The only safety of nations lies in removing the unearned increments of income from the possessing classes and adding them to the wage-income of the working classes or to the public income in order that they may be spent in raising the standard of consumption.—J. A. Hobson, Contemporary Review, August, 1902.

It is a leading thought in modern philosophy that in its process of development, each institution tends to cancel itself. The special function is born out of social necessities; its progress is determined by attractions or repulsions which arise in society, producing a certain effect which tends to negate the original function.—William Clarke.

If we view the physical aspects of existence in relation to happiness, it is obvious that the satisfaction of desires for food, clothing and shelter stands first in order of urgency in the life of nations.

That modern nationalities are very far from the attainment of this satisfaction of primary wants is lamentably evident to the eye of observers who examine the conditions in which the great majority of their members live. Food to the mass of the people is excessively dear. In order to buy it for his family, a workman has often to spend two-thirds of his weekly wage, leaving one-third only to meet the cost of shelter and clothing, and nothing at all for recreation and instruction.

If we add to this difficulty of satisfying the primary needs of a family on average wages, the frequent lack of employment with the consequent lack of any weekly income at all, and the prevalence of low wages, rightly termed starvation-wages, we have before us a picture of the utter inadequacy of our present industrial system to subserve general well-being.

It is necessary to understand something of our present industrial system, its foundations and evolution in the past, if we are to forecast the changes that will occur in the immediate future, when the fast-growing recognition of its manifold failings must inevitably bring about a different order of industry. Private property in land and in other essentials for the production of food, shelter, clothing, etc., lies at the basis of the present system; and since the direct object of private proprietors is not to satisfy the primary needs of the people, but to create individual profits, we cannot wonder that a system thus motived by selfishness works out in a miserable and wholly imperfect manner.

The industrial class may be broadly divided into two sections, employers and employed, while a few highly skilled workers, members of the professions of law, medicine, arts, letters, and science stand in a measure outside this category. Landlords and shareholders as such are an idle section of the community. They absorb the labour of a multitude of workers, while giving no personal service in return. Quite truly has it been said: “The modern form of private property is simply a legal claim to take year by year a share of the produce of the national industry without working for it.” (Fabian Essays, page 26).

In comparing past forms with the present forms of industry, a distinguishing feature of the latter is the number of great factories where workers toil long hours, usually in the tending of machines, to turn out for the private profit of their employers, vast quantities of goods destined for retail distribution all over the world. The large organizations of industry, so familiar to us, are of quite recent growth, and already show signs of a coming change as sweeping in its scope as any changes that have occurred in the past. Yet to listen to the expression of opinions that prevail in literary and upper class circles, one would suppose we had reached finality in our social system, and that the conventional tributes paid to proprietors of land and capital in the shape of rent and interest would, as a matter of course, remain legal to the end of time.

Now let us glance at the history of the past. For two centuries after the Norman conquest, intestine war and feudal oppressions embittered the life of the British labourer. He might be called from the plough at any moment to take up arms in his master’s quarrel, and if he sowed seed and saw his fields ripen, the harvest of his hopes might still be cut down by the sword of the forager, or trodden by the hoof of the war-horse. He was bondsman and slave, defenceless in the hands of the lords of the soil, who at best, protected him only in the barest necessities of a scanty livelihood—a hut without a chimney, its furniture a great brass pot and a bed valued at a few shillings. (Wade’s History of the Working Classes.) A change for the better came after the plague of 1348, and, when by perpetual warfare with France, men had become more valuable through diminution of their number.

King Edward the Third freed the bondsmen to recruit his armies, and enforced villeinry service was exchanged for service paid by wages—these, however, were ordinarily fixed by statute. In the middle of the eighteenth century wages stood at the ratio of about a bushel and a half of wheat for one week’s labour; by the middle of the nineteenth century they had fallen to what could only purchase one bushel of wheat. (Threading my Way, R. D. Owen, p. 220.) The cause of this change was that meanwhile, two clever men—Arkwright and Watt—had made discoveries which gave an impetus to industry beyond all previous experience. Mechanical aids to production were invented, and the consequent cheapening of products created more and more demand. Machinery and human labour side by side were under stress and strain to meet the call of new desires. Cotton and wool and flax were woven into fabrics and poured out of Great Britain to every quarter of the globe; capital was amassed, and wealthy capitalists bid against each other for more labour still. Agriculturists flocked into towns, factories sprang up in all directions, population rapidly increased, and children were sucked into the industrial maelstrom, for health and happiness were in no way considered when remunerative work was offered.

Outwardly the British world had altered. Internal warfare had passed away, and the war-horse was no longer visible in harvest-fields. The scene now presents a resemblance to a huge hive of bees industriously secreting and amassing honey for future use. Great Britain has assumed beyond her own shores a foremost place among civilized nations. The resources of her newly-created wealth seem boundless, and everywhere her power is felt. She can thin the ranks of her population, and swell her army to conquer and suppress the tyrant Napoleon, while keeping at work the enormous leviathan of her own trade and commerce by the deft fingers of her little children. Summer and winter find her tiny bees—infants of seven or eight—at labour in the factories from six a.m. to noon. One hour for dinner is allowed, and they toil on once more till eight o’clock at night.

Were these, then, the “good old times” of which we are proud? At all events they were the times in which England’s greatness was established and vast fortunes were built up, founded upon the industry of young children sweating in factories for thirteen hours a day.

“It was not in exceptional cases,” wrote Robert Dale Owen, when on a tour of inspection of factories with his father in 1815, “but as a rule, that we found children of ten years old worked regularly fourteen hours a day, with but half an hour’s interval for the midday meal, eaten in the factory.” In the fine yarn cotton mills, the “temperature usually exceeded 75 degrees,” and in all factories the atmosphere was more or less injurious to the lungs. In some cases “greed of gain had impelled mill-owners to still greater extremes of inhumanity, utterly disgraceful to a civilized nation.” Their mills were run fifteen, sometimes sixteen, hours a day, and children were employed even under the age of eight. “In some large factories, from one-fourth to one-fifth of the children were cripples or otherwise deformed. Most of the overseers openly carried stout leather thongs, and frequently we saw even the youngest children severely beaten.” (Threading my Way, p. 102.) At that period Robert Owen the elder expressed himself thus to the Earl of Liverpool: “It would be clearly unjust to blame manufacturers for practices with which they have been familiar from childhood, or to suppose that they have less humanity than any other class of men.” The system was what Robert Owen condemned, and he strained every nerve to bring about some alterations in the system. He wrote and spoke and agitated for the protection of children by law, and for their compulsory education, and he publicly exposed the ghastly evils that spring from competition unchecked by law, while left free to regulate itself at any amount of cost to life, health, and happiness.

After the lapse of about four years, the first point aimed at by Robert Owen was gained, and infants became protected by statute from gross oppression. His second point was gained in 1870, when the Government Bill for National Education was passed. And ever since the period of that noble, unselfish life, minds have everywhere been awakening to the truth of his third point, viz., that frightful evils inalienably belong to free industrial competition.

Owen proved that in the year 1816, the machine-saved labour in producing English fabrics—cotton, woollen, flax, and silk—exceeded the work which two hundred million of operatives could have turned out previous to the year 1760. (Threading my Way, p. 218.) The world was richer then to the extent of all this enormous producing power—a power, he thought, surely sent down from Heaven to set man free from the ancient curse that in the sweat of his brow should he eat bread. But what were the actual facts? There was no respite from toil for the workers, no freedom from the curse! Throughout the old and new world, senseless machinery competed with the living sons of toil, or, as Robert Owen expressed it, “a contest goes on between wood and iron on the one hand, human thews and sinews on the other—a dreadful contest, at which humanity shudders, and reason turns astonished away.” (Threading my Way, p. 218.) The problem presented was this: A recent rapid growth of wealth had enriched the few and left many in misery; nay more, it had lowered and pressed down the many to depths of degradation previously unknown. Were there no means by which mankind could unitedly work for the benefit of all, and all be made happy as the world grew richer? Political Economy suggested none, and Robert Owen turned from its futile study to that of the facts themselves. He was a manufacturer, in sympathy with employers as well as with employed. He had every opportunity for a practical understanding of the interests involved, and he gave years to the study of this question in a spirit of keen inquiry and ardent devotion to the cause. His ultimate conclusion was that in some form of socialism alone could a remedy for the existent evils of industrial life be found.

Henceforth he laboured to give to the world an object lesson in socialism. He embarked his fortune in bold experiments, which proved—as in the case of New Harmony—financial failures. Into the details of these failures I cannot now enter, nor have we to deal just yet with socialism as a remedy. My present purpose is to show the origin and reality of the evils inherent in the individualistic system of industry—evils on which the argument for socialism is based. And I must reiterate the statement made by John Stuart Mill in 1869, that the fundamental questions relating to property, and to the best methods of production and distribution—questions involved in socialism—require to be thoroughly investigated. Mr. Mill’s opinion regarding socialism was that in some future time communistic production might prove well-adapted to the wants and the nature of man, but a high standard of moral and intellectual education would first be necessary, and the passage to that state could only be slow.

Meanwhile the sufferings of the proletariat are as intense as in the days of Robert Owen. The problem which absorbed his energies and wrecked his fortunes remains as yet unsolved, and we, who live when a twentieth century has been entered upon, are daily surrounded by a mass of workers tied hand and foot by poverty and often weighed down by despair. And this is the case, notwithstanding the lapse of a long intermediate period of national prosperity; in spite, also, of the powers of science to enlighten manual labour, the intellectual efforts to advance education, and a boundless benevolence and sympathy ready to embrace all mankind, and give happiness to all, were only the right means devised wherewith to accomplish that end.^[1]

Individual benevolence has failed, and that as completely as Robert Owen’s socialism, to cope with general poverty, and the method of Poor Laws has accomplished almost nothing.

In Robert Owen’s day the evils described in factory life belonged specially to Great Britain. That is not the limit, however, now. I need only refer my reader to Henry George’s picture of poverty dogging the footsteps of progress in America and to Professor Goldwin Smith’s corroborative words: “It is a melancholy fact, that everywhere in America we are looking forward to the necessity of a public provision for the poor.” And again: “There will in time be an educated proletariat of a very miserable and perhaps dangerous kind, for nothing can be more wretched and explosive than destitution with the social humiliation which attends it, in men whose sensibilities have been quickened and whose ambition has been aroused.”

The problem respecting appalling poverty in the midst of wealth (it is a poverty marring the happiness of the rich as well as the poor) cries out for solution. It forces itself upon public attention in the old world as in the new. There is no escape from it. The problem must be grappled with by educated reason, and solved by means of the patient exercise of a cold calculation of natural forces. Happily it is recognized in its evolutional aspects by many thinkers all over the world. Twenty years ago Charles Letourneau in his Sociology wrote: “In every country which enjoys the European system of civilization, the right of property has ever been in a state of evolution, always tending to give a greater degree of independence to the individual owner; in other words, the evolution is always worked in favour of individual egotism. Who can say that the evolution is now complete, or that we have yet realized the highest ideal system in the disposition of our property? A progressive evolution is, for every society, one of the conditions of existence. The right of proprietorship cannot, therefore, remain stationary.” The period that has elapsed since that passage was written has witnessed a widespread and strong growth of opinion upon these lines.

In the Contemporary Review of February, 1902, Mr. J. A. Hobson thus writes: “... The idea of natural individual rights as the basis of democracy disappears. A clear grasp of society as an economic organism completely explodes the notion of property as an inherent individual right, for it shows that no individual can make or appropriate anything of value without the direct continuous assistance of society.”

The right of proprietorship in land is the first principle to examine. The relation between land and life in its simpler aspects is clear and definite. All classes of land animals—man included—are immediately dependent for subsistence upon the produce of land, and when man emerges from slavery, another element, namely, labour, enters into the conditions of his life and becomes, with land, essential to his existence. Of food, fitted for the nourishment of man, uncultivated land produces little save some wild fruits and edible roots, and many wild animals, which he may eat if in hunting them down they do not eat him. But land placed under the additional forces of man’s physical and intellectual energies produces an immense variety of objects—a perfect wealth of raw material, vegetable, animal, mineral—which, yielding to further elaboration through his efforts and genius, all help to create for him a civilized life. This raw material, in short, supplied man with food, shelter, clothing, with the comforts and luxuries his developing nature demands, and with all necessaries to the existence of literature, science, and art.

Passing over the primitive forms of associated life—the nomad and pastoral—we come to the agricultural stage, when labourers on the land are manifestly the all-important social units. They sow, till, and reap the fields. They tend domestic animals, whose skins and wool are made into garments by other members of the group. But the latter depend for food and the raw materials of their industry on the cultivators, who are, if I may so express it, the foundation stones of the simple social structure. To whom does the land belong? To the whole group, and an annual division amongst the families for purposes of cultivation takes place, whilst weapons, fishing-boats, tools and other movables are the property of individuals.

Now observe, a change gradually occurs, a change from the communal possession of land to a system of the individual possession of land, and force is the sole cause of this change. External aggression has initiated militant activity, while, in the process of frequent resistance to invasion, and frequent aggression upon others, there is produced the class inequalities which distinguish a militant type of society and a system allowing of individual land-ownership. Land becomes private property in the hands of the bold and crafty, who compel the cultivation of the soil by the landless men of the group, and by prisoners of war spared on condition that they perform hard labour. The institution of slavery thus becomes established, and it is a leading factor in the promotion of civilization. Lords of the soil spend their energies in warlike activities, whilst protecting their slaves and serfs at labour. The produce of that labour is appropriated by the dominant class, and used for its own particular benefit. Its requirements extend much beyond the mere necessaries of existence that it yields to the workers, and slowly there uprises a new form of labour and a large class of labourers, producing a variety of commodities to gratify the desires of pomp-loving, barbaric chiefs.

Now this class, the labour of which is wholly absorbed by the chiefs, must be fed from the produce of the land. How is this accomplished? The chiefs, while exacting hard labour from the slaves and serfs, yield them only a bare living. But the proceeds of their labour, over and above the bare living of the producers, is very considerable. There is therefore a large surplus, which, appropriated by the chiefs as rent, is the source of their power. With it they support a large class of landless men engaged in ministering to their own specific wants. Moreover, this class groups itself around the castle of the chiefs, which are filled with military retainers, and here we have the beginnings of towns.

The town population increases steadily with the increase of the surplus produce from land under better conditions of cultivation. Markets and stores are instituted, and a commercial system is introduced. Barter gives way to the use of money, and the entire social organism expands and becomes more complex.

Anon, slavery disappears. But workers on the land—always the most necessary social units—remain poor as before. Competitors for work, in danger of starving, drive no hard bargain with masters who are in full possession of the soil, and able to forbid their growing even the simple fruits and grain required for a meagre living. For food enough to live, they readily pledge the labour of their whole lives, and since nature’s recompense for labour is liberal, there is an abundant surplus produce for landowners to grasp and employ as they choose. Into the towns it is sent, and there it stimulates progress—mental and material—and creates new departures in social life.

Class inequalities among town workers increase, and labour becomes organized. The mentally stronger dominate the weaker in the new fields of industry. They direct and control the production of commodities for the use of the dominant class, and succeed in acquiring a greater reward for their work than a meagre living. Out of the surplus produce of the land they become able to secure from their lords a portion which forms the foundation of wealth in a new social class—a class of landless capitalists who, possessing brain power and later money-power, become the supreme factors in altering social conditions. These men promote manufacture and commerce by action similar to the landholders’ methods of promoting agriculture. They press down their workers to a bare living, and take as profits all that competition permits of the results of the joint labour. These profits they apply to the satisfaction of their personal desires and the carrying out of their schemes of manufacturing and commercial enterprise. Finally, they indulge in luxurious living and emulate landholders in the purchase of valuable commodities, thus stimulating certain trades.

Meanwhile, through the intercourse of urban life, mental activity rapidly augments. Education is initiated, aptitude and skill are more and more prized and rewarded. Invention profoundly modifies the primitive modes of production, and genius aspires to understand and govern the forces of nature. One direction taken by mental activity eventuates in an important social force, viz., the Church, or religious organization. Many of the best minds in early ages were allied with the priesthood, and the Church’s desire for stately temples, gorgeous shrines, and decorative worship have enormously aided the outward development of architecture, sculpture, painting, and music, and the inward growth of aesthetic capacity. But priests and all whose labour is absorbed by the requirements of religious worship and the constructing of temples, must be fed on the produce of the land. The priesthood is maintained in leisure by rents, tithes, or the voluntary offerings of the people. It is freed from the necessity of industrial labour and military activity, and members within this large class have devoted their leisure to literature, history, philosophy, and art, thereby greatly advancing civilization.

Under increased stability of governments the organization becomes of a mainly industrial type. Nations now possess enormous wealth in the form of material commodities, wealth in the form of intellectual literature and the educational institutions that promote knowledge; wealth in the form of ornament—all that embellishes and makes beautiful the surroundings of human life; and all this wealth has come into existence through the natural action of evolutionary forces—an action creative, step by step, of a system of social interdependence and regulation. The prominent features of the system are: First, private property in land; second, great social inequality; third, poverty of manual labourers; fourth, a large town population, and a small or minimum peasant population. Its less prominent but no less decisive feature is the complete social subjugation of the poor by the rich.

The supports of the system through the whole process of its growth have been labourers on the land, and these labourers have scarcely at all partaken of the national wealth. The food they reaped formed the motor force vitalizing and energizing the evolving social organism. Food was the ruling power deciding the growth and extent of economic life, as well as the form of its development. But food-producers have never determined the destination of the surplus food, and in this fact lies the key to a great social problem which students of social science are bound to comprehend. The landholders—and these as a rule have not been workers on the land—have decided the destination of the surplus produce. Up to the present-day landlords—including the proprietors of coal, iron and other mines, capitalist employers of labour, the churches of the nation, and hereditary rulers—are at the fountainhead of modern civilization. It is through their action—caused mainly by selfishness, tyranny, pride, greed—that cultivators and operatives have been kept at maximum toil and been limited in number, while at the same time the land’s resources have developed and improved until land and labour united serve to support an enormous mass of population—individuals of entirely distinctive character, activities, social position and social worth, all alike in this one particular—they are daily and hourly consumers of the produce of the land.

A good harvest that is general over the world sends activity like an electric current through the economic system. A bad harvest, if universal, would cause universal depression; not agriculture alone must suffer, but manufacture, commerce, science, art, literature, education, recreation—for on the production of food depends the buying power of the whole trading world. It is true that modern countries are not maintained from their own food resources alone. Also, it is true that the machinery of exchange—money and our vast credit system—enter into the phenomena and confuse the student’s mind. Nevertheless, an all-important fact discloses itself on close investigation, viz., this—the relation of landlordism to modern civilization is not accidental, it is essential and causal.

As already shown, the general drift of the produce of the land has been into the towns; and thither also have migrated the labourers. Machinery and science applied to land cultivation lowered the amount of peasant labour required, but it did not lower the birth-rate. Surplus peasants have been driven by necessity from their homes to the centres of manufacturing industry, and, competing for work there with the operative class, have kept wages low and facilitated the enriching of capitalist employers. These men, actuated by personal desires, selfish ambition, and a tendency to mercantile speculation, use their wealth in extending the production of objects that minister to a life of luxury and refinement.

The older political economists mistakenly taught that “all capital, with a trifling exception, was originally the result of saving.” (J. S. Mill’s Political Economy, book 1, chap. 5.) Attention to the history of social evolution, however, proves the fact to be otherwise. Not individual saving, but social seizure, created capital. Its origin, as we have shown, was the surplus produce taken from producers and disposed of by a dominant class. It originated through the selfish quality of rapacity and not through the respectable virtue of prudence, as some capitalists would have us believe. The growth of capital has been enormous since the beginning of the industrial revolution; and at the present moment the riches of a comparatively small number of the owners of our land and capital are colossal and increasing. At the same time, there is no diminution of poverty among workers. Thirty per cent. of the five million inhabitants of London are inadequately supplied with the bare necessaries of life, and about a fourth of the entire community become paupers at sixty-five. I refer my reader to Sidney Webb’s pamphlet, The Difficulties of Individualism.

The supersession of the small by the great industry has given the main fruits of invention and the new power over nature to a small proprietary class, upon whom the mass of the people are dependent for leave to earn their living. The rent and interest claimed by that class absorbs, on an average, one-third of the product of labour. The remaining 8d. of the 1s. is then shared between the various classes co-operating in the production, but in such a way that at least 4d. goes to a set of educated workers numbering less than one-fifth of the whole, leaving four-fifths to divide less than 4d. out of the 1s. between them. “The consequence is the social condition we see around us.” (Ibid.)

Thus four out of five of the whole population—the weekly wage-earners—toil perpetually for less than a third of the aggregate product of labour, at an annual wage averaging at most £40 per adult, and are hurried into early graves by the severity of their lives, dying, as regards at least one-third of them, destitute, or actually in receipt of poor law relief.

In town and country, the operatives and peasants, who, united, form one large class engaged in manual labour, resemble Sinbad the Sailor, on whose shoulders rides the Old Man of the Sea. It is they who maintain our leisured classes. The proletariat carries on its back all the rich and their innumerable dependents, more than 300,000 soldiers, an immense navy, a million of paupers, a number of State pensioners, a multitude of criminals, His Majesty and the Royal Family, all Government officials and ecclesiastics—a vast host of unproductive consumers throughout society.

Slavery of the many for the comfort and enjoyment of the few! That is all man has attained to, so far, in the evolution of society. And no one who studies the facts of life can deny this impeachment of civilization: “All over the world the beauty, glory, and grace of civilization rests on human lives crushed into misery and distortion.” (Henry George.)

The extremity of contrast between rich and poor has no ethical justification. Under purely ethical conditions, every child born into a nation should have equal chances of life, comforts, and luxuries, with every other child. But, as we know, one British babe may be born to an income of £100,000 a year, and another to no income, but to a constant struggle for bare subsistence and a pauper’s grave at last. The system permitting this is ethically odious. Nevertheless, we have to recognize that, under non-ethical conditions, development has taken place, and we must accept the process as the natural, inevitable result of all prior conditions.

Man’s ethical nature itself is the product of a slow evolution, not yet so advanced as to require and create purely ethical social conditions. Changes in the future will proceed on lines of natural growth, as in the past, but with this supreme difference—the issues will be favourable to general happiness, the advance infinitely more rapid, because aided by conscious human effort.

All schemes of social reform that are revolutionary are widely chimerical to the thoughtful evolutionist, for were we suddenly to deprive our richer classes of property, privilege, and power, we should simply create a general abasement of our national civilization. Our upper classes, rendered effeminate by ill-spent leisure and all the artificial pleasures of a voluptuous and inane life, are incapable of directing civilization to the highest and noblest ends. Yet it is out of their midst that springs the demand for commodities ministering to all the amenities and refinements of a civilized life. It is refinement alone that demands refinement, culture that demands culture; and were the control of human labour to pass suddenly from the hands of the upper into those of the lower classes, which are still, in the mass, degraded and unenlightened, there would be no effective demand for these commodities, and the science and art implicated in their production would inevitably, though gradually, disappear.

Progressive evolution culminates in social justice, and the principle of private property in land, which implies an injurious monopoly in what is essential to human life (and is therefore socially unjust), is certain to be consciously relinquished at a given stage of the nation’s intellectual and moral advance.

Having traced the evolution of the individualistic system of industry, and seen that the inherent evils of the system have their source in the private ownership of land and capital, which “necessarily involves the complete exclusion of the mere worker, as such, from most of the economic advantages of the soil on which he is born, and the buildings, machinery, and railways he finds around him” (Sidney Webb), let me now sum up and state the paramount evils that have to be overcome. For the workers these are—low wages, long hours of toil, difficulty of obtaining work, and, when it is obtained, uncertainty of being permitted to retain it. For the community generally there are further evils, viz., first, the mal-production of commodities made manifest in food adulteration and in a perpetual output of objects that, instead of promoting and conserving civilization, debase and corrupt public taste and morals; and, second, the mal-production of human life, for poverty is a social force that directly tends to racial degeneration. A population born and bred in our city slums becomes physically, mentally, and morally unfit.

The facts of poverty and the unemployed are impossible to deny. Frederick Harrison’s picture is accurate; ninety per cent. of the actual producers of wealth have no home they can call their own beyond the end of the week, have no bit of soil or so much as a room that belongs to them, have nothing of any kind except so much of old furniture as will go in a cart; have the precarious chance of weekly wages, which barely suffice to keep them in health; are separated by so narrow a margin from destitution that a month of bad trade, sickness or unexpected loss brings them face to face with hunger and pauperism. This is the normal state of the average workman in town or country. (Report of Ind. Ref. Congress, 1886.)

As regards the children of these workmen, fifty per cent. die before they reach five years of age, while eighteen per cent. only of upper class children die at the same age. The industrial evolution of the last 150 years, with its labour-saving machinery and highly organized masses of wage-workers, has done nothing at all to lessen poverty. Poverty has steadily kept pace with the increase of population.

But observe in the present day there is one significant feature that forces itself upon public attention—a feature revealing to the social student our approach to that stage of evolution spoken of by William Clarke in the passage I quote as motto to this chapter: “Each institution tends to cancel itself.... Its special function and progress produce effects tending to negate the original function.”

If we look minutely into the latest developments of large businesses, we find that the diminution in the number of competitors does not as a rule lead to an easing of the competitive struggle. As Mr. J. A. Hobson observes and demonstrates: “It is precisely in those trades which are most highly organized, provided with the most advanced machinery, and composed of the largest units of capital, that the fiercest and most unscrupulous competition has shown itself.” (Evolution of Capital, p. 120.) There is an increase, in short, of the elements destined to destroy competition. The anxiety, arduousness, and wastefulness of strife among the rival competitors, becomes so intolerable that a mutual truce and amalgamation is sought after as a release. When fully realized, the amalgamation becomes a monopoly, and competition, that much vaunted check to counteract the natural rapacity of private capitalists, ceases altogether. Let industrial monopoly be fairly established, and behold! competition, with all its merits, real or assumed, is abrogated.

But industrial monopoly in private hands becomes intolerable to the public, so that invariably, in the long run, the community either puts a forcible stop to the monopoly, or assumes it, and administers it as a State function.

We may confidently assert that as large industries approach to the stage of absorption into monopolies of federated groups of wealthy capitalists, the more general and widespread grows dissatisfaction and resentment on the part of the dispossessed smaller capitalists who have been beaten out of the field.

Now, the trend of movement to-day, through the whole fields of production and distribution, is from business on a small scale to business on a large scale, and the formation of limited companies, rings, trusts, etc. By purchasing raw material in greater quantities an immense saving is effected, and the same occurs in the advertising of goods and in organizing numerous workers instead of a few. These savings make it possible to lower the price of the finished commodity to the public. Hence the change from smaller to larger commercial enterprises is favourable to public interests up to a certain point. But the moment monopoly point is reached, the position straightway becomes reversed. Henceforward the public have no protection from a sudden raising of prices, for, the competitive check having been withdrawn, monopolists dominate their respective fields of production and distribution, and the individually selfish forces alone hold sway.

This tendency, then, to larger and larger industrial organization, with its wasteful warfare and other attendant evils, implies a certain advance. It indicates competition working out to its last expression and final breakdown. It points to the supersession of the individualistic industrial system by a collectivist industrial system requiring democratic state-ownership of land and the means of production and distribution of all commodities.

In process of civilizing man has made himself acquainted with many laws of nature, and has learnt so to handle matter as to direct its forces into channels carrying benefit to himself. He has thus become the controller of natural forces in as far as they lie within reach of his mental comprehension and physical activities. It is by this method, and no other, that our advance along the line of material civilization has been accomplished, and all further extension of the comforts and amenities of economic and social life is certain to be obtained through persistence in this available and satisfactory course.

Now, throughout the domain of non-material civilization, man has never constituted himself controller of natural forces, although, in orders of life inferior to his own, he has guided many vital forces. For instance, there are vegetable and animal forces—all subject to natural law—that he has enlisted in his service and made submissive to his dominion. The forms of vegetable life around us to-day—cereals, fruit-trees, plants, and flowers of infinitely varied tint—bear witness to the art and skill of man; and the animal kingdom, ruled by mysterious biological laws, has provided him with faithful servants obedient to his will, in a life which to dogs and horses is largely artificial.

In the order of his own social life man’s position is wholly different. What we behold, if we take an objective view of a so-called civilized society, is a marvellous variety of complicated movements. These are the outcome of forces pursuing an unbridled course; and that course is always the path of least resistance. As yet there is no intervening force of a collective, mental nature to adapt that course to an ultimate definite aim and purpose, or to harmonize broadly those lines of least resistance with the line of permanent and universal advantage to mankind. As Professor Lester F. Ward expresses it, “Man has made the winds, the waters, fire, steam and electricity do his bidding. All nature, both animate and inanimate, has been reduced to his service.... One class of natural forces still remains the play of chance, and from it, instead of aid, he is constantly receiving the most serious checks. This field is that of society itself, these unreclaimed forces are the social forces of whose nature man seems to possess no knowledge, whose very existence he persistently ignores, and which he consequently is powerless to control.” (Dynamic Sociology, vol. I. p. 35.) These unreclaimed social forces—selfishness, rapacity, pride—give activity to the competitive system, and run riot on the basis of private property in land and the means of production. But the present condition of things cannot much longer persist, and a new industrial system, the outcome of far more elevated social forces, is shaping itself rapidly in many minds throughout Europe, America, and the whole civilized world; that system of co-operative industry we have now to consider.

The true organic formula of political as of economic justice is—

Whilst bearing in mind that the present economic system—a system unconsciously produced through the play of selfish forces—was a necessary stage of evolution, and tended to progress so long as savage proclivities in the mass of the people made a closer social union impossible, we have also to recognize the changes, outward and inward, occurring under that system. First, a rise of co-operation, both voluntary and involuntary—in factories and throughout business generally—has taken place, causing evolution to proceed on wider lines. Second, a slow, silent, unstudied, half-unconscious movement has advanced, and in these days eventuated in the conception of a new system which purports to be the form that industrial evolution must assume in the near future. And inasmuch as this new system is less egoistic and more social than any system of competition, it will move on ethical lines of progress.

The present system, as we have seen, is based on private property in land and the instruments of production and distribution. In opposition to this, socialism implies that the State or people collectively should own the land and instruments of production and distribution. Further, that the State should organize routine labour and direct the distribution of produce upon this basis, and that throughout society social equality should be established and maintained.

The sentiment of justice and the feelings of sympathy and solidarity, without which no socialized society could exist, are prominent everywhere to-day. They manifest in philanthropic action all over the country, in constant efforts to adjust political and economic forces to lines of social equality and in the revolt of wage-workers, throughout the civilized world, from conditions they are finding intolerable and will not much longer endure.

A wholly unselfish order of life is impossible still, but under any intelligent collectivist system, individual selfishness becomes modified and controlled. Hence we may confidently expect that the strong anti-social feelings fostered by the private property and competitive system of industry will largely subside in the greater fraternity of an organized socialism.

It is significant that ignorant opponents, in their wildly erroneous interpretation of the theory of socialism as an equal division of money to all, recognize the gross injustice of the present distribution of wealth. The wrong and misery accruing from the individualistic system of industry are widely felt and freely admitted, while the underlying causes of the evil and the true remedies are not yet understood.

As regards the connexion of socialism with the theories of political economy, I must shortly explain: Political economy is the science of wealth—its production and distribution. But as the science relates exclusively to the present competitive system, the socialist finds in it a full exposure of the evils involved in that system, and ample grounds for striving to bring about its supersession by a system of co-operation on a socialized property basis. There is not and there cannot be any conflict between a true political economy and a scientific socialism. The one describes what is, the other what may be and ought to be. Both recognize that wealth is produced (and it is the only possible way) by the application of labour to land, and its products. In the present system, the individual possession of land and the instruments of production forms the ruling factor, producing inequality in the distribution of wealth and gives the basis on which commercial competition rests. In referring to laws of political economy, it is not unusual to speak as if they were laws of nature, no more to be banished than the law of gravitation. On this assumption there is raised the argument that society is forever bound to the present system, with its payments of rent, interest and profits out of the surplus proceeds of labour. Nevertheless, it is easy to see that the so-called laws of economics are only rules of social living springing from motives of human self-seeking exercised within the generally accepted conditions of private property in the essentials of life. It is not necessary for the socialist to contend against any single generalization of political economy; each may be true on its own basis, but, with that basis socialism is at war. Let society relinquish the property basis, and political economy remains applicable only to the past, while in the future the motives of human self-seeking enter upon a fresh career in a more altruistic system.

We must grasp the true nature of the various tributes imposed upon labour—rent, interest, profits and rent of ability—to comprehend their economic bearing. A farm is the private property of a landlord, while it is cultivated by a farmer and his labourers. The proceeds of the industry of the two latter is divided into three portions—the labourers’ wages, the landlord’s rent and the farmer’s profits. The first, dependent on demand and supply in the labour market, is kept down to what will cover the expense of a bare subsistence; and the second is always the highest amount the landlord can extract above the portion the farmer consents to live upon after paying the subsistence wage to his labourers. A landlord’s rapacity, however, is no longer the only factor in determining rent, since State interference has been found necessary for protection of farmers in the public interests. The economic bearing of rent is this: it gives effect to the demands of the landlord class for the results of an immense amount of labour applied to the production of varied commodities. As already explained, the produce sold in towns by farmers to pay rent goes, in large measure, to the support of workers who are manufacturing luxuries, objets de luxe, and many meretricious wares that minister to the depraved taste of men and women whose happiness is destroyed by a life of idleness and ennui.

It is not land only, but capital in the shape of railways, factories, workshops, machinery, etc., that are held as private property. For the use of these, therefore, workers pay a tribute called interest on capital. This interest gives effective demand to the wants of a large class of comparatively idle shareholders, who further absorb the services and produce of another great army of workers. The next tribute, namely profits, is a claim connected with the organizing of labour. It represents a prodigious tax levied upon workers, a tax that enables employers and managers—more or less wealthy—to enjoy comforts and luxuries their employés can never command. The fourth tribute has been called the rent of ability. It rests on the non-ethical principle that some people deserve from society a great reward for work they have pleasure in doing, while the toilers engaged in irksome, dangerous, dirty, distasteful work—however necessary to the whole community—are only entitled to a pittance wage.

Let us look at the proportional value of rent, interest, profits and rent of ability in their relation to the reward of manual labour. Out of the yearly income of the nation, recently computed at £1,450,000,000, £510,000,000 goes in rent and interest and £410,000,000 in profits and salaries to the ruling classes, while £530,000,000 only is available for payment of wages to manual workers. But when we consider that the latter compose the great mass of the population, and the former a small section or fraction of it only, the enormities involved in the working of our property institutions exhibit their true colours, and the growing sense of justice within civilized humanity revolts wholly from the system. The facts, roughly speaking, are that one-third of the total income of the nation goes to four-fifths of the population, while the remaining one-fifth pockets two-thirds of the income. (See Sidney Webb in Fabian Tract No. 69.)

In the Census of 1891 there were 543,038 adult men who entered themselves as not working for a living. We may assume these belonged chiefly to the wealthy classes, and if we reckon their average incomes at £500 per annum, there emerges a sum of £271,519,000 as approximately the value of the labour they exact each year from workers to whom they render no services in return. Again, if we add to the number of these idle men the women and children now living on rent and interest, the above computation falls far short of the reality. And, need it be said, the more there is taken from workers by non-workers, the less must remain for the workers themselves.

To people ignorant of economic principles, the man who spends a good income on personal gratifications appears—in his relations to society—either passive, or active beneficially, inasmuch as he “gives employment,” and his “giving” on these lines is lavish. Moreover, it is considered that the difference between rich and poor is one of natural inequality, of which, if workers complain, they are considered as unreasonable as the invalid who complains that other people are healthy. But the facts admit of no such analogy. The rich owe everything to the poor. They are simply a parasitic class, and the money they spend represents a power (socially permitted) to command and absorb the labour of their fellows. They exact life-long services, for which they bestow no personal service in return. Were we to place a rich man with all his money on an uninhabited island, however fertile, he would at once be reduced to his natural stature. No money would cause his daily comforts to spring up around him, and still less the many luxuries without which he feels his existence has no charm. In order to live he himself must work, for he is the sole representative of the scores of fellow-men on whose labour he has hitherto wholly depended for necessaries and all the amenities of a civilized life. The absorption by one of the labour of many is a social arrangement of genetic origin, and is immoral or non-ethical in character.

Socialism is the philosophy of a pure, wholesome, progressive industrial life, to be initiated and maintained by human effort—nay more, it is a veritable Gospel of Peace. And I use the word Gospel advisedly, for the finest religious quality of human nature is not in those beings who calmly pursue a course of spiritual development for themselves, unmindful that the physical part of their fellows craves the food and rest without which the latent soul within cannot manifest itself.

We have seen that in the domain of feeling the stirrings of socialism have for years been agitating the bosom of society, and although the outcome in philanthropic action issues usually in failure, none the less does it spring from the highest and holiest motives of man. But while philanthropy chiefly represents love’s labour lost, there are other and more virile forces in action that are indicative of a coming organic democracy. Observe, for instance, the constant efforts of the people to alter the political and economic strain by State interference. This agitation is a very significant fact. It betrays a hunger for social justice which will certainly increase with the growth of knowledge, public spirit and sensitiveness to personal rights. This hunger can never be fully appeased under any system that permits wealth to flow to the lucky, the clever, the cunning, the greedy, and be handed down by inheritance and bequest from generation to generation. No modification of individualism and not even socialism will banish all popular agitation. Communism is the far-distant goal to which it points, for communism alone sets forth as attainable a satisfying equality in all the comforts of life, and since evolution must eventuate in social justice, whatever falls short of this will inevitably contain some conditions of discontent.

But whilst a craving for justice among the masses cries out for State interference, from whence comes the modern view of what justice means? Among the classes it has been considered that the man who is clever, i.e. mentally strong, has a right to a greater reward for labour than the man who is stupid. The origin of this notion is simply the fact that in a competitive system he is able to obtain that superior reward. Power, and not any ethical idea, is the foundation of the notion. The notions of justice prevailing throughout society have all arisen naturally in the past amid the strong and privileged few, and readily have they been accepted by the docile and oppressed many. The clever, not the stupid, have formed public opinion, and that under a purely egoistic impulse. Nevertheless, as evolution passes from the unconscious to the self-conscious stage, reason unites with altruistic feeling to give birth to new conceptions that are moulding public opinion to a higher and truer form, and working out on the plane of practical action. The conception of justice involved in socialism is naturally unpalatable to the privileged few, but it goes far to prove the truth of socialism, that the conception is the fruit of the most advanced study of our social organism as a whole, while it coincides precisely with the blindly instinctive pulsations of the central mass of the people.

Turning now from the moral and emotional to the economic and practical side of the question, we are bound to inquire by what methods transition from the present competitive commercial system of industry to the socialism of the future will take effect. For, be it observed, supporters of the latter system not only assert its ethical superiority, but further assert that it is both practicable and economically inevitable.

There are two, and only two, general directions of popular reform: first, the revolutionary—the driving straight at established institutions with the intention of overthrowing them; second, the legislative—the aiming to improve the existing system by co-operative methods and the modification and gradual destruction of its worst features, i.e. its extremes of injustice and inequality. I have to point out how retrograde and futile for the promotion of happiness is sudden revolution. It is the spontaneous method of human passion where intellect is unenlightened on natural evolution and causation. It seeks to overturn what, for the time being, is the highest product of evolution, and it would blindly substitute that, which although ethically superior, the society of the time is unable to support. The method of legislative reform, national and municipal, is the rational one; and no other, we may confidently hope, will be tried in the civilized countries of Europe so long as socialists are not harassed and persecuted for their opinion beyond the point of endurance.

Already, as regards legislation in this country, the power of the Demos—the mass of the people—is acutely felt. Step by step our rulers have been compelled to lower the political franchise in order to quell revolutionary tendency and maintain their position. Fear-forces within the social organism have changed direction unnoted at the surface. The classes are secretly more afraid of the people than the people are of the classes; yet the actual burdens borne by the people are in no way lightened. And why is this so? Because the people generally are ignorant of their political power, and still more ignorant of how to wield it favourably to their own interests. As has truly been said: “The difficulty in England is not to secure more political power for the people, but to persuade them to make any sensible use of the power they already have.”

But social forces of persuasion and enlightenment are ready prepared for their guidance. In the upper and lower sections of the middle class, men and women whose culture is scientific and whose moral sentiment is advanced, are ranging themselves in the van of the world’s progress, and chiefly through their efforts there is pouring into and penetrating the darkness of the masses a flood of intellectual enlightenment. This process begun has its definite bearings. A growing intelligence in the people will cause the displacement of all authority that is irresponsible. A better selection of legislators will be made, and these, constrained by judicious criticism, will study the principles of social science and learn how best to attain the clear ends of government.

As our masses rise to the full exercise of their political power and the democratic trend of the nation goes forward, no higher motive force than that of self-seeking is required to secure better social conditions. Not only does the ignorant self-seeking of the masses carry weight commanding attention, but the intelligent self-seeking of rulers is a force set in similar direction. To please the majority of constituents is their highest policy; and since food and leisure and education are the essential needs of that majority, such available intellect as the legislative body possesses will be honestly applied to promoting the increase and better distribution of these various necessaries of a civilized life; in short, to promoting the general well-being in so far as the exigencies of the times permit.

I do not deny that self-seeking in rulers has hitherto mainly led to the clever hoodwinking of ignorant constituents. I merely assert that we have rounded the point of Cape Danger in that regard. Every step we take on democratic lines, every advance we make in educating the people, removes us further from that danger point. Moreover, I assert that extending the Parliamentary franchise to women of every social class will equally work for good. The new altruistic or philanthropic spirit of the age has laid firm hold of the so-called educated women of to-day. When public responsibility presses these women to self-education in politics, the myriad injustices revealed will cause them to turn from futile individualist charities and concentrate their energies on works of real and lasting social reform. We may confidently anticipate that the British Parliament will become an excellent instrument of Democratic Government when certain reforms—that are already widely agitated—have been carried out. These reforms are that: “The House of Commons should be freed from the veto of the House of Lords, and should be thrown open to candidates from all classes by a system of payment of representatives and a more rational method of election.” (See Fabian Tract No. 70.)

There are two lines of action certain to be pursued by a Parliament growing yearly more democratic. One is the line of protection of labour, the other is that of an active service of the people. Now State interference with trade—in the interests of workers—is condemned by the laissez-faire school of economists. Such action is scoffingly termed “grandmotherly legislation.” It is deprecated as injurious to society as a whole, as an outrage on the liberty of the British subject, and an impious desecration of the capitalistic fetish, “Freedom of Contract.” But when the knowledge of facts proves that on one side this so-called freedom signifies freedom of choice between dire starvation and the distasteful terms of an absolute master, surprise is not felt that intelligent men prefer what the ignorant may regard as a species of State bondage. This preference is a feature of the times clearly visible. No doubt, where social equality reigns, individual liberty is a noble attainment; but with inequality in the means of life and the fundamental conditions of social happiness, a State that is honestly striving to restore the balance is a very fount of justice. The quest of the workers is not that of individual liberty, but of a collective liberty, embracing every man, woman and child within the ranks of their own order.

There is no moral principle that condemns State interference, although we may admit that occasionally it has wrought evil instead of good. Failures have been caused by ignorance alike in the rulers and the ruled. But as knowledge of the real problem advances, errors in governing will become less frequent, and the action of the State be marked by a wise adaptation to human needs in view of the greatest happiness possible.

State regulation is simply a matter of power and expediency. At the present low stage of civilization, for just so long as the ruling power is exercised by a propertied minority, it will prove injurious to the majority; but when the power passes over to the people the evils from which the majority suffer—in so far as they are remediable by society—will be slowly and surely redressed. Our County, District and Parish Councils are important instalments of democracy. These elected bodies, with their increasing powers, are potent to make of the community an ever larger and larger employer of labour, until, at the will of the people, all industries become absorbed, and the collectivist system of labour organization is gradually established. It is evident that the instruments of a thoroughly democratic administration are rapidly perfecting in Great Britain; and when the ideal of socialism dominates the national mind, these will present a ready means of realizing the ideal in practice. Ignorance of the ideal leads many minds into the false assumption that the raising of wages, and to do this the impoverishing of capitalists, is the socialistic sine quâ non in State action. But as Mrs. Bosanquet explains: “In our nineteenth century cry for higher wages we are apt to lose sight of the fact that many things are more important to the working-man than a few shillings added to his weekly income. A good supply of water, well-paved and lighted streets, a market in which he can always obtain wholesome food, and properly guarded sanitary conditions, will do more to raise his standard of living above that of his ancestors than any increase of mere money income. With those he can lead a healthy, orderly life on comparatively small wages; without them no rise in wages, however desirable in itself, will enable him to escape danger and disease.” (Rich and Poor, by Mrs. Bernard Bosanquet.)

This puts the case for municipal socialism in a nutshell. No amount of philanthropy, no amount of individual action is likely to provide a parish with a good water supply, properly paved and lighted streets, sanitary dwellings and a well-managed market. (Fabian News.) Yet these are fundamental requisites of general well-being, and another requisite for well-being and progress, dependent upon State action, is education of the people. If the power of the masses and their independence of arbitrary authority grow out of accord with their real knowledge of things, disastrous and bloody revolutions become possible. That in some sort the State must educate the masses is a principle already acknowledged and acted upon. We know, too, with how little success! But as Government loses its evil characteristics and grows enlightened, our State education will be directed to new ends. Its aim will be to impress such knowledge on the rising generations as will prepare them for social life, and instruct them in the means of averting misery and increasing happiness. It will educate them in the science of society and true meliorism, in the best methods for repressing anti-social feelings, in the formation of noble ideals of conduct, and in that religion which unites mankind in the region of the heart and makes of their union a living and growing social organism.

But while this is the aim of State education, the exact means adopted may vary. Where parents are superior much may be left in their hands, but inferior parents can never be permitted to train up children in inferior ways at the risk of lowering social purity and health.

I believe the time will arrive when Government, acting on its right of force and expediency, will take up and sequestrate the small class of social units who, defective by nature and evil conditions, are unable to control the injurious tendency to propagate their kind. This degraded minority will be kindly dealt with and allowed all liberty not inconsistent with the careful guarding of public safety. The object to attain would be simply the putting an end to their evil stock.

In the matter of State education, as well as in that of State interference with trade, objections are made on the ground of injustice. “Why,” it is asked, “should a man without children be taxed to educate the children of others? Is it not unjust that the earnings of the prudent should be taken to save the imprudent from the consequences of their own folly?” My answer is that besides being expedient, it is not socially unjust and the argument rests on the fact that the rewards of life depend upon the economic conditions of society much more than upon individual effort or merit. The amount of a man’s income is determined by forces not created by justice, and over which he has no personal control. A clever physician may command the fee of a guinea a visit. Let another competent man appear in the neighbourhood and charge half a guinea, the first has to lower his fee or lose his patients, and if he lowers his fee, the sum of the incomes of the two physicians sharing the patients between them will be less than the amount of the single income originally derived from that source. A man’s gains are what the competitive system ordained by society permits him to seize, whether he be working hard or not at all. Within these non-moral conditions an appeal to justice is irrelevant. Outside the non-moral conditions, what justice requires is that all men should be socially equal in respect of two things, viz. liberty and the ordinary comforts of life.

If employers do not deem it unjust to lower wages, neither should they deem it unjust were the State to lower their incomes to the precise amount their employés receive. Society has in the past arbitrarily arranged conditions that favour the few; why should it not now arbitrarily rearrange these conditions favourably to the many? If we take the average amount of all incomes to represent the sum each worker might justly receive, we find that a number of people have far more than this sum. The surplus represents then an “unearned increment” obtained by force of circumstance. A still larger number of people, on the other hand, are wholly unable to win, by any effort they may make, the above average amount, even if they work hard and well all their lives. Is it not just and reasonable that the more fortunate are required to give up a portion of their “unearned increment” in order that in the interests of society the children of the less fortunate should be educated? And, again, the improvident and immoral are nature’s defective children. Does not the highest religion demand that they should be tenderly dealt with and spared—if that be possible—all the tortures that nature unaided would bring upon them.

I believe that, under conscious evolution, the State will become in its action more and more philanthropic, simply for this reason—its members will become more and more humane and public-spirited.

Voluntary and State agency, however, will continue to co-exist. Each has its peculiar merits and demerits, and each individual case to be dealt with has its peculiar conditions. Science and experience must in each case therefore decide which agency applies best. There is no foregone conclusion that under State Socialism all private industries will collapse. The principle of the system is that no method of industry, hurtful to society as a whole, may exist, and the power of the State shall be rigorously used to protect the interests of the whole, as against conflicting individual interests. Even now it is felt, through the growing democratic spirit, that for our public bodies to take advantage of the struggle for employment of starving, hard-pressed men and women, is a national disgrace. It will soon be a point of honour with the nation to fix a minimum wage for public employés much above the competitive rate. Some County Councils have already been moved to direct that workers employed by them, or under their contracts, should be paid trade-union wages. Parliament has in some cases acted similarly, and when we remember that Government at this moment is the largest employer of labour in the kingdom, we realize that its example in giving wages determined more by equity than by competition will have a raising effect upon wages in private employment.

There is not any danger, however, that the movement of taking over the industries of the country by the State will stop short of the most favourable point. As I write this chapter, the following paragraph has appeared in a socialist journal of to-day: “It is proposed to establish a gigantic trust to control the entire iron-producing interests of the United States. This, of course, is eminently proper from an economic view, as it is a clearly demonstrated fact that production on a large scale is cheaper than production on a small scale. Carnegie, Rockefeller and Morgan, proposers of the iron trust, are, from a certain standpoint, benefactors of the race, inasmuch as they will demonstrate the practicability of the co-operative idea on a national scale in production. In due time the people will recognize the folly of allowing these men to reap the whole profits, and the system will be readjusted.”

Another important public event was the introduction into the British Parliament of an Employer’s Liability Bill. “This Bill proceeds,” said its introducer, “on the principle that when a person for his own profit sets in motion agencies which create risks for others, he ought to be civilly responsible.” (The Scotsman Report, May 4, 1897.) Now it goes without saying that the iron trust, and all trusts and commercial rings and monopolies, create the risk of a disastrous rise of prices to the general public, and a consequent greater inequality of wealth possession than even that from which we are suffering acutely to-day. A logical executive, holding the above principle, will inevitably annex to the State these huge outgrowths of the competitive system, will keep down prices to the level required by the general interests, and apply profits to the good of all.

That the time is not far distant when nationalization of the land will take place, appears from the fact that many others besides socialists advocate the measure. But we must not suppose that rent will be abrogated. The State will impose a charge on the fertile and well situated lands to create conditions that are fair not only to consumers but to cultivators, whose labour in view of a given result must vary according to the superiority or inferiority of soils and situations. District Councils will in all probability organize agricultural labour, the State only drawing a rent; while to present owners of the land compensation will be made, and, if accustomed to work on the land, salaried positions in the new order offered.