The labour troubles of to-day however raise too large a question to be discussed here. They seem to be growing more bitter, perhaps owing to the fact that the enormous extension of joint stock business has made the personal contact of masters and men almost impossible, and there is no reason why the Board of a Joint Stock Company should be philanthropic, if the members are not large minded enough to see that it is to their interest to have a contented staff. I do not, myself, see how any profit-sharing scheme can be applied to railroads, though the practice of facilitating investment in railway stocks by employees is largely increasing. I believe that the management of the staff must more nearly approach that of the Post Office, or the Army, than of a societé en commandite, since the capital invested is too enormous for the employees to own any considerable share.

In concluding this section of our subject, one cannot but feel that railway men are now so well paid, and their position is so well assured, that some modus vivendi ought to be found which would prevent disastrous strikes. It has been suggested that a court of arbitration might be instituted, two of whose members should be government officials, to be called in as assessors on the request of either party.

To sum up, we may admit that as our private railway system was the first to be constructed, so was it the first to lead the world, in speed, in accommodation, and in cheapness.

To keep this proud position it is in need of constant criticism, and the publicity necessary to such criticism, and moreover, of intelligence to enable us to keep a foremost place in technical

matters.

From the age of construction we are are moving into an age when working, or what the French call 'exploitation' will be more important: and how far our system will meet this change remains to be seen. But as government purchase is out of the question, and as the change has to be met, it will be for the public to demand what they need, and to call attention to improvements in the methods of other nations; and these our companies, if their future is at all like their past, should assuredly not be slow to introduce.

T. C. FARRER

THE DIFFICULTIES OF INDIVIDUALISM

THERE are many methods of investigating a movement in public thought or of examining a change in social aspirations. When Mr. Leonard Courtney undertook to set forth in the first number of the Economic Journal the Difficulties of Socialism,' he elected to study the subject neither in the historical or economic investigations of its scientific adherents nor in those of its serious critics, neither in the aspirations of its millions of votaries nor in the objections of its political opponents. He ignored the long history of the Socialist movement in England, France, and Germany; he shut his eyes to its marked and growing influence on economists and statesmen; he sought for an explanation of its aims neither from the professors nor from the popular leaders. He passed over the voluminous and varied international literature of the movement itself, and, after briefly referring to various Utopias of the past, took as its representative exponent a popular novelette' by a middle class Boston journalist and Sunday-school teacher, who was not a member of any Socialist organization, who was admittedly unacquainted either with its methods or its aims, and who displays, almost on every page of his unscientific Utopia, traces of the influence of what is perhaps the least socialized community in the world.

The wide circulation of Looking Backward (mainly among non-Socialists) appears, in Mr. Courtney's eyes, to make it more worthy of examination in the scientific pages of the Economic Journal than the suggestive writings of Owen or Comte, the subtle and pregnant analysis of the facts of the Industrial Revolution by Karl Marx, or the researches into economic history by whole schools of German Socialist economists. And it is highly significant of Mr. Courtney's general misapprehension of the Socialist movement that he describes at some length (apparently under the impression that he is criticizing Socialism) the insignificant attempts of a tiny band of philanthropic

divines and barristers-the so-called 'Christian Socialists' of 1850-to bring about a reversion to the Individualist method of production by starting little associations of producers, whilst he entirely omits to notice the essentially Socialist structure of the great modern co-operative movement, with its elimination of private profit and its democratic control over industry.

Indeed, all the developments of social life which brought about Mill's conversion to Socialism, and which are SO strongly influencing contemporary economists, appear to lie altogether outside Mr. Courtney's ken. He ignores the rapid progress of the collective control over the capitalist system of industry, by factory and other legislation on the one hand, and by Trade Unions on the other; whilst the steady supersession. of that system by our largely unconscious Municipal Socialism— the means of production owned by local authorities already exceeding the whole industrial capital of Ireland-is apparently without significance to this painstaking student of Looking Backward, and the picturesque descriptions of American Communist societies.

This method of dealing with Socialism is not unusual in England, and needs no comment. It may, however, serve to explain why the following pages are devoted, not to a detailed examination of Mr. Courtney's misconceptions, but to an attempt to set forth the main difficulties which are leading so many of Mr. Courtney's friends to abandon the individualist ideal.

It may be suggested that there is little to be gained either by the elaboration or by the criticism of ideal states of society. It cannot, indeed, be too often repeated that Socialism, to Socialists, is not a Utopia which they have invented, but a principle of social organization which they assert to have been discovered by the patient investigators into sociology whose labours have distinguished the present century. That principle, whether true or false, has, during a whole generation, met with an everincreasing, though often unconscious, acceptance by political administrators.

It is, indeed, one of the initial difficulties' to be overcome by Individualists that so many of them received their economic and historical training before we had learnt to think of social institutions and economic relations as being as much the subjects of constant change and evolution as any biological organism. The main outlines of social organization, based upon the exact sphere of private ownership in England to-day, appear to them as fixed and immovable as if they had come down from the Mount.'

Although the very last century has seen an almost complete upsetting of every economic and industrial relation in the country, it seems to be assumed that the existing social order, thus newcreated, is destined inevitably to endure in its main features unchanged and unchangeable. History is tacitly considered as having stopped with the last great convulsion of the Industrial Revolution, and Time to have then suddenly ceased to be the Great Innovator. Conversely, Socialism is, to such persons, still only a statical heaven sought to be substituted, uno ictu, for an equally statical world here present. So accustomed, indeed, were English students of the last generation to think of Socialism as a mere Utopia, spun from the humanity-intoxicated brains of various Frenchmen of the beginning of this century, that even Mr. Courtney evidently finds great difficulty in recognizing it in its modern scientific form. But this is merely a consequence of the same imperfect appreciation of historical evolution. Down to the present generation every aspirant after social reform, whether Socialist or Individualist, naturally embodied his ideas in a detailed plan of a new social order, from which all contemporary evils were eliminated. Bellamy is but a belated Cabet, Babœuf, or Campanella; and it is a little too bad to mistake this New England Utopian scheme for the essentially evolutionary Socialist movement now surging throughout Europe.

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Indeed, this very flux of things, which Bellamy and most of his critics ignore, constitutes the main difficulty' of Individualism. Whatever we may think of the existing social order, one thing is certain-namely, that it will now, as heretofore, inevitably undergo considerable modification in the future. Those modifications will be partly the result of forces not consciously initiated or directed by human will. Partly, however, the modifications will be the results, either intended or unintended, of deliberate attempts to readjust the social environment to suit man's real or fancied needs. It is therefore not a question of whether the existing social order shall be changed, but of how this inevitable change shall be made.

In the present phase of acute social compunction, the maladjustments which occasion these modifications appear to us in the guise of social problems.' But whether or not they are the subjects of conscious thought or conscious action, their influence is perpetually at work, silently or obtrusively modifying the distribution of social pressure, and altering the weft of that social tissue of which our life is made. The characteristic feature] of our own age is not this constant evolution itself-for that, of

course, is of all time-but our increasing consciousness of it.) Instead of unconscious factors we become deliberate agents, either to aid or resist the developments coming to our notice. Human selection accordingly becomes, to the distress of Mr. Herbert Spencer, the main form of natural selection, and functional adaptation replaces the struggle for existence as the main factor in social progress. Man becomes the midwife of the great womb of Time, and necessarily undertakes the responsibility for the new economic relations which he brings into existence.

Hence the growing value of correct principles of social action, of valid ideals for social aspiration. Hence, therefore, the importance, for weal or for woe, of the change in social ideals and principles which marks off the present generation of Socialists from the surviving economists and statesmen brought up in the 'Manchester school.' We may, of course, prefer not to accept the watchwords or shibboleths of either party; we may carefully guard ourselves against the falsehood of extremes'; we may believe that we can really steer a middle course. This comforting reflection of the practical man is, however, an unphilosophical delusion. As each difficulty of the present day comes up for solution, our action or inaction must, for all our caution, necessarily incline to one side or the other. We may help to modify the social organism either in the direction of a more general Collectivism or in that of a more perfect Individualism; it will be hard, even by doing nothing, to leave the balance just as it was. It becomes, accordingly, of vital importance to examine not only our practical policy but also our ideals and principles of action, even if we do not intend to follow these out to their logical conclusion.

It is not easy, at the present day, to be quite fair to the opi-` nions of the little knot of noble-minded enthusiasts who broke for us the chains of the oligarchic tyranny of the eighteenth century. Their work was essentially destructive, and this is not the place in which to estimate how ably they carried on their statical analysis, or how completely they misunderstood the social results of the industrial revolution which was falsifying all their predictions almost before they were uttered. But we may, perhaps, not unfairly sum up as follows the principles which guided them in dealing with the difficulties of social life: that the best government is that which governs least; that the utmost possible scope. should be allowed to untrammelled individual enterprise; that open competition and complete freedom from legal restrictions. furnish the best guarantees of a healthy industrial community;