obtained by the least possible collective rule. The peasant on his own farm, the blacksmith at his own forge, needed only to be let alone to be allowed to follow their own individual desires as to the manner and duration of their work. But the organization of workers into huge armies, the directing of the factory and the warehouse by skilled generals aud captains, which is the inevitable outcome of the machine industry and the world-commerce, have necessarily deprived the average workman of the direction of his own life or the management of his own work. The middle class student, over whose Occupation the Juggernaut Car of the Industrial Revolution has not passed, finds it difficult to realize how sullenly the workman resents his exclusion from all share in the direction of the industrial world. This feeling is part of the real inwardness of the demand for an Eight Hours Bill.

The ordinary journalist or member of Parliament still says: "I don't consult any one except my doctor as to my hours of labor. That is a matter which each grown man must settle for himself." We never hear such a remark from a working man belonging to any trade more highly organized than chimney-sweeping. The modern artisan has learnt that he can no more fix for himself the time at which he shall begin and end his work than he can fix the sunrise or the tides. When the carrier drove his own cart and the weaver sat at his own loom they began and left off work at the hours that each preferred. Now the railway worker or the power-ioom weaver knows that he must work the same hours as his mates.

It was this industrial autocracy that the Christian Socialists of 1850 sought to remedy by re-establishing the "self-governing workshop" of associated craftsmen; and a similar purpose still pervades the whole field of industrial philanthropy. Sometimes it takes the specious name of "industrial partnership"; sometimes, the less pretentious form of a joint-stock company with one-pound shares. In the country it inspires the zeal for the creation of peasant proprietorships, or the restoration of "village industries," and behind it stalk those bogus middle class "reforms" known as "free land" and "leasehold enfranchisement." But it can scarcely be hidden from the eyes of any serious student of economic evolution that all these well-meant endeavors to set back the industrial clock are, as regards any widespread result, foredoomed to failure.

The growth of capital has been so vast, and is so rapidly increasing, that any hope of the great mass of the workers ever owning under any conceivable Individualist arrangements the instruments of production with which they work can only be deemed chimerical.

The estimated value of the wealth of the United Kingdom to-day is 10,000 millions sterling, or over £1,100 per family. The co-operative movement controls about 13 millions sterling. The total possessions of the 31 millions of the wageearning class are less than 250 millions sterling, or not £7 capital per family. The eight millions of the population who do not belong to the wage-ear ning class own all the rest; the death duty returns show, indeed, that one-half of the entire total is in the hands of about 25,000 families. For references to the authorities for these and other statistics quoted, see Fabian Tract No. 5, Facts for Socialists.

Hence it is that irresponsible personal authority over the actions of others-expelled from the throne, the castle, and the altar-still reigns, almost unchecked, in the factory and the mine. The " captains of industry," like the kings of yore, are indeed honestly unable to imagine how the business of the world can ever go on without the continuance of their existing rights and powers. And truly, upon any possible development of Individualistic principles, it is not easy to see how the worker can ever escape from their "beneficent"

rule.

The Growth of Collective Action.

But representative government has taught the people how to gain collectively that power which they could never again individually possess. The present century has accordingly witnessed a growing demand for the legal regulation of the conditions of industry which represents a marked advance on previous conceptions of the sphere of legislation. It has also seen a progress in the public management of industrial undertakings which represents an equal advance in the field of government administration. Such an extension of collective action is, it may safely be asserted, an inevitable result of political democracy. When the Commons of England had secured the right to vote supplies, it must have seemed an unwarrantable extension that they should claim also to redress grievances. When they passed from legislation to the exercise of control over the executive, the constitutional jurists were aghast at the presumption. The attempt of Parliament to seize the command of the military forces led to a civil war. Its control over foreign policy is scarcely two hundred years old. Every one of these developments of the collective authority of the nation over the conditions of its own life was denounced as an illegitimate usurpation foredoomed to failure. Every one of them is still being resisted in countries less advanced in political development. In England, where all these rights are admitted, each of them inconsistent with the "complete personal liberty" of the minority, the Individualists of to-day deny the competence of the people to regulate, through their representative committees, national or local, the conditions under which they work and live. Although the tyranny which keeps the tramcar conductor away from his home for seventeen hours a day is not the tyranny of king or priest or noble, he feels that it is tyranny all the same, and seeks to curb it in the way his fathers took.

The captains of war have been reduced to the position of salaried officers acting for public ends under public control; and the art of war has not decayed. In a similar way the captains of industry are gradually being deposed from their independent commands, and turned into salaried servants of the public. Nearly all the railways of the world, outside of America and the United Kingdom, are managed in this way. The Belgian Government works its own line of passenger steamers. The Paris Municipal Council opens public bakeries. The Glasgow Town Council runs its own common lodging houses, Plymouth its own tramways. Everywhere, schools, water

works, gas-works, dwellings for the people, and many other forms of capital, are passing from individual into collective control. And there is no contrary movement. No community which has once "municipalized" any public service ever retraces its steps or reverses its action.

Such is the answer that is actually being given to this difficulty of Individualism. Everywhere the workman is coming to understand that it is practically hopeless for him, either individually or co-operatively, to own the constantly growing mass of capital by the use of which he lives. Either we must, under what is called "complete personal freedom," acquiesce in the personal rule of the capitalist, tempered only by enlightened self-interest and the "gift of sympathy," or we must substitute for it, as we did for the royal authority, the collective rule of the whole community. The decision is scarcely doubtful. And hence we have on all sides, what to the Individualist is the most incomprehensible of phenomena, the expansion of the sphere of government in the interests of liberty itself. Socialism is, indeed, nothing but the extension of democratic selfgovernment from the political to the industrial world, and it is hard to resist the conclusion that it is an inevitable outcome of the joint effects of the economic and political revolutions of the past century.

Competition.

Individualists often take refuge in a faith that the extension of the proprietary class, and the competition of its members, will always furnish an adequate safeguard against the tyranny of any one of them. But the monopoly of which the democracy is here impatient is not that of any single individual, but that of the class itself. What the workers are objecting to is, not the rise of any industrial Buonaparte financially domineering the whole earth-though American experience makes even this less improbable than it once was-but the creation of a new feudal system of industry, the domination of the mass of ordinary workers by a hierarchy of property owners, who compete, it is true, among themselves, but who are nevertheless able, as a class, to preserve a very real control over the lives of those who depend upon their own daily labor.

Moreover, competition, where it still exists, is in itself one of the Individualist's difficulties, resulting, under a system of unequal incomes, not merely in the production, as we have seen, of the wrong commodities, but also of their production in the wrong way and for the wrong ends. The whole range of the present competitvie Individualism manifestly tends, indeed, to the glorification, not of honest personal service, but of the pursuit of personal gain-not the production of wealth, but the obtaining of riches. The inevitable) outcome is the apotheosis, not of social service, but of successful financial speculation, which is already the special bane of the American civilization. With it comes inevitably a demoralization of personal character, a coarsening of moral fibre, and a hideous lack of

taste.

The Lesson of Evolution.

This, indeed, is the lesson which economics brings to ethics. The "fittest to survive" is not necessarily the best, but much more probably he who takes the fullest possible,advantage of the conditions of the struggle, heedless of the result to his rivals. Indeed, the social consequences of complete personal liberty in the struggle for existence have been so appalling that the principle has had necessarily to be abandoned. It is now generally admitted to be a primary duty of government to prescribe the plane on which it will allow the struggle for existence to be fought out, and so to determine which kind of fitness shall survive. We have long ruled out of the conflict the appeal to brute force, thereby depriving the stronger man of his natural advantage over his weaker brother. We stop as fast as we can every development of fraud and chicanery, and so limit the natural right of the cunning to overreach their neighbors. We prohibit the weapon of deceptive labels and trade marks. In spite of John Bright's protest, we rule that adulteration is not a permissible form of competition. We forbid slavery: with Mill's consent, we even refuse to enforce a lifelong contract of service. We condemn long hours of labor for women and children, and now even for adult men, and insanitary conditions of labor for all

workers.

The whole history of social progress is, indeed, one long series of definitions and limitations of the conditions of the struggle, in order to raise the quality of the fittest who survive. This service can be performed only by the government. No individual competitor can lay down the rules of the combat. No individual can safely choose the higher plane so long as his opponent is at liberty to fight on the lower. In the face of this experience, the Individualist proposal to rely on complete personal liberty and free competition is not calculated to gain much acceptance. A social system devised to encourage "the art of establishing the maximum inequality over our neighbors"-as Ruskin puts it-appears destined to be replaced, wherever this is possible, by one based on salaried public service, with the stimulus of duty and esteem, instead of that of fortunemaking.

The Struggle for Existence between Nations.

But perhaps the most serious difficulty presented by the present concentration of energy upon personal gain is its effect upon the position of the community in the race struggle. The lesson of evolution seems to be that interracial competition is really more momentous in its consequences than the struggle between individuals. It is of comparatively little importance, in the long run, that individuals should develop to the utmost, if the life of the community in which they live is not thereby served. Two generations ago it would have been assumed, as a matter of course, that the most efficient life for each community was to be secured by each individual in it being left complete personal freedom. But that

crude vision has long since been demolished. Fifty years' social experience have convinced every statesman that, although there is no common sensorium, a society is something more than the sum of its members; that a social organism has a life and health distinguishable from those of its individual atoms. Hence it is that we have had Lord Shaftesbury warning us that without Factory Acts we should lose our textile trade; Matthew Arnold, that without national education_we were steering straight into national decay; and finally even Professor Huxley taking up the parable that, unless we see to the training of our residuum, France and Germany and the United States will take our place in the world's workshop. This "difficulty" of Individualism can be met, indeed, like the rest, only by the application of what are essentially Socialist principles.

Argument and Class Bias.

These "difficulties" will appeal more strongly to some persons than to others. The evils of inequality of wealth will come home more forcibly to the three millions of the submerged tenth in want of the bare necessaries of life than they will to the small class provided with every luxury at the cost of the rest. The ethical objection to any diminution in the incomes of those who own our land will vary in strength according, in the main, to our economic or political prepossessions. The indiscriminate multiplication of the unfit, like the drunkenness of the masses, will appear as a cause or an effect of social inequality according to our actual information about the poor, and our disposition towards them. The luxury of the rich may strike us as a sign either of national wealth or of national maladjustment of resources to needs. The autocratic administration of industry will appear either as the beneficent direction of the appropriate captains of industry, or as the tyranny of a proprietary class over those who have no alternative but to become its wageslaves. The struggle of the slaves among themselves, of the pro-prietors among themselves, and of each class with the other, may be to us "the beneficent private war which makes one man strive to climb on the shoulders of another, and remain there ;"* or it may: loom to us, out of the blood and tears and misery of the strife, as a horrible remnant of the barbarism from which man has half risen since

"We dined, as a rule, on each other:

What matter? the toughest survived."

That survival from an obsolescent form of the struggle for existence may seem the best guarantee for the continuance of the community and the race; or it may, on the other hand, appear a suicidal internecine conflict, as fatal as that between the belly and the members. All through the tale two views are possible, and we shall take the one or the other according to our knowledge and temperament.

* Sir Henry Maine, Popular Government, pp. 49, 50.