not in the least the fiscal or economic one that the industry can be more advantageously conducted by the Government, but is a theory of social politics which requires that the whole economic work of the people ought to be more and more converted from the form of private into the form of public organization, so that every working man might be a public servant and enjoy the same assured existence that other public servants at present possess.

In the next place, since many industries must remain in private hands, the State is bound to see the existence of the labourers engaged in private works guaranteed as securely as those engaged in public works. It must take steps to provide them with both an absolute and a relative increase of wages by instituting a compulsory system of paying wages as a percentage of the gross produce; it must guarantee them a certain continuity of employment; must limit the hours of their labour to the length prescribed by the present state of the arts in the several trades; and supply a system of public insurance against accidents, sickness, infirmity, and age, together with a provision for widows and orphans.

In the third place, all public works are to be managed on the socialistic principle of supplying manual labourers with commodities at a cheaper rate than their social superiors. They are to have advantages in the matters of gas and water supply, railway fares, school fees, and everything else that is provided by the public authority.

In the fourth place, taxation is to be employed directly to mitigate the inequalities of wealth resulting from the present commercial system, and to save and even increase the labourer's income at the expense of the income of other classes. This is to be done by the progressive income-tax, and by the application of the product of indirect taxation on certain articles of working-class consumption to special working-class ends. For example, he thinks Prince Bismarck's proposed tobacco monopoly might be made "the patrimony of the disinherited."

In the fifth place, the State ought to take measures to wean the people not only from noxious forms of expenditure, like the expenditure on strong drink, but from useless and wasteful expenditure, and to guide them into a more economic, far-going, and beneficial employment of the earnings they make.

Now for all this work, involving as it does so large an amount of interference with the natural liberty of things, Wagner not unreasonably thinks that a strong Government is absolutely indispensable—a Government that knows its own mind, and has the power and the will to carry it out; a Government whose authority is established on the history and opinion of the nation, and stands high above all the contending political factions of the hour. And in Germany, such an executive can only be found in the present Empire, which is merely following "Frederician and Josephine traditions" in coming forward, as it did in the Imperial message of November, 1881, as a genuine "social monarchy."

In this doctrine of Professor Wagner we find the same general features we have already seen in the doctrine of Rodbertus. It is true he would not nationalize all industries whatsoever; he would only nationalize such industries as the State is really fit to manage successfully. He admits that uneconomic management can never contribute to the public good, and so far he accepts a very sound principle of limitation. But then he applies the principle with too great laxity. He has an excessive idea of the State's capacities. He thinks that every business now conducted by a joint-stock company could be just as well conducted by the Government, and ought therefore to be nationalized; but experience shows—railway experience, for example—that joint-stock management, when it is good, is better than Government management at its best. Then Professor Wagner thinks every industry which has a natural tendency to become in any case a practical monopoly would be better in the hands of the Government; but Government might interfere enough to restrain the mischiefs of monopoly—as it does in the case of railways in this country, for example—without incurring the liabilities of complete management. Professor Wagner would in these ways throw a great deal of work on Government which Government is not very fit to accomplish successfully, and he would like to throw everything on it, if he could overcome his scruples about its capabilities, because he thinks industrial nationalization would facilitate the realization of his particular views of the equitable distribution of wealth. It is true, again, that Wagner's theory of equitable distribution is not the theory of Rodbertus—he rejects the right of labour to the whole product; but his theory, if less definite, is not less unjustifiable. It is virtually the theory of equality of conditions which considers all inequalities of fortune wrong, because they are held to come either from chance, or—what is worse—from an unjust utilization of chance, and which, on that account, takes comparative poverty to constitute of itself a righteous claim for compensation as against comparative wealth. Now, a state of enforced equality of conditions would probably be found neither possible nor desirable, but it is in its very conception unjust. It may be well, as far as it can be done, to check refined methods of deceit, or cruel utilizations of an advantageous position, but it can never be right to deprive energy, talent, and character of the natural reward and incentive of their exertions. The world would soon be poor if it discouraged the skill of the skilful, as it would soon cease to be virtuous if it ostracized those who were pre-eminently honest or just. The idea of equality has been a great factor in human progress, but it requires no such outcome as this. Equality is but the respect we owe to human dignity, and that very respect for human dignity demands security for the fruits of industry to the successful, and security against the loss of the spirit of personal independence in the mass of the people. But while that is so, there is one broad requirement of that same fundamental respect for human dignity which must be admitted to be wholly just and reasonable—the requirement which we have seen to have been recognised by the English economists—that the citizens be, as far as possible, secured, if necessary by public compulsion and public money, in the elementary conditions of all humane living. The State might not be right if it gave the aged a comfortable superannuation allowance, or the unemployed agreeable work at good wages; but it is only doing its duty when, with the English law, it gives them enough to keep them, without taking away from the one the motives for making a voluntary provision against age, or from the other the spur to look out for work for themselves.

It will be said that this is a standard that is subject to a certain variability; that a house may be considered unfit for habitation now that our fathers would have been fain to occupy; that shoes seem an indispensable element of humane living now, though, as Adam Smith informs us, they were still only an optional decency in some parts of Scotland in his time. But differences of this nature lead to no practical difficulty, and the standard is fixity of measure itself when compared with the indefinite claims that may be made in the name of historical compensation, or wild theories of distributive justice, and it makes a wholesome appeal to recognised obligations of humanity instead of feeding a violent sense of unbounded hereditary wrong. At all events, it presents the true equality—equality of moral rights—over against the false equality of State socialism—equality of material conditions; and it is able to present a better face against that system, because it recognises a certain measure of material conditions among the original moral rights. For this reason the English theory of social politics is the best practical criterion for discriminating between socialistic legislation and wholesome social reforms. The State socialistic position cannot be advantageously attacked from the ground of Mr. Spencer and the adherents of laissez-faire, who merely say, Let misfortune and poverty alone; whether remediable or irremediable, they are not the State's affairs. The two theories nowhere come within range; but the English theory meets State socialism at every point, almost hand to hand, for it admits the State's competency to deal with poverty and misfortune, and to alter men's material conditions to the extent needed for the practical realization of their full moral rights.

III. State Socialism and Social Reform.

On this English theory of social politics, the State, though not socialist, is very frankly social reformer, and those schools of opinion, which are usually thought to have been most averse to Government intervention, have been among the most earnest in pressing that rôle upon the State. Cobden, I presume, may be taken as a fair representative of the Manchester school, and Cobden, with all his love of liberty, loved progress more, and thought the best Government was the Government that did most for social reform. When he visited Prussia in 1838, he was struck with admiration at the paternal but improving rule he found in operation there. "I very much suspect," he said, "that at present for the great mass of the people Prussia possesses the best Government in Europe. I would gladly give up my taste for talking politics, to secure such a state of things in England. Had our people such a simple and economical Government, so deeply imbued with justice to all, and aiming so constantly to elevate mentally and morally its population, how much better would it be for the twelve or fifteen millions in the British Empire, who, while they possess no electoral rights, are yet persuaded they are freemen!" So far from thinking, as the Manchester man of polemics is always made to think, that the State goes far enough when it secures to every man liberty to pursue his own interest his own way, as long as he does not interfere with the corresponding right of his neighbours, the Manchester man of reality takes the State severely to task for neglecting to promote the mental and moral elevation of the people; the chief end of Government being to establish not liberty alone, but every other necessary security for rational progress. The theory of laissez-faire would of course permit measures required for the public safety, but what Cobden calls for are measures of social amelioration. Provisions for the better protection of person and property, as they exist, against violence or fraud, make up but a small part of legitimate State duty, compared with provisions for their better development, for enlarging the powers of the national manhood, or the product of the national resources. The institution of property itself is a provision for progress, and could never have originated under the system of laissez-faire, which now makes it a main branch of State work to defend it. In the form of permanent and exclusive possession, it is undoubtedly a contravention of the equal freedom of all to the use of their common inheritance, committed for the purpose of securing their more productive use of it. It interferes with their access to the land, and with the equality of their opportunities, but then it enhances and concentrates the energies of the occupants, and it doubles the yield of the soil. It promotes two objects, which are quite as paramount concerns of the State as liberty itself—it improves the industrial manhood of the nation, and it increases the productivity of the natural resources; and institutions that conduce to such results are not really infractions of liberty, but rather complements of it, because they give people an ampler use of their own powers, and create, by means of the increase of production they work, more and better opportunities than those they take away.

Now the lines of legitimate intervention prescribed by the necessities of progress, and already followed in the original institution of property, will naturally, when extended through our complicated civilization, include a very considerable and varied field of social and industrial activity, and this has been all along recognised by the English economists and statesmen. While opposed to the State doing anything either moral or material for individuals, which individuals could do better, or with better results, for themselves, they agreed in requiring the State, first, to undertake any industrial work it had superior natural advantages for conducting successfully; and second, to protect the weaker classes effectively in the essentials of all rational and humane living—in what Adam Smith calls "an undeformed and unmutilated manhood"—not only against the ravages of violence or fear or insecurity, but against those of ignorance, disease, and want. Smith, we know, would even save them from cowardice by a system of military training, and from fanaticism by an established Church, because, he said, cowardice and fanaticism were as great deformities of manhood as ignorance or disease, and prevented a man from having command of himself and his own powers quite as effectually as violence or oppression. Laws which give every man better command and use of his own energies are in manifest harmony with liberty, and for the State to do such industrial work as it has special natural advantages for doing is conformable with the principle of free-trade itself, which has always prescribed to men and nations as the best rule for their prosperity, that they should concentrate their strength on the branches of industry they possess natural advantages for cultivating, and give up wasting their labour on less productive employment. Mr. Chamberlain is certainly wrong in thinking over-government an extinct danger under democratic institutions, a mere survival from times of oppression which haunts the people still, though they are their own masters, with foolish fears of over-governing themselves. In reality, the danger has much more probably increased, as John Stuart Mill believed, for if we cannot over-govern ourselves, we can very easily and cheerfully over-govern one another, and a majority may impose its brute will with even less scruple than a monarch; but however that may be, those who tremble most sincerely for the ark of liberty cannot see any undue contraction of the field of individual action in an extension of authority for either of the two purposes here specified, for the purpose of undertaking industrial work which private initiative cannot prosecute so advantageously, or of making more secure to the weaker citizens those primary conditions of normal humanity, which are really their natural right. The first of these purposes is quite consistent with the principles of men like W. von Humboldt, who contend that the best means of national prosperity is the cultivation to the utmost of the individual energy of the people, and who are opposed to Government interference because it represses or supplants that energy. They welcome everything that tends to economize and develop energy, to place things in the hands of those that can do them best, and generally to increase the productive capacity of the whole community. They believe that machinery, division of labour, factory systems, keenest conditions of competition, however they may at first seem to contract men's opportunities of employment, always end in multiplying them, and, because they increase or economize the productive powers of those actually employed, really expand the field of employment for all. Now Government management would of course have a like operation wherever Government management effected a like economy or increase in the productive powers of society, and would really expand the field of individual initiative which it appeared to contract; and those who believe most in individual energy and its power of seeking out for itself the most advantageous new outlets, will find least to complain of in an intervention of authority which releases men from work ill-suited to their powers to do, and sends them into work where their powers can be more fruitfully occupied.

The second purpose of legitimate intervention seems even less open to objection from that side. The State is asked to go in social reform only as far as it goes in judicial administration—it is asked to secure for every man as effectively as it can those essentials of all rational and humane living which are really every man's right, because without them he would be something less than man, his manhood would be wanting, maimed, mutilated, deformed, incapable of fulfilling the ends of its being. Those original requirements of humane existence are dues of the common nature we wear, which, we cannot see extinguished in others without an injury to our own self-respect, and the State is bound to provide adequate securities for one of them as much as for another. The same reason which justified the State at first in protecting person and property against violence, justified it yesterday in abolishing slavery, justifies it to-day in abolishing ignorance, and will justify it to-morrow in abolishing other degrading conditions of life. The public sense of human dignity may grow from age to age and be offended to-morrow by what it tolerates to-day, but the principle of sound intervention is all through the same—that the proposed measure is necessary to enable men to live the true life of a man and fulfil the proper ends of rational being. A thoughtful French writer defends State intervention for the purpose of social amelioration as being a mere duty of what he calls reparative justice. Popular misery and decadence, he would say, is always very largely the result of bad laws and other bad civil conditions, as we see it plainly to have been in the case of the Irish cottiers, the Scotch crofters, and the rural labourers of England, and when the community has really inflicted the injury, the community is bound in the merest justice to repair it. And the obligation would not be exhausted with the repeal of bad laws; it would require the positive restoration to the declining populations of the conditions of real prosperity from which they fell. But though this is a specific ground which may occasionally quicken the State's remedial action with something of the energy of remorse, it is no extension of its natural and legitimate sphere of intervention, and the State might properly take every measure necessary for the effectual restoration of a declining section of the population to conditions of real prosperity on the broad and simple principle already laid down, that the measure is necessary to put those people in a position to fulfil their vocation as human beings. Hopeless conditions of labour are as contrary to sound nature, and as fatal to any proper use of man's energies, as slavery itself, and their mere existence constitutes a sufficient cause for the State's intervention, apart from any special responsibility the State may bear for their historical origin. Even the measure of the required intervention is no way less, for if its purpose is to preserve some essential of full normal manhood, its only limit is that of being effectual to serve the purpose. The original natural obligation of the State needs no expansion then from historical responsibilities to cover any effectual form of remedial action against the social decadence of particular classes of the population, whether it be the constitution of a new right like the right to a fair rent, the adoption of administrative measures like the migration of redundant inhabitants, or the provision of wise facilities for the rest by the loan of public money.

It is plain, therefore, that we have here within the lines of accepted and even "orthodox" English theory a doctrine of social politics which gives the Government an ample and perfectly adequate place in the promotion of all necessary social reform; and if we are all socialists now, as is so often said, it is not because we have undergone any change of principles on social legislation, but only a public awakening to our social miseries. The Churches, for example, while they left Lord Shaftesbury to fight his battles for the helpless alone, have now shared in this social awakening, and show not only a general ardour to agitate social questions, but even some pains to understand them; but the Churches did not neglect Lord Shaftesbury fifty years ago, because they thought his Factory Bills proceeded from unsound views of the State's functions, but merely because their interest was not then sufficiently aroused in the temporal welfare of the poor, and with all their individual charities they responded little to the grievances of social classes. We are all socialists now, only in feeling as much interest in these grievances as the socialists are in the habit of doing, but we have not departed from our old lines of social policy, and there is no need we should, for they are broad enough to satisfy every claim of sound social reform.

It is only when these lines are transgressed that, strictly speaking, socialism begins; and though it is hopeless to think of confining the vulgar use of the word to its strict signification, it is at least essential to do so if we desire any clear or firm grasp of principle. The socialism of the present time extends the State's intervention from those industrial undertakings it is fitted to manage well to all industrial undertakings whatever, and from establishing securities for the full use of men's energies to attempting to equalize in some way the results of their use of them. It may be shortly described as aiming at the progressive nationalization of industries with a view to the progressive equalization of incomes. The common pleas for this policy are, first, the necessity of introducing a distribution of wealth more in accordance with personal merit by neutralizing the effects of chance, which at present throw some into opulence without any co-operation from their own labour, and press thousands into penury in spite of their most honest exertions; and second, the advantage society would reap from the mere economy of the resources at present wasted in unnecessary competition. Both pleas are, however delusive; it is neither good nor possible to suppress chance, and if competition involves some loss, it yields a much more abounding gain.

A sense of the blind play of chance in all things human lies indeed beneath all work of social relief. "Hodie mihi, cras tibi," wrote the good Regent Murray over his lintel to avert the grudge of envy, and the same feeling of the uncertainty of fortune quickens the thought of pity. Men reflect how much of their own comfort they owe to good circumstances rather than good deserts, and how much more bad circumstances have often to do with poverty than bad guiding. To change these bad conditions so far as to preserve for every man intact the essentials of common progressive manhood is a proper object of social work. But while mitigating the operation of chance to that extent is well, to try and suppress its operation altogether would be injurious, even if it were possible. For there is no pursuit under the sun in which chance has not its part as well as skill, and skill itself is often nothing but a quick grasp of happy chance. To discourage the alert from seizing good opportunities on the wing, by confiscating the results and distributing them among the languid and inactive, is the same thing as to discourage them by like means from exerting all their industry in any other way. It violates their individual right with no better effect than to cripple the national production. They are entitled to the best conditions for the successful use of their individual energies, and the best conditions for the use of individual energies are the true securities for national progress. The sound policy is not the greater equalization of opportunities, but their greater utilization. It may be right to make ships seaworthy and their masters competent navigators, but if one of them gets delayed in a calm or disabled by a storm, while another has caught a fair wind and is carried on to port, it would answer no good purpose to equalize their gains for the mere correction of the inequality in their opportunities. It would relax in both masters alike the supreme essentials of all successful labour—activity, vigilance, enterprise. State action with respect to the quips and arrows of fortune ought to go as far but no farther than State action with respect to the crimes and hostilities of men, or with respect to evil forces of nature like those of infectious diseases—it ought to content itself with effectually protecting the primary conditions of sound manhood against their outrages. It may do what it can, not merely to relieve the unfortunate in their extremity, but to prevent their coming to extremity, to arrest, if possible, their decline, to check or soften the trade fluctuations that often swamp them, and to facilitate their self-recovery; but, when it goes on to suppress or equalize the operation of fortune, it destroys the good with the evil, and even if it removed the tares, would find it had only spoiled the harvest of wheat. The present industrial system has its defects, but it certainly has one immense advantage which would be forfeited under socialism—it tends to elicit to their utmost the talents and energies alike of employers and employed. The languor of the "Government stroke" and the slow mechanism of a State department are unfavourable to an abundant production. The general slackening of industry, and the extinction of those innumerable sources of active initiative which at present are so busy pushing out new and fruitful developments, are too great a price to pay for the suppression of the evils of competition. To effect some economies in the use of capital, we damage or destroy the forces by which capital is produced, and really lose the pound to save the penny.

Even from the standing-point of a good distribution of wealth, if by a good distribution we mean, not an equal distribution of the produce, however small the individual share, but, what is surely much better, a high general level of comfort, though considerable inequalities may remain, then an abundant production is still the most indispensable thing, for it is the most certain of all means to that high general level of comfort. Even in those agricultural countries where this result is promoted by a land system favouring peasant properties, the result is largely due to the fact that occupying ownership is itself the best condition for high production; and if we compare the principal modern industrial nations, we shall find labour enjoying the best real remuneration in those where the rate of production is highest, where employers are most competent, machinery most perfected, and labour itself personally most efficient. And, on the other hand, while the general level of comfort rises under a policy that develops productivity even at the risk of widening inequality, the general level of comfort always sinks under the contrary policy which sacrifices productivity to socialistic ideas and claims.

We have practical experience of the working of socialism in various forms, and under the most opposite conditions of culture, and the experience is everywhere the same. Custom in Samoa, for example, gives a man a pretty strict right to go to his neighbour and requisition what he wants, or even to quarter himself in the house without payment, as long as he pleases. No one dares to refuse, for fear of losing credit and suffering reproach. Originating as a well-meant refuge for the distressed, the system has become still more a subterfuge for the lazy, and Dr. Turner sums up his account of it by saying, "This communistic system is a sad hindrance to the industrious, and eats like a canker-worm at the roots of individual and national progress." The disheartening of the industrious has an even worse effect than the encouragement of the indolent; the more they make, the more subject they are to the imposition. The English agricultural labourers belong to a very different state of society from the savages of Samoa. They are of an energetic race, which if it does not positively love work, has probably as little aversion to it as any nation in the world, and seems often really to delight in the hardest exertion; but in England the effect of giving the poor a similar socialistic right was precisely the same as in Samoa. While we are supposed to have been advancing in socialism with our Factory Acts, we were really retreating from it in our Poor Law. The old English laws which for centuries first fixed labourers' wages, and then made up the deficiencies of the wages, if such occurred, out of the poor rates, were certainly socialistic, and the commission that inquired into their working sixty years ago reported that their worst effect had been to make the labourers such poor workers that they were hardly worth the wages they got. The men were by law unable to earn more if they worked more, or to lose anything if they worked less, and so their very working powers drooped and withered. As most modern socialists put their trust entirely in the old motive of self-interest, and propose to pay every man according to his work, their only resource against such a result would be a stern system of poor-law administration, like the English, and that would of course involve a departure from their favourite ideal of furnishing the dependent poor with as decent and comfortable a living as the independent poor gain for themselves by their work. The change from Samoa to rural England is probably not so great as the change from rural England to Brook Farm and the other experimental communities of the United States, companies of cultivated and earnest people, coming from one of the best civilized stocks, and settling under the favourable material conditions of a new country for the very purpose of working out a socialist ideal. Yet in these American communities, socialistic institutions led to precisely the same results as they did in England and in Samoa, a slackening of industry, and a deterioration of the general level of comfort. No doubt, as Horace Greeley said, who knew these communities well, and lived for a time in more than one of them, there came to them along with the lofty souls, who are willing to labour and endure, "scores of whom the world is quite worthy, the conceited, the crotchety, the selfish, the headstrong, the pugnacious, the unappreciated, the played-out, the idle, the good-for-nothing generally, who, finding themselves utterly out of place, and at a discount in the world as it is, rashly conclude that they are exactly fitted for the world as it ought to be." But the proportion of difficult subjects would not be larger in Brook Farm or New Harmony than it is in the ordinary world outside, and in these communities they would be under the constant influence of leaders of the highest character and an almost religious enthusiasm. If the new and better economic motives, which romantic socialists like Mr. Bellamy always assure us are to carry us to such great things as soon as the suppression of the present pecuniary motive allows them to rise into operation—if the love of work for its own sake, the sense of public duty, the desire of public appreciation, could be expected to prevail anywhere to any purpose, it would be among the gifted and noble spirits who founded the community of Brook Farm. But the late W. H. Channing, who was a member of the community and looked back upon it with the tenderest feelings, explains its failure by saying: "The great evil, the radical, practical danger, seemed to be a willingness to do work half thorough, to rest in poor results, to be content amidst comparatively squalid conditions, and to form habits of indolence."[8]

The idleness of the idle was one of the chief standing troubles in all the socialistic experiments of the United States. Mr. Noyes gives us an account of forty-seven communistic experiments which had been made under modern socialist influences in the United States and had failed, while Mr. Nordhoff, on the other hand, furnishes a like account of seventy-two communities, established mainly under religious influences (fifty-eight of them belonging to the Shakers alone), which have been not merely social but economic successes, some of them for more than a hundred years; and one is struck with the degree in which the idler difficulty has contributed to the failure of the forty-seven, and in which the continual and comparatively successful conflict with that difficulty by means of their peculiar system of religious discipline has aided in the success of the other seventy-two. Mr. Noyes is himself founder of the Oneida community, and bases his descriptions of the rest on information supplied by men who were members of the communities he describes, or on the materials collected by Mr. Macdonald, a Scotch Owenite, who visited most of the American communities for the purpose of describing them. No causes of failure are more often mentioned by him than "too many idlers" and "bad management." Not that industry was relaxed all round. On the contrary, it seems to have been a peculiarity of the Owenite and Fourierist communities, that the industrious wrought much harder (and in most of them for much poorer fare) than labourers of ordinary life. Macdonald was surprised at the marvellous industry he saw as he watched them, and would say to himself: "If you fail, I will give it up, for never did I see men work so well and so brotherly with each other." But then a little way off he would come on people who "merely crawled about, probably sick (he charitably suggests), just looking on like myself at anything which fell in their way." A very common feeling among members of these communities seems to have been that they were far more troubled with idlers than the rest of the world, because their system itself presented special attractions to that unwelcome class. "Men came," says one of the Trumbull Phalanx, "with the idea that they could live in idleness at the expense of the purchasers of the estate, and their ideas were practically carried out, while others came with good heart for the work." The same testimony is given about the Sylvania Association. "Idle and greedy people," says the writer of this testimony, "find their way into such attempts, and soon show forth their character by burdening others with too much labour, and in times of scarcity supplying themselves with more than their allowance of various necessaries, instead of taking less." Idle and greedy people, no doubt, did get into these communities, but these idle and greedy people constitute, I fear, a very large proportion of mankind, and the point is that socialistic institutions unfortunately offer them encouragement and opportunity. The experience of American communism directly contradicts John Stuart Mill's opinion, that men are not more likely to evade their fair share of the work under a socialistic system than they are now. That difficulty in one form or another was their constant vexation. The members of Owen's community at Yellow Springs belonged in general to a superior class; but one of them, in stating the causes of the failure of that community, says: "The industrious, the skilful, and the strong saw the products of their labour enjoyed by the indolent, and the unskilled, and the improvident, and self-love rose against benevolence. A band of musicians insisted that their brassy harmony was as necessary to the common happiness as bread and meat, and declined to enter the harvest field or the workshop. A lecturer upon Natural Science insisted upon talking only while others worked. Mechanics whose day's labour brought two dollars into the common stock insisted that they should in justice work only half as long as the agriculturist, whose day's work brought only one." The same evil, according to R. D. Owen, contributed to the fall of New Harmony; "there was not disinterested industry," he says, "there was not mutual confidence." A lady who was a member of the Marlboro' Association in Ohio, a socialistic experiment that lasted four years and then failed, attributes the failure to "the complicated state of the business concerns, the amount of debt contracted, and the feeling that each would work with more energy, for a time at least, if thrown upon his own resources, with plenty of elbow-room, and nothing to distract his attention."

The magnitude of this difficulty only appears the greater when we turn from the forty-seven socialistic experiments which have failed to the seventy-two which have thriven. The Shakers and Rappists are undoubtedly very industrious people, who, by producing a good article, have won and kept for years a firm hold of the American market, and being, in consequence of their institution of celibacy, a community of adult workers exclusively, every man and every woman being a productive labourer, the wonder is they are not wealthier and more prosperous even than they are. Their economic prosperity is based, as economic prosperity always is and must be, on their general habits of industry, and the natural tendency of socialistic arrangements to relax these habits is in their case effectually, though not without difficulty, counteracted by their religious discipline. Idleness is a sin; next to disobedience to the elders, no other sin is more reprobated among them, because no other sin is at once so besetting and so dangerous there, and the conquest and suppression of idleness is a continual object of their vigilance, and of their ordinary devotional practice. Mr. Nordhoff publishes a few of their most popular hymns, and one is struck with the space the cultivation of personal industry seems to occupy in their thoughts. "Old Slug," as they delight to nickname the idler, is the "Old Adam" of the Shakers, and a public sentiment of hatred and contempt for the indolent man is sedulously fostered by them. As they not only work, but also live under one another's constant supervision, and within earshot of one another's criticism, they more than replace the eye of the master by the keener and more sleepless eye of moral and social police. And if all this discipline fails, they have the last resource of expulsion. They easily make the idler too uncomfortable to remain. "They have," says Mr. Nordhoff, "no difficulty in sloughing off persons who come with bad or low motives." They exercise, in short, the power of dismissal, the last sanction in ordinary use in the old state of society. Not that they make any virtue of strenuous labour. They work moderately, and avoid anything like fatigue or exhaustion. They frankly acknowledged to Mr. Nordhoff, once and again, that three hired men taken in from the ordinary world would do as much work as five or six of their members. Their wants are few and simple, and they are satisfied with the moderate exertion that suffices to supply them; but they will tolerate no shirking of that in any shape or form, and this alone saves them from disaster. The experiences of these successful Shaker and Rappist communities serve, therefore, to show, even better than the experiences of the unsuccessful Owenite and Fourierist communities, the gravity that the idleness difficulty would assume in a general socialistic régime, which possessed nothing in the nature of the power of dismissal, and in which we could not calculate either on the formation of an effective public opinion against idleness, or on its effective application if it were formed. The men who founded the unsuccessful communities were far superior to the Shakers in business ability and education, and they had more money to begin their experiments with, but where they failed the Shakers have succeeded through the indirect economic effects of their rigorous religious discipline. But the evidence is as plain in the one case as in the other as to the natural, and even powerful, effect of socialistic arrangements in relaxing the industry of many sorts and conditions of men.

The same sources of evidence prove with equal clearness the development under socialistic institutions of two other concurrent causes of decline. I have already quoted Mr. Channing's statement that the Brook Farm community showed a disposition to be content with comparatively squalid conditions of life. Mr. Nordhoff would probably not use the word squalid of anything he saw in the Shaker and Rappist communities he describes, except perhaps in certain instances of the state of the public streets; and in some points, such as the scrupulous cleanness of the interior of their houses, he would set them far above their neighbours—you could eat your dinner, he says, off their floors. Still the people he found everywhere content, if not exactly with squalid, certainly with poor and dull and rough conditions of life, much poorer, duller, and rougher than they might easily be. They enjoyed equality, security from harassing anxiety for the morrow, abundance even for their limited wants, independence from subjection to a master, but they were weak in the ordinary springs of progress. The spirit of material improvement was not much abroad among them. Give me the stationary state of society and contentment, you may exclaim; but then even this stationary state is only maintained in these sequestered communities by the constant play of peculiar religious influences which cannot be counted on everywhere, and it would soon change into a declining state in the great seething world outside if it were not effectively counter-worked by the most powerful incentives to progress. Now the same equalizing social arrangements which destroy one of the most essential of these incentives by guaranteeing men the results of industry without its exertion, enfeeble a second by predisposing them to rest content with the lower conditions of life to which they are reduced.

A third cause of decline to which the American experience shows socialistic institutions to be incident is a certain weakness in the management, produced sometimes by divided counsels, sometimes by the delay involved in getting the sanction of a Board to every little detail of business, and sometimes by a difficulty which we find also shattering similar experiments in France, that men were raised to the Committee by their gifts of persuasion rather than their gifts of administration. Well-meaning persons, with a great itch for managing things, and a great turn for bungling them, for whom there is, under the present order of society, a considerable safety-valve in philanthropy, contrive in a socialistic community to get appointed on the Council of Industry, and play sad havoc with the common good. While they preached and wasted, the really practical men who, with better power of talk, might have confounded them, could only sulk and grumble, and eventually lost heart in their work, and all interest and confidence in the concern. This had much to do, according to Mr. Meeker, an old Fourierist, with the ruin of the North American Phalanx, one of the most important of the transatlantic experiments, and it was the main cause apparently of the downfall of the community of Coxsackie—"They had many persons engaged in talking and law-making who did not work at any useful employment; the consequences were that after struggling on for between one and two years the experiment came to an end." A socialist State would probably have as many difficulties with this bustling but unsatisfactory class of persons as a socialist Phalanx, nor would the evils of divided counsels and departmental delays be a whit milder; and the extension of State management to branches of work for which it had not otherwise some sort of special natural qualification would have the same kind of ruinous operation.

In spirit and effect, therefore, as may be palpably seen from these actual experiments, the equalizing institutions of socialism stand quite apart from the very restricted use of State management and the remedial or invigorating legislation that a sound social policy prescribes. When England is accused of heading the nations in the race of State socialism, because England has nationalized the post and telegraph service, and passed a series of factory and agrarian Acts for the protection of the weaker classes of the people, the accusation is made without proper discrimination. It is not the frequency of the intervention, but its purpose and consequences that make it socialistic. If the post is better managed by the State than by private initiative, if the factory and agrarian laws merely reinstate weaker classes in the conditions essential for a normal human life, and neither seek nor produce that equalization of the differences of fortune or skill which is fatal to any high and progressive general level of comfort, then there is no State socialism in it at all. State management is not pushed beyond the limit of efficiency, nor popular rights beyond the positive claims of social justice. Let us go a little further into detail.

IV. State Socialism and State Management.

What are the conditions of efficient State administration? The State possesses several natural characteristics which give it a decided advantage as an industrial manager, some for one branch of work, some for another. It has stability, it has permanency, and it has—what is perhaps its principal industrial superiority—unrivalled power of securing unity of administration, since it is the only agency that can use force for the purpose. On the other hand, it has one great natural defect, its want of a personal stake in the produce of the business it conducts, its want of that keen check on waste and that pushing incentive to exertion which private undertakings enjoy in the eye and energy of the master. This is the great taproot from which all the usual faults of Government management spring—its routine, red-tape spirit, its sluggishness in noting changes in the market, in adapting itself to changes in the public taste, and in introducing improved methods of production. Government servants may very generally be men of a higher stamp and training than the servants of a private company, but they are proverbial, on the one hand, for a certain lofty disdain of the humble but valuable virtue of parsimony, and, on the other, for an unprogressive, unenterprising, uninventive administration of business.