103 
 
 a*.? 3& 
 
 
LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 Class No. 
 
 Accessions 
 
STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
STEPPING-STONES TO 
 SOCIALISM. 
 
 DAVID MAXWELL, C.E. 
 
 UIXVIRSITY 
 
 To the solid ground of Nature, 
 Trusts the mind that builds for aye." 
 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 HULL: 
 WILLIAM ANDREWS & CO., THE HULL PRESS. 
 
 LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT, & Co., LD. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 FOREWORDS i 
 
 THE POPULAR MEANING OF THE TERM SOCIALISM 3 
 
 LORD SALISBURY ON SOCIALISM - 6 
 
 WHY THERE is IN MANY MINDS AN ANTIPATHY TO 
 
 SOCIALISM - 10 
 
 ON SOME SOCIALISTIC VIEWS OF MARRIAGE - 17 
 
 THE QUESTION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY - 21 
 
 THE OLD POLITICAL ECONOMY is NOT THE WAY OF 
 
 SALVATION - - 30 
 
 "WHO is MY NEIGHBOUR?" - - - 34 
 
 PROGRESS, AND THE CONDITION OF THE LABOURER 36 
 
 GOOD AND BAD TRADE : PRECARIOUS EMPLOYMENT 44 
 
 ALL POPULAR MOVEMENTS ARE HELPING ON SOCIALISM 50 
 
 MODERN LITERATURE IN RELATION TO SOCIAL PROGRESS 62 
 
 PRUNING THE OLD THEOLOGICAL TREE - 73 
 
 THE CHURCHES, THEIR SOCIALISTIC TENDENCIES 80 
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE EARTH IN RELATION TO HUMAN 
 
 LIFE - - 85 
 
 SOCIALISM is BASED ON NATURAL LAWS OF LIFE 95 
 
 HUMANITY IN THE FUTURE - - 106 
 
 PRELUDES TO SOCIALISM - 109 
 
 FORECASTS OF THE ULTIMATE FORM OF SOCIETY - 113 
 
 A PlSGAH-TOP VIEW OF THE PROMISED LAND - - 121 
 
STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 FOREWORDS: THE CONFLICTING SCHOOLS 
 OF SOCIALISM. 
 
 SOCIALISM, the dominant topic of the present 
 day, has not had to emerge in its propagandism 
 as an entirely new birth of time. Sir Thomas More, 
 Sir Philip Sydney, and Lord Bacon were amongst its 
 earlier precursors. Saint Simon, Charles Fourier, and 
 Robert Owen, theorized and taught in a more recent 
 period. Here, as in other things, the thoughts of the 
 past are the inheritance of the present. Various 
 socialistic standards are now reared, each the rallying 
 point of its greater or lesser host of adherents : under 
 which flag do we venture to enlist ? or, like Hal-o'-the- 
 wynd, do we "fight for our own hand ?" 
 
 Broadly speaking, the advocates of socialism, differ- 
 ing far less in their ultimate aims than in their proposed 
 methods of accomplishment, may be said to have had 
 their prototypes in the two historic schools of geology. 
 The earlier of these schools held that the heterogeneous 
 
2 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 and distorted condition of the earth's crust was the 
 outcome of convulsion and catastrophe, of earthquake 
 and explosion, of abrupt upheavals and disruptions. 
 The later school maintained that all the changes which 
 have occurred in the crust, tiltings and dislocations of 
 strata, the grooving out of water-channels, elevation here 
 and submergence there, were results from agencies 
 acting with steady persistence throughout long periods 
 of time, " without haste and without rest." 
 
 The Hebrew prophet, brooding by the river of 
 Babylon over the lost Jerusalem of his fathers, his heart 
 surcharged with patriotism, his high-strung idealistic 
 temperament quivering with mystical aspirations, calls 
 out in perplexity and bewilderment, " O Lord, what 
 shall be the issue of these things ?" French revolutionists 
 in the tumbrils, which through a lane of tigerish, blood- 
 unsated eyes, were slowly wending to the Place de la 
 Revolution : wished to each other that the Saturn then 
 devouring his own children had spared them a little 
 longer, "so they could have seen the end of it!" Ah, 
 but there is no real issue or ending within the great 
 drama of humanity. Each partial end or issue is but 
 a fresh thread woven into the mighty web ; a thread 
 which shall begin another change in the pattern and 
 design be an opening out of new chapters, new 
 characters, scenes, and incidents in the drama. 
 
THE POPULAR MEANING OF THE TERM SOCIALISM. 3 
 
 THE POPULAR MEANING OF THE TERM 
 SOCIALISM. 
 
 Nuttall gives the meaning of the word as : "A system 
 which, in opposition to the competitive system at present 
 prevailing, seeks to re-organize society on the basis, in the 
 main, of a certain secularism in religion, of community 
 of interest, and of co-operation in labour for the common 
 good ; " and competition signifies : " Strife between those 
 desirous of obtaining the same object ; contention for 
 superiority ; rivalry." 
 
 Passing for the moment the first-named item in the 
 dictionary meaning of the term, with the others which 
 are said to enter into the basis of socialism, there will be 
 general agreement that they are well and fairly stated. 
 All hypothetical systems of society differing essentially 
 from those which have been drifted into fortuitously, 
 without preconceived design have been planned on the 
 understanding that in their establishment, and for their 
 maintenance, there would be a concensus of intention, of 
 mutual aid and co-operation. It having been assumed 
 that, on the basis of competition, of antagonistic interests, 
 no form of society can be raised which would be alike 
 beneficial to all its members. 
 
 But the advocates of competition assert its stimulative 
 influences in calling out effort and invention ; that it 
 increases the sum of the energies which are put forth in 
 the production of wealth, and the facilities for its 
 distribution; that the comparatively greater success of 
 the more active, clever, or persevering is a spur and an 
 incitement to the less clever, active, or persevering ; that 
 
STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 the former deserve their higher success, and are justly 
 entitled to reap all its advantages ; and that their meaner 
 rivals receive their due deserts in the disadvantages of 
 their ill success. They say, moreover, that the con- 
 sequent creation of a richer class, with its many requisites, 
 is beneficial, gives more employment for labour, and a 
 higher tone to society ; that as Nature gives inequality of 
 aptitude in her human children as their starting-points in 
 life, so the division of mankind into classes of higher and 
 lower is in the natural order of things ; and that, as in 
 the past, so throughout the coming ages, there shall ever 
 be poverty and mean conditions of life in the land. 
 
 The advocates of socialism say, on the other hand, 
 that the wealth produced would, in quality and real value, 
 if not in actual amount, be largely increased if those with 
 higher and those with lower qualifications were to help 
 each other in its production, and that its enjoyment 
 ought to be not according to success in the production, 
 but according to the needs of all who took part therein. 
 They aver that over-reaching and chicanery, "jerry-work" 
 and adulteration, are the natural outcome of rivalry and 
 antagonism ; that, in a world teeming with abundance, 
 poverty is not a natural necessity ; and that caste and its 
 creation of factitious wants are productive of many 
 serious evils. They further say that there are other 
 elements in human nature than the desire for personal 
 advantage over others, which would equally nay, 
 would more effectually and reliably, call out effort and 
 inventive skill, and this to the common advantage of 
 all. 
 
 On these different contentions, the conflicting systems 
 
THE POPULAR MEANING OF THE TERM SOCIALISM. 5 
 
 take their stands, and marshal their forces of argument ; 
 they are now face to face, and the eyes of the world and 
 the future of humanity await the issue. The social 
 question is in the very air ; it disturbs us with discussions 
 which cannot be evaded, and it asserts itself as a leading 
 factor in every forecast of the future. 
 
 No doubt the teachings of many professed advocates 
 have conspired to saddle the lexicographer's definition of 
 socialism with the rider of antagonism to religion ; but 
 it is not very evident how any possible improvements in 
 the art of social life necessarily imply a repudiation of, or 
 a disbelief in, spiritual religion'; that is, in the being of 
 God, in an inherent power, the law of the laws of the 
 universe. Certainly, socialism is secular in its aims, just 
 as the arts of government, of jurisprudence, of education, 
 of medicine, and of sanitation are secular, "pertaining 
 to this present world." The socialist advocate has here 
 a rightful standing ; but not in doing what would be 
 ultra vires, and a meddlesome usurpation of powers 
 beyond his mandate ; not in placing a veto on thought 
 and conscience, on matters outside his domain. The 
 religion, or the lack of religion, of the far future is 
 entirely a question for the men of that future ; as little 
 need for us to trouble about it as about how they shall 
 dress, or trim their beards, or in what speech new or 
 old they shall bid each other " Good morning." 
 
 We apprehend that the real essence of the Christian 
 
 religion is in the teachings of its founder ; and certainly 
 
 the animating spirit of these teachings is that of 
 
 benevolence, of sympathy with the poor and the 
 
6 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 distressed ; even the erring and sinful were not outside 
 the pale of his pitiful regards. His supreme object was 
 the establishment of a universal kingdom of righteous- 
 ness, of peace and love upon the earth. He ever 
 inculcated simplicity and moderation of life ; only one 
 dish was needful for the supper at Bethany, " much 
 serving " was merely cumbersome. The critically severe 
 John Stuart Mill said that " in all questions of conduct 
 there was no better rule than this : What would Jesus of 
 Nazareth have done if he had been in my place?" We 
 hardly see how regard for Christ's teachings should be a 
 barrier or a hindrance to social amelioration. If, in the 
 extraneous things which have been grafted into the 
 popular faith, there are any erroneous views of man's 
 nature, or of his ability to modify or to re-construct his 
 forms of social life, a belief in these errors will be 
 inimical to his progress they will be false lights tempting 
 him to drift out of his true course; let these go and 
 the sooner they go the better. 
 
 ' LORD SALISBURY ON SOCIALISM. 
 
 In the House of Lords, on the iQth May, 1890, the 
 Earl of Wemyss made a speech, denouncing the 
 "Socialism of the Senate," in passing or advancing 
 measures which implied the confiscation of private 
 property, and the curtailment of individual liberty in the 
 right of Free Contract. This speech seemed like a far- 
 off echo of the Duke of Newcastle's " Cannot I do what 
 I like with my own ? " in the first Reform Bill campaign. 
 The Marquis of Salisbury replied in substance as follows : 
 
LORD SALISBURY ON SOCIALISM. 7 
 
 "Every question has to be discussed, not on its 
 philosophical origin or its technical classification, but on 
 its own merits. He took socialism in its strict meaning 
 to be for the State to do a thing which hitherto and 
 usually was done by private people for the sake of gain. 
 There was nothing so socialistic as the Mint and the 
 Post Office. New dangers had arisen in consequence of 
 the development of their civilization and industries, and 
 for which they had to find new remedies. The socialistic 
 proposals indicated the great evils which they were 
 brought forward to remedy ; and nobody, who was not 
 absolutely blind, could deny the existence of these evils. 
 They were evils to the existence of which the Emperor 
 of Germany testified in summoning the recent Conference. 
 They had undoubtedly come upon an age of the world 
 when the action of industrial causes and economic 
 influences had produced great centres of misery, and had 
 added a terrible catalogue to the ills which flesh was 
 heir to. It was their duty to do all they could 
 to find remedies for these evils. How far they could 
 grapple with them, they could not know yet ; but 
 they were bound to give to the task the best of their 
 attention and the utmost of their ability, and even if they 
 were called socialists in attempting to do so, they 
 should be reconciled if they could find the remedies, 
 knowing that they were undertaking no new principle, 
 or striking^ out no new faith, but that they were 
 pursuing the long and healthy traditions of English 
 legislation." 
 
 These were wise and bold words of the Prime 
 Minister, of a man who, with many faults of temper 
 
STKI'IMNll-STONKS TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 and of will, is yet, we trust, one in our roll of 
 
 statesmen 
 
 " Who know the season when to take 
 Occasion by the hand, and make 
 The bounds of freedom wider yet." 
 
 But fully admitting the usefulness and importance of 
 legislation ever keeping in touch with, and even leading 
 in, the van of progressive thought, we may remark that 
 legislative enactments do not, as a rule, effect all, or 
 nearly all, the results which were hoped for by their 
 advocates, or were feared by their opponents. To the 
 old Chartist agitators, Universal Suffrage was to be the 
 sure and certain panacea for all political evils ; to 
 Conservatives it was to be a perilous "leap in the dark," 
 "a shooting of Niagara," with a sequel of anarchy and 
 confusion constitutional England lost for ever ! Now, 
 after years of practical experience of what is virtually 
 universal suffrage, protected by the ballot, a Conservative 
 Government is in power, and there are yet some bad old 
 laws on the Statute Book. The chief hopes for a better 
 future, for an enlightened progress towards more bene- 
 ficial social arrangements, lie in the education and moral 
 advancement of all classes in the community ; but this 
 education and higher morality will ever be largely aided 
 by wise and sympathetic legislation, making it, on the 
 whole, easier to do right and harder to do wrong. 
 
 Note further, in the language of Lord Salisbury,' 
 another confirmation of how easily, with what ready 
 compliance/ utterly unconscious of wrench or of 
 inconsistency, the old use-and-wont adapts itself to all 
 the changes which are brought about by the whirligig of 
 
LORD SALISBURY ON SOCIALISM. 9 
 
 time. A new idea, whether in philosophy or in the 
 business of common life, which has in itself the elements 
 of truth or of adaptability, passes, as a rule, through three 
 phases : first, of active opposition, or of silent, careless 
 contempt ; secondly, it is worth investigating a little 
 faint praise, and "almost thou persuadest me;" and 
 lastly, of general acceptation, most people then thinking 
 that they always thought it was the right thing ! And 
 these three phases so run into and blend with each other 
 that there is seldom any feeling of incongruity, of 
 conversion or change of front. The Church which 
 compelled Galileo to abjure as heretical his teaching of 
 the earth's movements now numbers amongst its 
 ecclesiastics many earnest and efficient practical 
 astronomers. Beliefs in a literal six-days' creation and 
 in a universal deluge were, within the memories of many 
 of us, tests of orthodoxy ; such beliefs would now, as 
 contrary to the generally-accepted method of creation, 
 and of the ordinary course of nature, be accounted 
 superstitious. When Robert Chambers wrote his 
 " Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation," he 
 published it in strictest anonymity ; otherwise, social 
 ostracism would have been the penalty. Now, the theory 
 of evolution, as the all-prevading law of the universe, 
 obtains general credence. The political party, which has 
 not heretofore distinguished itself as a prime mover in 
 the cause of comprehensive National Education, is to-day 
 putting into practical shape what the rival and more 
 pronouncedly popular party had ventured to suggest 
 only with bated breath and feeble hopes of realisa- 
 tion that the cost of this education should be 
 
10 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM, 
 
 borne by the State, that to the recipients it should 
 be free ! 
 
 So, when in the Imperial Parliament the old Norman- 
 French words, " La Reine volante," or whatever form 
 may then be in ordinary use, as the constitutional 
 confirmation of Bills which had been thrice read in both 
 Houses shall have been pronounced on measures, which 
 would now be deemed wildly socialistic, they will fall as 
 mere matter of course, and as if Parliament were still 
 quietly "pursuing the long and healthy traditions of 
 English legislation." 
 
 WHY THERE IS IN MANY MINDS AN 
 ANTIPATHY TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 To many persons, the very word is a fearful spectre, 
 a Frankenstein monster, the incarnation of all evil : 
 and these persons are not generally the more ignorant 
 or the weaker-minded ; they are often men of culture and 
 high character. There are various reasons for such 
 aversion, but chiefly these two : 
 
 i. In the past history of human society, beneficial 
 changes in the life conditions of some, have generally 
 meant detrimental changes in the life conditions of 
 others ; elevation here has been balanced, nay, often 
 overbalanced, by depression there. The important, 
 labour-saving invention of the power-loom cheapened 
 sheets and shirting, but brought want and misery to the 
 hand-loom weavers. There is thus a natural fear that 
 similar oscillations between better and worse, between 
 fortunate haves and unfortunate have-nots* must ever be 
 
WHY THERE IS AN ANTIPATHY TO SOCIALISM. 1 1 
 
 the rule in social life. It is not easy to instil into the 
 minds of its own advocates and much less easy into 
 the minds of others a thorough recognition of the 
 central principle of socialism, a general elevation in the 
 elements of wholesome human life. No doubt this 
 principle is folded up within the unopened calyx of the 
 future ; and it has to be unfolded by new wisdom and 
 new experience. But such an all-embracing elevation is 
 hardly a necessary deduction from the history of the 
 past ; and faith in it, a faith of hope and confidence 
 which will remove mountains of doubt and distrust, will 
 be but a slow growth in the minds of men. 
 
 2. Many who have assumed the position of leadership 
 in modern socialism, and proposing universal peace and 
 goodwill, mutual helpfulness and common brotherhood 
 as the ultimate goal, have yet indicated such a rough, 
 dangerous, and altogether forbidding road towards that 
 goal a propagandism like that of old Islam by the 
 sword through violence and vindictiveness, confiscation 
 and coercion, that quiet, peaceful, kind-hearted people 
 have stood aghast in natural revulsion and dismay. 
 
 One high-priest in the gospel of what is known as 
 International Socialism, thus affirms in an authoritative 
 Manifesto : " The Communists declare openly that their 
 aims can be attained only by a violent overthrow of the 
 existing social order. Let the ruling classes tremble 
 before a Communistic revolution." Hardly a hopeful 
 prospect this for the early advent of changes for the 
 general good and welfare ; essential to which are the 
 earnest faith, the cordial assent, and the hearty co- 
 operation of every class in the community. And the 
 
12 STKPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 avowed principles of other self-constituted leaders imply 
 that the delicately-adjusted organizations, which are also 
 essentials in a new and improved order of society, are to 
 be based on universal anarchy, on " every human being 
 having the right and the means of doing that which 
 pleases him, without being controlled by any govern- 
 mental power whatsoever, whether the origin of such 
 power was elective or imposed. The best governments 
 are the worst." That men in any one class of our 
 present society, with all hereditary taints and strains 
 towards evil in their blood, and having been nurtured in a 
 world saturated with malice and chicanery, sensuous lust 
 and selfish ambition, should, in their ignorance and un- 
 bridled passions, be allowed " to do what pleases them," 
 seems a proposition too absurd for discussion, and would 
 in practice only the instinct of self-preservation in society 
 will never allow it to reach that stage be simply moral 
 and social confusion. Shall it ever be safe for, and 
 beneficial to society, that it shall be without law, its 
 individual members doing as they like ? Yes, when they 
 have been all so nurtured and developed as that their 
 every liking and their every desire is towards the good of 
 their fellows ; when they are so enlightened as to be able 
 to forecast the ultimate effect, for good or for evil, of 
 every word and every action ; when love, the new 
 commandment of the teacher, has so saturated their 
 hearts, their every motive and every passion, that they 
 have become towards all that is noble and worthy, "a 
 law unto themselves." 
 
 We are so far from disbelieving in the possibility of 
 man going on towards perfection, that we have absolute 
 
WHY THERE IS AN ANTIPATHY TO SOCIALISM. 13 
 
 faith in his so doing. But when we think for a moment 
 on what must be the essential elements in such a high 
 condition of humanity, general, practically universal 
 wisdom and nobility of character, the thorough 
 discipline of the temper and the passions, the life-habit 
 of duty, of spending and being spent for others, we can 
 but wonder at the ignorance and infatuation of imagin- 
 ing that such exaltation could ever be attained through 
 the lowest and worst passions of savagery. All the 
 teachings of history are against such a supposition. A 
 stream, stained and polluted at its source, cannot yield 
 the living waters of social redemption. No absurdest 
 fetich in oldest or most barbarous superstitions, no 
 wildest legend of the fabulous in history were more alien 
 to the essential nature of things, or had less of reasonable 
 probability, than the idea of a peaceful Eden of human 
 regeneration, growing out of hatred and revenge, out of 
 social conflict and convulsion. 
 
 We know how, in the face of so much wrong in the 
 world, it is natural for sympathetic hearts to burn with 
 hatred of the wrong, and, unless they are enlightened by 
 a knowledge of the springs of human action, to include 
 in this hatred the wrong-doer : But we also know that 
 the higher laws of wisdom and philantrophy will rise 
 above the animosities and retaliations which are the 
 instincts of savagery ; will go farther back than to the 
 individual agent in eliciting the primary causes of evil 
 and of wrong ; substituting for these causes other 
 influences,, wherein the coincidence of individual with 
 social good, shall operate only beneficially for all. 
 
14 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 Another matter which many professed socialists think 
 it is their place to meddle with, and to give their dicta 
 upon, is the relative duties and privileges of the parents 
 and the community of the future, in regard to children. 
 In his recent Encyclical, the Pope has felt it to be his 
 duty to re-affirm the rights of parentage, as against the 
 claims made for the State. Older than any State, and 
 more closely bound up with the life of the individual, 
 the family cannot, he avers, be sacrificed to the new 
 theorists, who are for setting aside the most sacred and 
 most cherished traditions of human nature. 
 
 The instinctive idea with parents is, that their children 
 belong to them, are their very own ; and in many 
 savage peoples, and even in peoples living in a quasi- 
 civilisation, the parents have assumed the power of life 
 and death over their offspring. But nature endows the 
 child , with a magnetic power of inciting love and its 
 beneficial influences in the minds of its parents. In the 
 animal world, we find this principle to hold universally 
 true, that, the greater the needs of the offspring for 
 nurture and protection, the stronger is the parental 
 instinct of careful affection ; the longer the period pf 
 weakness, and of inability to sustain its own life in the 
 young, so concurrently extended is the period of parental 
 care. No young animal is more helpless to sustain of 
 itself the life which it has inherited, than is the young 
 humanity ; and in no other does the period of inability 
 extend through so many years. In full equilibrium with 
 this long continued helplessness is the parental affection, 
 and its outcome in nurture and protection. 
 
 This natural adaptation is the rule and tendency of 
 
WHY THERE IS AN ANTIPATHY TO SOCIALISM. 15 
 
 life ; but counter influences will interfere with, and 
 weaken the instincts of, nature. A woman of fashion 
 will often, in the pursuits of personal pleasure, neglect her 
 own children, handing them over to hirelings. A 
 drunkard will look upon his offspring as drags upon his 
 sensuous gratifications, will starve or even desert them. 
 The State has often to take upon itself parental duties ; 
 and it has also to protect its own interests, by seeing 
 that children are so brought up as to become good and 
 proper citizens, instead of being burdens upon it, or, 
 worse than mere burdens, cankers, eating into and 
 corrupting its very heart. And so the State says that 
 parents shall not be allowed to ill-use their children, to 
 insufficiently feed or clothe them, to bring them up in 
 ignorance, or send them too early to work. 
 
 Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver, had the idea of 
 making public principle and utility predominate over 
 private interests and affections ; and on that idea he 
 ordained that children were not to be the property of 
 their parents, but of the State, which was to direct their 
 education, and determine their modes of life. A better 
 idea with the legislators of the future the number of 
 whom will be equal with that of all wholesomely- 
 developed men and women upon the earth will be to 
 take fullest advantage of all natural instincts. The 
 parents, their hearts ever yearning with love for~ their 
 offspring, and the community, careful of its individual 
 members, co-operating with each other in placing the 
 children under all good influences towards that develop- 
 ment, which, being the best for their individual lives, 
 will also coincide with what is best for the general 
 
1 6 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 welfare. For this end, the experience of the past, and 
 the higher wisdom of their own times, will far better 
 qualify them to judge of fitting means and methods 
 than we can now either surmise or suggest. 
 
 Another reason for a dislike to socialism, as commonly 
 advocated, may be, that, in a question on which, above 
 all others, there is sure to be a great diversity of opinions, 
 and no one, however gifted, can possibly see clearly all 
 round, many propagandists majce irritating assumptions 
 of infallibility. The common rights of all men are 
 proposed as the leading objects ; and yet these advocates 
 would try to cramp and compress all other minds into 
 the shapes and dimensions of their own necessarily 
 circumscribed minds. " I am Sir Oracle," is ever an 
 offensive dictum ; ever rouses opposition and resentment. 
 Of all bigotries and intolerances, surely the worst, as 
 most incongruous and out of place, are those which 
 masquerade under guises of free thought and advanced 
 opinion ; in which, with the noble word Liberty on the 
 lips, the spirit of the Inquisitor is still lurking in the 
 heart. The old Puritans sought the New World that 
 they might there enjoy liberty of conscience, and alas 
 for poor human nature they there denied that liberty to 
 others. Diversities of opinion demand in our days 
 something beyond that old condescending term 
 toleration. Toleration of a man's honest thoughts by 
 his fellow-men, does not imply equality of rights, or 
 yield due respect to others, but is an assumption of 
 superiority. Wrong opinions of any kind will, some- 
 when and somehow, produce evil ; and it is ever a wise 
 
ON SOME SOCIALISTIC VIEWS OF MARRIAGE. 17 
 
 policy, as well as a high duty, for the better informed 
 to endeavour, by frank and full discussion, to change 
 them into right opinions. But, knowing how varied 
 circumstances and springs of action mould thought and 
 character into all their diversities, a true fraternity will 
 treat discordant opinions with tenderness and discretion, 
 with reverence even, not rudely plucking up the 
 tares, lest thereby the good wheat also be uprooted. 
 
 ON SOME SOCIALISTIC VIEWS OF 
 MARRIAGE. 
 
 On certain matters in the social life of the future 
 which only concern that future, which do not at all affect 
 present purposes and developments, and which it is 
 simply a usurpation of future rights to meddle with, some 
 of our modern Socialists have uttered their authoritative 
 tironundamento. We have alluded to the questions of 
 the future of religion and of the care of the young, we 
 now instance that of marriage. 
 
 The question of sex meets us, not merely in its broadest 
 purpose and distinction, but at every turning in life. Its 
 influence broods over society, over literature and art ; it 
 enters with us into nature's solitudes ; monastery and 
 nunnery walls cannot shut out this essential factor in the 
 constitution of humanity. In the consideration of any 
 proposed change, social or political, it is of equal 
 importance to enquire how would this change affect 
 women, will it raise or lower their character and position, 
 will it expand or contract the development of their 
 womanhood ? as it is to enquire how will it affect men ? 
 
1 8 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 The relationship of the sexes has varied considerably 
 in the historical past ; but the general rule, even in 
 savage life, has been a persistent and an abiding union 
 between one man and one woman, joining to each other 
 in early maturity ; the man, as a rule, providing the 
 necessary subsistence for the family, and protecting it 
 from danger ; the woman cooking the food, rearing the 
 offspring, and doing the necessary domestic work ; the 
 pair Nature's unit of life sharing together all the 
 fortunes of life. There have been divergences from the 
 general rule. There has been polygamy, chiefly amongst 
 Asiatic peoples, not a happy or very sensible modification, 
 which Nature herself, in the numerical equality of the 
 sexes, plainly repudiates. There have been savage 
 nations where husband and wife had to be of different 
 tribes, and the children were considered to belong to the 
 mother's tribe. There have been different opinions, 
 with their consequent customs, as to the degree of 
 relationship by blood which was preclusive of marriage. 
 And there have been different institutes and customs, 
 regarding divorce, the dissolution of the marriage-bond, 
 with more or less of motive and qualification. 
 
 There can be very little doubt that the natural and 
 instinctive union of the sexes, the kind which promises 
 the greatest individual happiness and the best results for 
 the community, is permanent marriage. Only to such a 
 union does the strong, all-mastering passion of love ever 
 with the advancement of civilisation and refinement, 
 waning in sensuousness, waxing in ideality point and 
 belong ; on any other foundation love is only mockery 
 and pretence. The outflow of the family affections, 
 
ON SOME SOCIALISTIC VIEWS OF MARRIAGE. 19 
 
 parental, filial, fraternal, and the proper training of 
 children, are all rooted and bound up in the permanency 
 of the marriage-bond. 
 
 No doubt, society will in the future, here as elsewhere 
 in its economy of life, introduce what modifications it 
 thinks fit and proper ; of these, its increased wisdom and 
 experience will enable it to judge far better than we 
 can now judge for it. Anyway, it will have the entire 
 responsibility of its acts, and be its own Court of Appeal ; 
 and whilst, in these days of free discussion, we cannot 
 place any enquiry, however useless and inapplicable to 
 present purposes, in an Index expurgatorious, it seems 
 utter foolishness and a gratuitous dissipation of energy, 
 to complicate social questions and create needless 
 prejudice, by statements and assertions on matters 
 entirely beyond the scope of present-day discussions. 
 
 Yet it is natural for man to project himself into the 
 future, to labour with hand and brain upon works which 
 will long outlast his own little life ; the fruitage from 
 which, indeed, may only appear when he himself has 
 long ceased to be. We can only balance our own 
 indebtedness to the past, and make our great heritage 
 therefrom truly and justly our own, by working for the 
 future. Let us, in science, place on record all discover- 
 able data in astronomy ; the present heights of 
 mountains, the contours of sea margins, the currents 
 and soundings throughout the seas ; the climatic ranges, 
 the isometrical lines of temperature, the magnetic 
 variations, the prevailing courses of the winds. In art, 
 let us bore tunnels, cut canals, and make our docks and 
 bridges stable and lasting as the pyramids. For all these 
 
20 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 things the future will be grateful to us, and speak well 
 of us. But don't let us trouble ourselves about the social 
 economy, the domestic habits, or the philosophy of the 
 future. In its riper age, it will, in all such matters, be 
 well able to think and to act for itself. 
 
 We know, of course, that there are in present society 
 many unsatisfactory marriages, uncongenialities, misfits, 
 with consequent unhappiness, separation of heart, if not 
 personal separation ; sometimes even unfaithfulness to 
 the " each-to-the-other " marriage- vow. A nobler develop- 
 ment, a higher-toned morale in the future, will do much 
 to prevent such unhappy marriages, or to mitigate the 
 detrimental results from the comparatively few which may 
 prove unsatisfactory. " Falling in love " will then be 
 less a haphazard boy and girl conceit ; more a result of 
 mutual knowledge, of calm judgment and thoughtful 
 consideration. The careful training of both sexes will 
 have inculcated prudence, a weighing and balancing 
 habit of mind, the desire for, and the enlightenment to 
 discover mutual adaptability. And all the bents of mind 
 and character in both sexes will be towards chastity 
 before marriage, towards faithfulness to the future 
 husband, or the future wife. One grossly deteriorating 
 factor in present social life, the brand of servility to mere 
 animalism, will then have vanished from the earth, have 
 gone with the wolf and the tiger, the small-pox and the 
 prison. Who can doubt this who has any faith at all 
 in the capability of men and women rising above their 
 meaner selves in the ultimate victory of the spirit over 
 the flesh ? 
 
THP] QUESTION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY. 21 
 
 THE QUESTION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY. 
 
 We read that in some of the Primitive Christian 
 Fellowships, all property was held in common, "and 
 distribution was made to every man according as he had 
 need." This striking picture of a social phase in 
 relatively ancient life, is sometimes referred to as fore- 
 casting the climax of all our civilisations, the ultimate 
 bourn of all our socialistic philosophies. Of course this 
 early effort towards Communism was the outcome of 
 enthusiasm in the new faith of a Heavenly Kingdom, 
 to be forthwith established upon the earth. It was on 
 a comparatively small scale, and probably did not 
 continue very long, or spread very widely amongst the new 
 proselytes. The idea, as a still binding duty from the 
 early example, has been taken up in recent years, and 
 worked out with fair success, but also on a small scale, 
 and under religious zeal, by the American Shakers and 
 some other sects. 
 
 The Christian Communists of over eighteen centuries 
 ago, did not think that the private retention of property 
 was the main pillar in a nobler, more divine fabric of 
 society. We read, " And not one of them said that ought 
 of the things which he possessed was his own ; but they 
 had all things common." And here questions arise : 
 If all the trends of opinion, and the remorseless logic of 
 events, point to the common use of all the products of 
 nature and all the constructions of art, as being a better 
 use than would be made of them under private owner- 
 ship, is it only under the fervour of religious faith that 
 such better use is practically possible ? -A&d if the 
 
 fUHIVBRSITTl 
 
22 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 future, in its ever increasing freedom of thought and its 
 diminishing regard for old authority, gives but faint 
 promise of such a faith being then prevalent ; are there 
 any other elements in man's nature, any forces other 
 than religious zeal which might then come into play, to 
 make practicable a common ownership of all wealth, and 
 its administration for the common good ? 
 
 We know that whatever men set up as their summum 
 bonum, their chief good will often absorb all the best 
 energies of their nature, be the one earnest purpose in 
 their minds, the master-motive in all their actions. 
 The patriot, to whom his country or nationality is the 
 highest good, will, for this ideal, freely give his life. 
 John Brown's detestation of negro slavery so permeated 
 every fibre of his being that he counted as nought all 
 other evils, even death itself. And what we would 
 account mean or even vicious ideals will often be the 
 all-swaying influences of life. A miser's insatiable thirst 
 for gold will be the ruling passion, stronger than love of 
 life, for the sole gratification of which life is worth living. 
 The gamester will, in his play-madness, fight death 
 itself, his trembling fingers clutching at the cards, when 
 the grim antagonist disputes with him for the final deal. 
 Old feuds have passed on for generations from sire to 
 son, and their consummation in one hour of vengeance 
 has been the goal of highest purpose and endeavour. 
 And doubtless, in man's social development, elements in 
 his nature which, in a confusion of interests, have 
 generally hitherto worked for evil, may be so trained 
 and directed, as that their active operation shall be only 
 towards the common good. 
 
THE QUESTION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY. 23 
 
 The two questions then Which of the two modes of 
 holding property, individually and collectively, is more 
 likely to be the better mode in an advanced society? 
 and, If community of ownership appeared to be the 
 better mode, is it possible, taking human nature as it is, 
 and with no aids from faith, other than faith in man's 
 will, ever to do what seems to him in the broadest sense 
 best for himself to realise permanent Communism ? 
 would thus be resolved into only the former question. 
 For the more beneficial methods in all things relating 
 to human society are entirely within men's own choice 
 and discretion. Nothing is too good to be true ; man can 
 attain to all his aspirations, the attainment to which 
 would be well for him. 
 
 And it needs no argument to prove, hypothetically at 
 least, that in a world teeming with an abundance of all 
 the elements of wealth, it is better that all should be share- 
 holders and co-partners in this wealth, than that it should 
 be in the hands of individuals, subject to their caprice or 
 neglect, their waste, their hoarding up, or their misuse. 
 Even now, the principle that every human being is, as such, 
 entitled to a subsistence, is admitted amongst civilised 
 nations. About one million of persons in England are 
 thus, under the designation of paupers, maintained at 
 the public cost. 
 
 But it is often urged that the fear of want, or the 
 discomfort and degradation of pauperism, is now the 
 spur to individual effort ; take away this spur in the 
 assurance of joint-ownership in the aggregated wealth 
 of the country, and very many would abandon work, 
 and serenely look on in lazy idleness at the industriously- 
 
24 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 inclined doing all the work. Men, such as are here 
 indicated, are a natural outgrowth from present society 
 where so many non-workers are better off, and assume 
 a higher caste than the workers ; where labour is often 
 drudgery, often ill-paid, and individually precarious. Out 
 of this condition of things, a growth of idlers, tramps, 
 and paupers springs up as naturally as thorns and 
 thistles in a neglected garden ; and, so long as there 
 continues to be many such wastrels of life floating on 
 the surface of society, or submerged in its slums and 
 hidden recesses, so long will the advent of the longed 
 for New Order of society be postponed. When labour 
 is dignified by being shared in by all, as much a factor 
 in daily life as eating and sleeping ; when, being within the 
 amount due to healthy exercise, it is seldom other than 
 pleasurable ; when, above all else, it has been grafted 
 as duty into the character, as much a portion of being 
 as eyesight and hearing, the shirking by capable men 
 of their fair share of work will have become a tradition 
 of the past. 
 
 One professed socialist has asserted in a terse phrase, 
 often quoted : "All property is theft." Of course, any- 
 thing obtained wrongfully, by unjustifiable means, is theft. 
 Jacob, taking mean advantage of famishing Esau, stole 
 his elder brother's birthright ; but, on the face of it, 
 surely property which has been acquired by personal 
 labour, or by other means which have not been 
 detrimental to others, may be said to be rightfully 
 possessed. It is another question, opening up a new 
 field for discussion, whether, under different social 
 
THE QUESTION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY. 25 
 
 arrangements, it would not be wisdom, for the general 
 good, and even to the advantage of the individual owner, 
 to throw such acquisitions into a common stock. Lord 
 Bramwell says in a recent article in the Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury: " Private property exists of right in such things, and 
 to such extent, as is for the good of the community ; if it 
 can be shewn that the existence of private property is not for 
 the good of the community, then it ought to be abolished." 
 So, according to the learned judge, the question of 
 holding property is to be put to the touchstone test of 
 how does its personal ownership affect others ? and we 
 cordially accept the proposition. We are repeatedly told 
 that we must respect the rights of others. We 
 acknowledge this to be our bounden duty ; all true 
 socialism must have this as one of its fundamental 
 axioms ; but the term requires specific definition. A 
 man's rights can only include things affecting his own 
 being and personality. They are thus bounded and 
 circumscribed ; they cease when they infringe upon the 
 rights of others. I have a right to walk along the foot- 
 path of a public street ; but I have no right, by racing 
 along or by keeping on what is understood to be the 
 wrong side of the footpath, to jostle against or to 
 obstruct other travellers. A man's dwelling-house is said 
 to be his castle ; but we send in the nuisance inspector 
 to see that it is in a sanitary condition.* We say that a 
 
 * In an article on gambling in the Nineteenth Century r , Sir James 
 Stephen makes a remark which should be taken to heart by those 
 who hold that gambling in private houses is the free exercise of 
 individual liberty. "True as this answer is, it is very unwise to 
 rest the defence of private habits upon a ground which involves an 
 admission that they would be criminal if practised in public." 
 
26 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 man has no right to bring up his children in ignorance, 
 to train them in vice, or to corrupt them by bad example. 
 We even deny the right of a man to do what he likes 
 with himself to go naked, to starve himself, to mutilate 
 his body, or destroy his own life. A magistrate fines a 
 man for being " drunk and incapable." We hardly admit 
 a man's right to destroy wholesome food, or to lock it 
 away in a time of scarcity in expectation of higher prices ; 
 and this although he could shew receipts in full for its 
 purchase, or had grown it on land which was technically 
 his own. And it is coming to be held that a man has 
 no right to say that any portion of the soil, which is the 
 natural heritage of the race, shall be left barren or com- 
 paratively unproductive ; and the rich are themselves 
 more and more feeling that they ought to be only 
 stewards of their wealth, giving account to their fellow- 
 men and to their own consciences how they use it. The 
 millionaire, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, holds that no man has 
 a right to die wealthy. Mr. Gladstone proposes a 
 brotherhood of the rich, of those with surplus wealth 
 beyond their wants as their consciences may determine 
 these wants who should regularly set apart and expend 
 the remainder for the good of their less-fortunate fellows. 
 Accumulated wealth really means the power of 
 commanding the labour of others, and it cannot be 
 administered or dispensed without affecting others, with- 
 out causing perturbations into ever-widening circles of 
 influence. How it is administered is a pertinent public 
 question a question which ought now to be put, which 
 most certainly will be put in earnest in the future. Every 
 expenditure of the products of mental and physical 
 
THE QUESTION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY. 27 
 
 labour will have to answer to the challenge Is this the 
 wisest and best expenditure for the general good ; or, 
 will it tend to perpetuate caste, class separations of 
 interest, and an order of human beings with highest 
 capabilities, the main business of whose life is personal 
 pleasure ; will it induce idleness or cause profitless 
 labour ; will it foster foolish wants and create useless 
 occupations ? 
 
 The individual right of holding private property is the 
 prescriptive basis of present society. " This is mine \ 
 that is thine " is the covenant, sealed by old usage, 
 countersigned by mutual agreement. To peremptorily 
 abolish this right would create general anarchy and 
 confusion, the very worst condition from which to date a 
 new and better era in social life. All attempts to out- 
 march the spirit and development of the current age 
 will be failures, as such attempts have ever been ; but 
 historic marches to triumphant issues have often been 
 through many failures, interspersed with re-action and 
 disaster. Man is naturally conservative, slow to loosen 
 his grip of the things to which he has by labour and 
 difficulty attained ; and, although he may thus often seem 
 to hinder his own progress, well for him he is so 
 constituted. The New Order has to grow out of the Old 
 Order, to grow as naturally as an oak grows out of an. 
 acorn. If, as we firmly believe, individual holding of 
 property will cease, or practically cease to be a factor in 
 human society, it will not be by confiscation, or legal 
 enactment, or a general relinquishment of individual rights, 
 but from its having run itself fairly out, by the gradual 
 absorption of private into public or collective property. 
 
28 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 And such a process is now taking place, not perhaps 
 with sufficient rapidity to satisfy the sanguine or the 
 enthusiastic, but perhaps in the way in which Nature 
 accomplishes her greater changes in the material world, 
 " hastening not, resting not." The changes in opinions, 
 the new driftings in our politics, the many discoveries in 
 science, the general progress in the arts of life, the 
 realistic tendencies in literature, the more humanitarian 
 voices from the pulpit, and the more sympathetic tone of 
 the daily press, which we have witnessed within 'the last 
 quarter of a century, all foreshadow that the wheels of 
 the great world's life will turn more swiftly in the future 
 than they have ever done in the past. A compass of 
 events which would formerly have been deemed the 
 sufficient work of a century, will now be represented by 
 the issues of a generation, and may yet represent the 
 work of a single decade. We are to be less afraid of 
 lethargy in the future than of feverish haste and over- 
 excitement. 
 
 What are all our ever-increasing public institutions 
 our Board schools, colleges, and museums, our parks, 
 public libraries, and lecture halls, our water and gas 
 works, our docks and railways, our hospitals and 
 churches, our army, navy, and police establishments, 
 even our workhouses and lunatic asylums but advanced 
 posts of socialism. They all asseverate, with ever firmer 
 voice, the higher economy and efficiency of united 
 interests, and that the care, the education, the welfare of 
 the individual is the business of the community. There 
 is Communism even in our National Debt ! 
 
 Governmental laws are every day interfering more and 
 
THE QUESTION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY. 2 9 
 
 more with the right of Free Contract. Women and 
 young persons are restricted within certain hours of 
 labour. Employers cannot be released by the consent 
 of their workpeople from the provisions of the Employers' 
 Liability Act. Irish landlords are restrained from receiv- 
 ing what Public Boards say are over-rents. A legislative 
 restriction of the hours of adult male labour, in mines at 
 least, is looming in the near future ; so are popular 
 powers in restriction of the liquor traffic. The workers 
 will themselves accomplish a general eight hours' day of 
 labour. Some years ago, Government took over the 
 telegraph system, managing it in conjunction with the 
 admirably-conducted postal system. Probably there are 
 those now living who shall yet travel over the country on 
 Government railways. Whether we like it or not, 
 bureaucracy governmental administration in depart- 
 ments is in the ascendant, and it is working for 
 socialism. 
 
 And, when we speak of government in the future, let 
 it be fully understood what we mean. The old idea of 
 government was of a power apart from, and independent 
 of, the governed. The fast-flowing tide of democracy 
 implies government by the peoples themselves, through 
 their chosen representatives. The State, under whatever 
 name, will come to be more and more the expression of 
 the popular mind and ideal. The term government will 
 lose its old significance, and may become altogether 
 obsolete. Perhaps the name chosen to designate society 
 in its corporate capacity may be the old one, of grand 
 significance the Commonwealth. 
 
30 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 THE OLD POLITICAL ECONOMY IS NOT THE 
 WAY OF SOCIAL SALVATION. 
 
 The system of social philosophy, of argument and 
 hypothesis here indicated, comes to us with an authority 
 of high names, and of a host of elaborate treatises, replete 
 with striking illustrations, interesting facts, and exhaustive 
 statistics ; and yet we do not give it a cordial greeting ; 
 it strikes no sympathetic chord in our hearts ; its com- 
 plexities bewilder and its deductions alarm us ; we name 
 it " the dismal science ; " we shirk its study, even whilst 
 sneering at its pretensions. But, in our consideration of 
 the problems of socialism, we ought to know something 
 of the old political economy. 
 
 The dictionary gives its meaning as "the science of 
 the production and distribution of wealth, as created by 
 human industry, and possessing exchangeable value." 
 Political economy may be called a science, just as 
 grammar and rhetoric, logic, jurisprudence, and theology 
 are sometimes called sciences ; but these are all relative 
 and contingent matters, not, as are the natural sciences, 
 absolute and unconditioned. We are often, by words 
 and phrases, misled from the true meanings of things. 
 Political economists speak of the laws of trade and 
 commerce, the laws of demand and supply, the laws 
 which regulate wages and the labour market, jiut as a 
 natural philosopher would speak of chemical, mechanical, 
 and biological laws ; but, in all human affairs, the human 
 will is the leading factor ; but this will is contingent on 
 time and circumstance, on the moral aptitudes, on the 
 state of knowledge and of civilisation. 
 
OLD POLITICAL ECONOMY WILL NOT SAVE US. 31 
 
 If there is now one of the many "voices from the 
 crowd," which, more than any other voice, carries with it 
 a conviction of its deep-seated earnestness, it is the 
 growing protest against the dicta of that political economy 
 which would place the mal-adjustments in social life to 
 the action of laws, absolute and immutable as laws of 
 gravitation and chemical composition. Men are seeing 
 more clearly day by day that all fluctuations in trade, 
 .gluts and panics, restricted employment and "sweating," 
 rates of wages, are as men make them ; that they are the 
 palpable effects of competition, of strength and ability 
 lording it over weakness and docility. They are coming 
 to see that it is possible for society in the aggregate, 
 under the wisdom which is learned from experience, to 
 control, to modify and direct all its elements. 
 
 Then, is not the reign of law universal ? Is social life 
 beyond its operations, the outcome of accident, chance, 
 hap-hazard ? If it were so, we could have no reasonable 
 hopes of regeneration. It is only our belief our 
 certainty that here cause and effect act as immutably as 
 in the firmaments, that certain results will necessarily 
 come from certain conditions, which gives us heart and 
 hope, and a high assurance of better things. Against the 
 dictionary meaning, and the old ideals of political 
 economy, we place the higher conception of John 
 Ruskin, when he defines it as " a system of conduct and 
 legislature, founded on the sciences, directing the arts, 
 and impossible except under certain conditions of moral 
 culture." 
 
 We take Ruskin's definition of political economy as a 
 summary and an embodiment of the creed of true 
 
32 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 socialism. It introduces an element which had no place 
 in the old ideals. Men, as men in the truest sense, for 
 whose use and advantage all trade and all the accumula- 
 tions of wealth ought only to exist, the very raison d'etre^ 
 " the reason for their existence," were hardly, in the older 
 systems, taken into consideration. They were simply as 
 counters in the game, "hands" to labour in the produc- 
 tion of wealth, to compete with each other for cheapness, 
 rapidity, and precision in this production. Political 
 economy was authoritative on the question of how many 
 men ought, under a proper division of labour, to be 
 employed in the manufacture of a pin ! But it did not 
 think that it was any part of its business to explain why, 
 with vastly improved means of production, the condition 
 of the labourer remained unimproved ; or to consider, 
 not at what minimum cost a pound of raw cotton can be 
 made into cloth, but how, under what arrangements, 
 cotton can be spun and woven, so that the human 
 machines employed in the process could secure 
 shirts for their backs, food for their bellies, and comfort- 
 able homes to shelter in. 
 
 All different phases of society have been each the 
 expression and development of its own times, the in- 
 carnated spirit of its age. The family, under its 
 patriarch, settling which portion shall locate to the east 
 and which to the west ; the tribe, under its chieftain, 
 uniting for common defence ; the nation under its king ; 
 the serf under his feudal baron ; and now, in the 
 development of free, individualist competition, the 
 labourer under the capitalist. 
 
 Competition signifies " strife for the attainment of an 
 
OLD POLITICAL ECONOMY WILL NOT SAVE US. 33 
 
 object, contention for superiority, rivalry." Does such 
 a foundation of antagonism amongst its elements 
 bespeak a sound and lasting superstructure of human 
 society ? In the very nature of things, a harmonious, 
 noble, and enduring pile cannot be raised upon such a 
 mean base. Nature will not be cheated ; as is the seed 
 sown, so will be the fruitage. We have spoken of law 
 reaching into the moral world. We know that justice, 
 benevolence, industry, and forethought bring their 
 rewards ; whilst injustice, malevolence, idleness, and 
 unthrift insure their due penalties ; and caste and 
 disunion, a clashing and conflict of interests, must 
 necessarily result from "rivalry and a contention for 
 superiority." Would a Solon or a Lycurgus, if called 
 upon de novo to project a social constitution for an 
 intelligent and progressive race, ever hit upon mutual 
 antagonism as his first principle of action ? 
 
 Certainly, this individualistic scramble, this pitting of 
 strength against weakness, of cunning against stupidity, 
 is not a true economy of the powers of life. Much 
 wealth is lost in the scramble ; scamped and pretentious 
 work is largely produced ; contracts are taken at un- 
 remunerative prices ; in the execution, the work is often 
 done disgracefully bad ; at other times, many innocent 
 persons will suffer more than the contractor himself. 
 The watchword for the whole crusade against the present 
 order of society is : Get away from old competition ! 
 " Devil take the hindmost," has to be changed into : 
 Let us help the naturally hindmost to keep pace with 
 others in the race of life. Oh, ye men of genius, with 
 capable minds and sympathetic hearts, here is a problem 
 
34 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 for you, worthy of your highest powers, How can we 
 contrive so that no one man shall rise on another's fall ? 
 And do not for one moment imagine that balance sheets 
 of imports and exports, and tall talk about " the flood- 
 gates of commercial prosperity," are any offset or 
 equipoise to the festering sloughs of poverty, failure, and 
 mean conditions of life, in the dim background. The 
 old platitude, " the greatest happiness to the greatest 
 number," is now put to the question, Can there ever be 
 true happiness neighbouring with, and akin to, misery ? 
 There cannot be ; Te deum laudamus ! the world has 
 not been so constituted. 
 
 "WHO IS MY NEIGHBOUR?" 
 
 Than Christ's parable of the Good gamaritan, no 
 grander utterance on our relations with, and our duties 
 towards, our fellow-men, ever dropped from human lips. 
 From this beautifully told little story told too on the 
 spin of the moment, in the Oriental fashion of answering 
 a question we have two great lessons in social life : 
 
 First, the common brotherhood of the race ; and that 
 in distress, in the clutch of physical or moral evil, all 
 men are in closest neighbourhood. The old spirit of 
 national patriotism has been a great factor in civilisation, 
 a buckler against aggression, it has promoted settledness 
 in social life, a unity of purpose, the better tillage of a 
 country's soil, the opening out of its mineral storage, 
 the construction of roads and harbours, the birth of 
 native laws and institutions. But it also kept up narrow 
 views on the kinship of the race ; national interests 
 stood before the interests of humanity ; national rivalries 
 
"WHO IS MY NEIGHBOUR?" 35 
 
 begot national animosities, and from these sprang wars 
 and oppressions. As the gentle Cowper wrote 
 
 " Lands intersected by a narrow firth 
 Abhorred each other ; mountains interposed 
 Made enemies of nations, which had else, 
 Like kindred drops, been mingled into one." 
 
 Man will ever naturally love the land of his fathers 
 and of his own birth, ever dear to him the play-fields of 
 his childhood, the rural vale where he first whispered of 
 love ; but the restricted patriotism of the past is too 
 narrow a cloak for the future citizen of the world to 
 wrap himself in. 
 
 And, secondly, that true philanthropy will ever concern 
 itself first with the nearest duty. The stranger, 
 travelling there on his ordinary business, did the right 
 thing, approved by the critical lawyer whose questioning 
 suggested the parable, approved by the great heart of 
 the world, down through all the centuries in which it 
 has been on record, in "showing mercy" to the poor 
 man who had fallen amongst thieves. 
 
 But if the Samaritan had been a dweller in those parts, 
 his philanthropy should not have ended with his thought- 
 ful and kindly directions to the host of the inn. He 
 would then be in duty bound to do his utmost for the 
 establishment of officers of law and order on that road, 
 so to prevent future outrages upon peaceful travellers. 
 
 And, if his was an enlightened philanthropy, it would 
 have gone farther still ; it would even have included the 
 thieves themselves ; he would have tried to make honest 
 men of them, to get them to quit the devil's army of 
 idleness and disorder, of violence, robbery, and general 
 
36 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 unwholesomeness of life, and to enlist them in the army 
 of righteousness, of order, and industry and sobriety of 
 life. Christ ever taught that in the most debased heart 
 there was still a spark of goodness which the breath of 
 love might fan into a living flame. 
 
 Thus read and expanded, this glorious parable is the 
 manifesto of true socialism. Succour the near misery, 
 and mitigate the near evil ; as far as you can, prevent 
 misery and evil ; trace misery and evil to their sources, 
 and there arrest their growth, nurturing in their places 
 the tender shoots of goodness, to blossom into healthful 
 excellence of life. 
 
 THE CONDITION OF THE LABOURER HAS 
 
 NOT KEPT PACE WITH PROGRESS IN 
 
 THE ARTS OF LIFE. 
 
 Last century witnessed the advent of the steam-engine, 
 the spinning-jenny, the jacquard loom, and other notable 
 inventions. The present century has much improved 
 on all the older mechanism, and added many new 
 inventions and adaptations : as gas and electric lighting, 
 the steam-vessel, the railway, the power-loom, the printing 
 machine, photography, the electric telegraph, and the 
 telephone, the hot blast in iron smelting, new processes of 
 converting iron into steel, and self-acting tools in iron 
 working. The chemical and mechanical powers of 
 nature have been more and more submitting themselves 
 as docile and untiring servants of man. In Great 
 Britain, and belonging to her seaports, there are steam- 
 engines doubling in total power the physical strength 
 
PROGRESS, AND THE STATUS OF THE LABOURER. 37 
 
 of the whole population. In other words, there are two 
 obedient slaves to work for every man, woman, and 
 child upon our Island ; for him or her to drain the deep, 
 dark mine, and heave out its teeming riches, to smelt 
 ores, forge iron, to spin and weave, to thresh and grind 
 corn, to load and unload ships, to print books and 
 newspapers, to transport ourselves and our commodities 
 over sea and land. 
 
 With these largely increased means of production, 
 there has been the creation of new wants and require- 
 ments ; things which erewhile were considered luxuries, 
 have come to be held as common necessaries of life. 
 If there is the new mechanism to produce superior 
 clothing fabrics, the desire to wear finer clothes is more 
 general. If there is the art of stereotyping and the 
 printing machine, the taste for reading is now almost 
 universal. No doubt education and refinement bring 
 with them discontent with the meaner ways of life. We 
 know that health, the soundness and efficiency of all 
 the powers of life, physical and mental, has its roots 
 in moderation and simplicity. A healthy appetite does 
 not require for its full and pleasureable satisfaction 
 a multiplicity of elaborately prepared viands ; such often 
 act detrimentally on the digestion and assimilation ; 
 but even were they innoxious, the merely sensuous 
 pleasure in eating is dearly bought by the labour and 
 time spent in their production. 
 
 But it is well that even in the minds of working men 
 there should be an earnest desire to attain to all the 
 really good things in cultured and refined life; that 
 they and their families should have a sufficiency of 
 
38 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 palatable' food, with due change of diet, and a more or 
 less frequent flavouring of wholesome dainties ; that 
 they should live in well-furnished, commodious, and 
 cheerful homes ; be able to wear good, tastefully-made 
 clothes ; be enabled to read the best books, hear the 
 best music, and see the best works of art ; that they 
 should have a fair amount of holidays, in which they 
 could place their feet on the daisied turf and walk by 
 the blossoming hedge-rows, or could saunter on the sea- 
 shore and watch the inrolling waves. 
 
 Culture and art, philosophy and science, have 
 heretofore been considered the privileges of a caste ; 
 the great mass, excluded from their knowledge and 
 enjoyment, have been as much a servile race as was 
 Israel in Egypt, or the helots of old Sparta. Is it 
 against the nature of things that taste and culture should 
 be broad-based upon popular appreciation, and their 
 general diffusion throughout society ? Are the old-time 
 restrictions a sure foundation for the maintenance of 
 the higher life, even of the few ? Would the absence of 
 an idle class starve science and literature and art? 
 Surely in the heirship of Shakespeare, of Milton and of 
 Wordsworth, of Newton, and Faraday and Darwin, all 
 their countrymen are co-legatees, entitled to share and 
 share alike. 
 
 We have said that education creates new wants ; but 
 it also brings with it the means of largely satisfying these 
 wants. It enables a man to derive fresh pleasures from 
 the common things of nature and of life, discovering in 
 them ever new beauties and relationships with his own 
 being. The scarped cliff, the striated boulder, are 
 
PROGRESS, AND THE STATUS OF THE LABOURER. 39 
 
 phonographed voices from the far past ; the old 
 cathedral has English history written on its every stone. 
 The new birth of life in an opening bud, the markings 
 on an insect's wing, the fleckings in the clouds, and the 
 changeful hues of sunset, are all, to the educated eye, 
 marvels of ever increasing interest and enjoyment. 
 
 Sometime ago, a leader amongst the coal miners was 
 taunted that when times were brisk and wages high, the 
 colliers were having roast turkey and champagne for 
 their Sunday dinner. He answered, that he did not 
 know if the charge was true ; but if roast turkey and 
 champagne were really good things, he did not know of 
 any class of men who were more entitled to them than 
 these miners. Whilst we thus claim for the workers a 
 share in all the best things in civilised and refined life, 
 we urge no plea against labour itself ; this would be the 
 extreme of ignorance and folly ; the work of the world 
 has ever to be done. But we are surely justified in 
 demanding that, with our immense resources, the labour 
 of every man should be reasonable in amount, should 
 be somewhat near an equality with the work to be done, 
 divided by the number of hands to do it ; always taking 
 natural ability into account, the weaker not expected to 
 do an equal amount of work with the stronger. And 
 further, that the labour should be performed under as 
 healthy and agreeable circumstances as science and 
 experience can secure for it. 
 
 In making these claims for labour, are we asking too 
 much? What are the ends and purposes of all our 
 brain-racking new inventions and improvements upon 
 old methods, our time and labour-saving processes in 
 
40 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 manufactures, our locomotives skimming at eagle speed 
 over the land, our full-freighted steamships traversing all 
 seas? Is the sole aim of all these things a result in 
 arithmetic ? are they ultimately all resolvable into profits, 
 premiums, percentages, and the sum-total of our 
 annual exports ? A poor investment of mind and nerve, 
 of life-purpose, and of life itself, if it be so. 
 
 We do not say but what, taking the condition of the 
 working classes all round, it has greatly improved within 
 the last half century. The working time has been 
 shortened generally, and the factories and workshops 
 have been made more sanitary; as a rule, the rates of 
 wages have been fully maintained, whilst the purchasing 
 power of money has except perhaps in house rent 
 considerably increased. These improvements have 
 obtained more generally in those skilled trades which 
 were better able to organize themselves into societies, for 
 mutual aid and common protection. But, even in the 
 lower grades of labour, there has been considerable 
 amelioration. No wiser measure was ever passed into 
 law by our Imperial Parliament than the Ten-hours' 
 Factory Act ; and we well remember with what grave 
 doubts and pessimistic forebodings, amongst even good 
 men and progressive politicians, that Act was passed. 
 It was an interference with, and a disturbance of, Free 
 Contract of that let-aloneism which gave a free hand to 
 competition, enabled us to undersell the foreigner, and 
 allowed fullest play to the laws of political economy ! Yet, 
 strange to say, with shorter hours to women and girls, 
 and " half-time " and schooling to children employed in 
 factories, came increased trade, higher profits to the 
 
PROGRESS, AND THE STATUS OF THE LABOURER. 41 
 
 manufacturers, and higher wages to the workpeople. 
 Another notable lesson in social economy that the 
 thing which common sense, common justice, and 
 common humanity dictate as the right thing to do, it is, 
 as a rule, and taking little heed of side issues and 
 possible consequences, the best, safest, most profitable 
 thing to do. To good measures, founded on justice and 
 morality, all things will, sooner or later, loyally adjust 
 themselves. The maintenance of wrong means the 
 continuance of discord and mal-adjustment. 
 
 But there is still in a multitude of instances very much 
 of drudgery, poverty, and precariousness in the world of 
 labour. How often is the physical frame worn down 
 and brought to premature decay by over-work, by 
 unwholesomeness in the working conditions, or by dull 
 and tedious monotony in the occupation. Man is not 
 so constituted in reference to the great round world, with 
 its marvellous grandeur, its beauty and fertility, as that 
 he with all aids from his arts and his sciences must 
 spend the greater portion of his span of operative 
 existence in painfully scratching out a bare subsistence. 
 All nature the bright sunshine, the field flowers, the 
 lambs at play in the meadows, the lark's blythe carol in 
 the sky tells of abundance, and a joyous exuberancy of 
 life ; but man has drifted into a form of society in which 
 all men do not labour, and in which a great part of the 
 labour performed is of no real utility. Labour which 
 strikes out no scintillation of intellect, and awakens no 
 invigorating gleams of thought, requiring only mechanical 
 attention, spirit-deadening from its sameness and con- 
 tinuity, is performed without heart, or soul, or sympathy 
 
42 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 with the work. But the true labour of cultured, high- 
 thoughted men ought to be spontaneous, congenial, and 
 properly diversified ; every stroke of the smith's hammer 
 ought to ring out music from his soul ; every delve of 
 the spade ought to be a pulse-throb of joyous life in the 
 husbandman. Who can imagine apathy or indifference 
 about his work in Shakespeare, in Christopher Wren, or 
 in Turner? 
 
 But, it will be said, the meaner kinds of work have to 
 be done, and those who follow mean occupations, do so 
 by their own free choice ! To which we reply : No work 
 ought to be considered mean or degrading which is 
 necessary in the service of humanity. Old George 
 Herbert avers that doing it in a true spirit 
 
 " Makes drudgery divine 
 Who sweeps a room as for His laws, 
 Makes that and the action fine." 
 
 And John Ruskin writes : " For there is no action so 
 slight nor so mean but it may be done to a great purpose, 
 and ennobled therefore ; nor is any purpose so great but 
 that slight actions may help it, and may be so done as to 
 help it much." The Theban general, Epaminondas, to 
 whom Cicero assigned the first place amongst the heroes 
 of Old Greece, was caballed against by rivals, and 
 sentenced, as a mark of degradation, to superintend the 
 cleansing and the sewers of the city. A meaner man 
 would have sulked over this, would have shirked the 
 duties, or performed them negligently ; Epaminondas 
 went into these duties with such energy and zeal that he 
 made the city sweet and wholesome. Nursing sick and 
 wounded soldiers, amidst the unspeakable horrors of 
 
PROGRESS, AND THE STATUS OF THE LABOURER. 43 
 
 Scutari, was not refined or pleasant work for a high-bred 
 lady ; yet when, in connection with this work, we pro- 
 nounce one name, it quivers on our lips, and thrills 
 through every fibre of our frames. In the many 
 idiosyncrasies of our nature, there are persons with 
 natural inclinations and adaptations for all kinds of work, 
 who have their special hobbies in doing certain things 
 which others have no desire to do, would rather shun 
 doing. As to choice of occupation, it is in the present 
 day, after a man has got into a special groove, generally that 
 free-will which must choose between that and starving ! 
 
 In a more matured state of society, when manual 
 labour shall have lost all spurious, caste-branded 
 marks of degradation, there will always be found willing 
 hands to do all kinds of needful work. But, as an 
 illustrious general and statesman of old Rome alternated 
 between the chief conduct of public affairs and the 
 labours of his home farm; or as a tent-maker of Tarsus 
 varied his occupation by speaking and writing words 
 which have been guiding lights of life down through the 
 centuries, so will the smaller occupations of life, requiring 
 less of mind, of skill, and culture, alternate with the 
 highest form of work of which the individual nature is 
 capable. One main object with every man will then be 
 to give his very best for society, and a main object of 
 society to get his very best out of every citizen. Swiftly 
 the shuttle of individual life passes through the great web 
 of humanity ; but, as it so passes, it weaves in its own 
 special thread, which has its place and influence in that 
 far-stretching pattern, which is ever shaping itself into 
 more of beauty and of perfected design. 
 
44 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 GOOD AND BAD TRADE : PRECARIOUS 
 EMPLOYMENT. 
 
 That the labour market is precarious and unstable ; 
 that at all times there are, in almost every trade, numbers 
 who could, and who most willingly ivould work, unable 
 to find employment ; that these numbers are often, from 
 the occurrence of commercial panic, glut, and crisis, 
 suddenly augmented, whilst their decrease, even under 
 renewed briskness, is gradual and protracted ; and that 
 there is in the condition of the labouring class, a 
 consequent uncertainty to all, and great wretchedness 
 amongst those who are the particular sufferers, are 
 facts, grievous but incontrovertible. It seems to be a 
 necessary result from our modern civilization, from our 
 rapid progress in science and art, from the enterprise 
 and energy of our commerce, from our ambition to work 
 for the world to almost force our commodities into 
 every country, civilized or barbarous, under the sun 
 that now shall the mechanism of trading industry act as 
 under high-pressure, with turmoil and excitement, and 
 then shall it slacken, deaden, and stagnate. At one 
 time there exists a great demand, or there is the prospect 
 of a great demand, for our goods, and every effort is 
 made to produce these in quantity, and with all expedi- 
 tion. A scrambling race ensues ; each capitalist or 
 manufacturer is suspicious of his neighbours, fears they 
 will reach the goal before him, that they will lead the 
 market, and obtain a lion's share of the profits. In the 
 domain of labour there is full employment ; wages are 
 
GOOD AND BAD TRADE : PRECARIOUS EMPLOYMENT. 45 
 
 raised, over-hours are worked, new mechanism is intro- 
 duced, all goes " merry as a marriage-bell." 
 
 What, sooner or later, then ensues ? A dark spot, no 
 bigger than a man's hand, appears at the verge of the 
 distant horizon ; a faint whisper of foreboding, a very 
 breath of distrust is heard. By-and-bye, the dark spot 
 has expanded into a lowering cloud, the whisper has 
 become a threatening voice ; till at length the cloud 
 spreads as a pall over the whole heavens, and the voice 
 thunders of ruin, of confusion and dismay. Where now 
 is the great demand ; the wild energy to produce ; the 
 high wages, full employ, and over-time ? All gone ! all 
 vanished ! The raw material is still abundant ; the 
 workman is still there, nor hath his strength and skill 
 deserted him ; the machines are still there, and ready 
 for^action ; there are still many ill-clad backs in the wide 
 world aye, even at home. But the animating spirit to 
 work up the raw material, to employ the labouring skill 
 and the ingenious machines, hath departed. As in a 
 death by drowning, the corpse still contains the heart 
 which so lately beat in warm fulness of life, bones and 
 blood, limbs and muscles, brain and nerves, all are 
 unimpaired ; but the animating spark hath fled, and all 
 these things are but putrescent masses of dead matter. 
 
 Then generally ensues a more or less lengthened 
 period of stagnation. Many factories are closed, others 
 are working short time ; furnaces are blown out ; steam- 
 engines and machines a prey to rust ; ships are laid idle 
 in the harbours ; many capitalists and employers are in 
 a state of bankruptcy. And thousands of operatives are 
 out of employment, not only for want of work, but the 
 
46 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 machines, which were introduced when trade was brisk, 
 now do much of the work which was formerly done by 
 hand. 
 
 And these unemployed operatives, by being a surplus 
 in the market supply of labour, tend to depreciate its 
 value, and to lower the wages of those who are in 
 employ. The operatives know this well, and most 
 trades have societies, the support of the funds of which, 
 in bad times, falls heavily on the members. From these 
 funds, a certain sum per week is given to unemployed 
 members ; sometimes, indeed, to unemployed workmen 
 of the trade who are not members of the society ; this 
 not from charity or goodwill, but to prevent these men 
 offering their services to employers at reduced wages. 
 This self-taxation of the employed operatives may at 
 times save their wages, but, in widely spread trades at 
 least, which have a feeble organization, when the number 
 of the unemployed becomes a considerable ratio, it is as 
 inefficient and powerless as was Mrs. Partington's broom 
 to stem the Atlantic. An over supply to the demand 
 will effect its usual result, nothing within the power of 
 the operative memorial, combination, turn-out will then 
 prevent a fall in his wages. 
 
 There is hardly a more distressing or humiliating 
 picture in the whole range of social life, than that of a 
 man with the acquired skill and cunning of his trade his 
 deft fingers yearning for their accustomed work vainly 
 searching for employment ; finding, as denial follows 
 denial, that the great teeming world has no present use 
 for him. "Hope deferred maketh the heart sick ;" and 
 one common incident in the case may furnish matter for 
 
GOOD AND BAD TRADE : PRECARIOUS EMPLOYMENT. 47 
 
 curious reflection : It is not the best men, the sober, 
 steady, home-loving men, the members of Institutes, the 
 readers and thinkers, who, as a rule, have the best chance 
 of obtaining employment. The more convivial, hail 
 fellow-well-met sort of men, men, who, over pipe and 
 pot, can talk about the odds on a particular horse, these 
 have their chums in every neighbouring workshop ; and 
 they, in a spirit of comradeship, will use their influence 
 on behalf of their confreres. 
 
 And, in the picture we have drawn, we ought, every 
 one of us, to share in the humiliation and distress ; for 
 it is a strong, heart-searching indictment against society, 
 which has produced and now upholds the condition of 
 things which includes such results. The " bad trade " 
 has not come from an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, 
 or a deluge of waters ; there has been no germination of 
 microbes or bacteria to poison the social atmosphere and 
 cause panic and disaster ; all the factors in the case are 
 man-made, and could be man-altered. Burns wrote 
 words which, coming from a true man's heart find 
 sympathetic chords in every other true heart 
 
 "See yonder poor, o'erlaboured wight, 
 
 So abject, mean, and vile, 
 Who begs a brother of the earth 
 
 To give him leave to toil ; 
 And see his lordly fellow-worm 
 
 The poor petition spurn, 
 Unmindful, tho' a weeping wife 
 
 And helpless offspring mourn." 
 
 But the "lordly fellow-worm," is only one little wheel in 
 a complex, inter-geared train-work, to blame, as we all 
 are, for the evils, the mal-adjustments in social life ; not 
 
48 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 to blame individually, except so far as he may be 
 individually deficient in benevolence, and the courtesies 
 due from man to man, and more especially due to 
 penury and misfortune. 
 
 It is painfully interesting to watch the down-grade 
 course of a family whose head has been struck by that 
 social paralysis want of work. Neighbours may not 
 for a time observe much change ; but, little by little, if 
 employment comes not, whispers rise: "They are 
 indebted to this and that other tradesman, they are back 
 with their rent, the landlord has just been in ; the 
 husband no longer shows a watch-chain, and did you 
 notice, the wedding-ring is off the wife's finger ! The 
 house appears scarce of furniture, they are often seen 
 going to the pawn-shop, the children become ragged." 
 Often the family all at once disappear, no one knows 
 whither. And if such are the outward, visible evils, the 
 moral evils are still more grievous. An idle artisan ! 
 His right hand loses its cunning; a shiftless, lethargic 
 look comes into his face ; his chances of obtaining work 
 become ever fainter and fewer ; his time hangs heavy ; 
 often he gets into evil company, becomes a drunkard, 
 a mere loafer, careless of home, of family, of character. 
 We do not say that nevermore can he redeem his life, 
 and regain his old social standing ; there is ever hope 
 that the root of goodness in every human soul, though 
 stifled by foul weeds, and become arid and withered 
 from neglect, may still possess some vitality some 
 powers of recuperation. 
 
 In the parable, the cares of this world, the deceitful- 
 ness of riches, and the lusts of other things, were thorns 
 
GOOD AND BAD TRADE : PRECARIOUS EMPLOYMENT. 49 
 
 and thistles which choked the healthful growth of the 
 good seed. But mean conditions of life will equally 
 prevent a wholesome growth from that seed. The 
 scrambling existence of so many of the wage-earners, 
 now in, and now out of employment, the work 
 often paid under the margin of a decent subsistence, 
 this is not a condition favourable to the growth of pure 
 morality, to the attainment of a high standard of 
 character. The outward life ever re-acts upon, and 
 largely moulds the inner life. On some strong natures, 
 narrow means and uncertainty will develope thrift and 
 economy, and more active endeavour ; but on the 
 weaker natures, the pinch of poverty means loss of 
 heart and endeavour ; unthrift when the weekly wage is 
 coming in ; the pawn-shop and listless lounging at the 
 street corners, in the first week of idleness. 
 
 We quote some pregnant words from Mr. Tom Mann 
 on the Royal Commission on Labour, in a recent 
 number of the New Review : " We want work with 
 regular wages, in order that food, clothing, and other 
 commodities shall be always procurable ; and a com- 
 mission made up of persons who believe this impossible 
 had better not sit. To-day, at least 800,000 men are 
 out of employment, and yet others are working over a 
 hundred hours per week for ordinary wages. The Royal 
 Commission have to point out the most practical way of 
 altering this. There are season trades, as the tea trade, 
 the Baltic trade, and the building trades, in the slack 
 seasons of which, many thousands of workmen and their 
 families are actually starving. Cannot a country like 
 this make some better arrangement? For the well-fed 
 
50 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 to declare that these matters right themselves, is but to 
 foster the revolutionary proclivities of even the most 
 possessed of men. These things do not right themselves, 
 and, far better no commission, unless these questions 
 are dealt with." 
 
 ALL POPULAR MOVEMENTS ARE WATER- 
 ING THE SEEDS OF SOCIALISM. 
 
 Many of these movements do not on the surface 
 appear as direct currents towards socialism ; but, 
 observed more narrowly, thought over more deeply, it 
 will be made evident that they all proceed from three 
 ideas, which a trinity in unity together form the tap- 
 root of socialism. i. That many things in present 
 society are not right or satisfactory as they are ; 2. That 
 it is possible, by new methods and regulations, to make 
 these things better; and 3. That it is everybody's 
 business, and will be seen to be for everybody's interest, 
 to try to make them better. 
 
 And so the advocates for higher education, open to 
 all ; for temperance ; for social purity ; for increased 
 protection for women and children ; for public libraries, 
 art galleries, museums, parks, gymnasia, and baths ; for 
 more restricted hours and ages of labour; for labour 
 federations ; for co-operative institutions ; for Salvation 
 Army schemes for the social redemption from the depths 
 of the lost and fallen ; for mutual reduction in national 
 armaments ; for international arbitration, are //, however 
 varied in their objects, and each movement based on 
 its own comparatively high significance, yet pulling in 
 
POPULAR MOVEMENTS HELPING ON SOCIALISM. 51 
 
 one direction. They are all shaking the dry bones of 
 old isolation and let-aloneism ; they are all united in 
 repudiation of, and protest against, that political economy 
 which has so long lived on the falsity, that as things 
 are, so for ever they are bound and fated to be ! 
 
 The very latest of all the movements, that for work- 
 men's pensions, to be provided for, partly by con- 
 tributions from each workman during the working years 
 of his life, partly by levies on his employers, and partly 
 by State aid, is a very striking movement indeed. We 
 do not call it a bid for popularity on the part of its pro- 
 moters ; we have no doubt but what the majority of 
 these are acting from good motives, are clearly seeing 
 the tendencies of the times, and the trends of public 
 opinion. Some of them may think that by giving what 
 appear to be safe courses to the lesser streams of 
 socialism, they may retard, divert, or even dam up the 
 mightier currents which now seem sweeping irresistibly 
 onwards. We think that in this they are entirely 
 mistaken. Every fresh stage in the progress of socialism 
 is a new Pisgah top, ever giving a clearer and nearer 
 prospect of the promised land, ever raising fresh hopes 
 and longings and strivings for its attainment ; every 
 such stage will be a vantage ground towards reaching 
 the next higher stage. 
 
 Yes, and every new stage will be farther breaking 
 down old prejudices, will be more and more shewing the 
 hollowness of old fears. It never can be too much 
 insisted on, until it penetrates the very inmost fibre of 
 the socialistic propaganda, that the farther and more 
 important stages can only be reached by the hearty 
 
52 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 consent and the active aid and co-operation of all classes 
 in the community. Before the realization of any scheme 
 of society which claims to be a maturity in development, 
 must be first a general conviction of its excellence, 
 a general desire for its adoption. Once that conviction 
 and that desire are rooted in the mind and conscience 
 of a people, the mere machinery, the modus operandi, 
 will be found without difficulty, will indeed be there, 
 waiting at the door. Once it is felt to be essential for 
 the welfare of the community that every one of its 
 members should be cared for, then every one will be 
 cared for. 
 
 The ideal of the individual can seldom be attained ; 
 life is short, its powers are limited, and circumstances 
 are often adverse. But it is different with an ideal 
 in politics or in social economy which has become 
 rooted in a nation. The nation never dies ; its powers 
 of effecting all of natural possibilities which it wills, are 
 when it understands these powers and can use them 
 aright unlimited, or limited only by its relations with 
 other nations. When the general experience and tone 
 of mind of the nations in the van of the world's 
 civilisation have ripened into a knowledge of the true 
 interests of social life, they shall decree, and shall be 
 able to achieve general and abiding prosperity. When 
 there has come to be a- general consensus of ideals, their 
 realisation is as certain as is the continuance of the 
 race. 
 
 The present times may come to be known in social 
 history as the age of Strikes. The word is hard and 
 
POPULAR MOVEMENTS HELPING ON SOCIALISM. 53 
 
 grating to the ear, and the idea which it conveys of 
 conflict and disturbance is not a pleasant one, is not in 
 consonance with that peace and goodwill amongst men 
 which must be the prelude to the New Order in social life. 
 A strike throws out of gear the mechanism of peaceful 
 industry, produces personal and family suffering to the 
 workmen engaged therein, cost and commotion to their 
 fellow-w T orkmen, loss and business confusion to the 
 employers, mutual irritation and mistrust, and even, at 
 times, lawlessness, intimidation, and a weakened morale. 
 What are the advantages? Perhaps, taken all round, 
 and including all side issues, the monetary gains to the 
 workmen would not shew very conspicuously on a 
 general balance-sheet. And yet the workman knows 
 that the strike is a weapon which he cannot let go ; he 
 clings to it with an almost religious tenacity, persuaded 
 that the loss and disaster which it frequently entails 
 upon him, have their full equivalents in a more assured 
 recognition of his status in the social domain, and of his 
 purpose and his ability to maintain, or to further secure, 
 his " rights." 
 
 Through long ages, man has had to struggle for in- 
 dividual freedom of action ; but he is finding out more and 
 more in the business of life, the advantages of concerted 
 action. Petty business concerns with small capitals 
 have, with profitable economy, been giving place to 
 great concerns with large capitals ; and the individual 
 workman, finding that in these great concerns he had 
 lost his relative importance, and that standing by him- 
 self he was utterly insignificant, was driven to associate 
 for the common safety with his fellow-workmen. United 
 
54 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 labour was the natural set-off to accumulated capital ; 
 and thus capital and labour, the twin-factors in 
 profitable industry, have drifted into adverse com- 
 binations ; too often breathing mutual vituperation and 
 defiance, and striking at each other to their mutual 
 detriment. Both forces are daily gaining experience, 
 are testing their relative powers, and strengthening 
 themselves for further conflicts. 
 
 But it cannot always go on thus. The instinct of 
 self-preservation will, in both employers and employed, 
 seek for other ways out of their relative difficulties 
 than mutual injury, conflict, and aggression. Their 
 harmonious activities for the common good is a leading 
 problem for the future ; and all attempts to solve this 
 problem, as by courts of arbitration, and by the com- 
 bination of profit-sharing with wage-earning, will be 
 helping forward the great social movement. Trade- 
 unionism is one of the many feeders of the ever 
 ingathering stream of socialism ; its combinative powers 
 will yet find other outlets of action than opposition to 
 capital ; nay, there are signs now plainly discernible to 
 the clearer-sighted, that, before very long, capital and 
 labour will fraternize, will coalesce, and work in unison 
 together. And when, in the spread of co-operative 
 industries, there is this natural union, thriving under 
 individual capabilities, in wholesome vigorous life, then 
 is society within measurable distance from the confines 
 of its promised land. 
 
 Amongst the popular movements of the day, no one 
 occupies a more prominent position than the movement 
 
POPULAR MOVEMENTS HELPING ON SOCIALISM. 55 
 
 for reduced working-hours, as a palliative to pre- 
 cariousness of employment. A few years ago, any 
 movement which would interfere with "free trade," 
 which would attempt to regulate the production of 
 wealth, would have been scouted by the popular school 
 of political economy, as subversive of first principles. 
 But the reign of Laisser faire, " let things alone, let 
 them take their own course," is virtually over, very 
 quietly it has passed away. It has now come to be 
 considered reasonable that a more quiet and prudent 
 system of trade would be better for the manufacturers, 
 and would make the workmen's employment more 
 regular, more equally diffused over the year; thus 
 avoiding flushes of prosperity, dearly bought by succeed- 
 ing periods of depression, by recurring gluts and panics, 
 each crisis following the other at shorter intervals, and 
 finding us less able to bear it than its predecessors. 
 
 Too much of useful work is not now done on the 
 whole, but it is done irregularly, by fits and starts ; by 
 numbers of the working-class labouring long hours, or 
 what is called "full time," whilst the remainder are 
 either altogether unemployed, or are only in occasional 
 work. Surely it would be much better for all to work 
 in medium - } the wages would be more in proportion, 
 that is, per hour of work, than at present, for .there 
 would be fewer competing unemployed labourers. We 
 are persuaded that, under a general system of working, 
 say the popular eight hours per day, thus employing 
 nearly all hands, the wages would, in a short time, be 
 quite what they are at present, with ten hours of work. 
 The profits also would be nearly what they are at present, 
 
56 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 and more certain and equable ; whilst there would be 
 a great saving in poor-rates, and in police, prison, and 
 other public expenses. And the drain on the funds of 
 the Trade Clubs in payments to their unemployed 
 members, would be largely diminished. 
 
 The "eight-hours' movement" holds the field at 
 present, not only in our own country, but also on the 
 continent, in the minds and the public activities of the 
 working classes ; and, no doubt, this movement will, 
 before long, be largely successful. There is a division of 
 opinion amongst its leaders as to whether its purpose 
 should be brought about by the action and general 
 consent of the two parties who are more directly 
 interested, the workmen and the employers, or made 
 statutory by legislative enactment. Probably, it will 
 virtually come in both ways. The workmen, if they are 
 in earnest, and use aright their powers of combination, 
 can achieve their purpose in most trades w r here numbers 
 are employed together in workshops, on large under- 
 takings, or on dock-sides. Parliament could modify the 
 Factory Acts to meet the new requirements, and it could 
 pass Acts regulating the working time in mines and on 
 railways, and the police hours on duty ; and Government 
 employees in dockyards and arsenals, in the Post-Office 
 and the Coastguard, could be given the eight-hours' day ; 
 but there are a great many trades and professions which 
 it seems hardly possible for any restrictive enactment to 
 reach the tailor, the shoemaker, the seamstress, and 
 many others, working in their own homes, the sailor on 
 the high seas, the physician in his practice, the " slavey " 
 in the lodging-house, no possible inspectorship could 
 
POPULAR MOVEMENTS HELPING ON SOCIALISM. 57 
 
 oversee or control; but nearly all would in time come 
 into touch with general opinion and example. 
 
 And the supply in the labour market could well afford 
 to allow the labourer a few more holidays to brighten 
 and diversify his working-life. Heads of departments in 
 businesses and public offices must and we do not blame 
 them have their annual holiday-month ; junior clerks 
 and foremen count on their summer fortnight in the 
 country or by the sea-side. Every working-man ought 
 to have at least a free week's remission from his daily 
 task, for change of air and scene. It is interesting to 
 read what Dr. Paley wrote more than a century ago, in 
 advocating what no one would now ever think requires 
 any advocacy the advantages of a seventh-day rest from 
 labour : " Nor is there anything lost to the community 
 by the intermission of public industry one day in the 
 week ; for, in countries tolerably advanced in population 
 and the arts of civil life, there is always enough of human 
 labour and to spare. The difficulty is not so much to 
 procure, as to employ it. The addition of the seventh 
 day's labour to the other six would have no other effect 
 than to reduce the price. The labourer himself, who 
 deserved and suffered most by the change, would gain 
 nothing." If, when Paley wrote his " Moral Philosophy," 
 there was then " enough of human labour and to spare," 
 there must now, with the ubiquitous steam-engine, and 
 a multitudinous array of labour-saving mechanism in all 
 the arts of civil life the prolific fruitage of a century 
 be a far wider margin in the supply. 
 
 And farther restrictions at each end of the life-term of 
 
58 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 labour will also, with shortened hours, tend to render 
 employment more uniform and less precarious. A few 
 years ago, the legal age at which children are to begin 
 work as half-timers in factories was raised from nine to 
 ten years. A farther alteration, to raise the age to twelve 
 years, was recently under Parliamentary discussion. The 
 Bill will probably pass into law amended we query the 
 amendment to eleven years ; but even this will be 
 another step in the right direction. And the increase in 
 Higher-grade Board Schools, supplementing by more 
 advanced studies the ordinary seven standards, will tend 
 to protract the educational period of life, and thus delay 
 the entrance into the world of labour. 
 
 And, promising to affect the farther end of the life- 
 term of labour, there is, amongst other agencies, the new 
 movement we have spoken of, for providing retiring 
 pensions to workmen. It is suggested that, at say sixty- 
 five years of age, a man shall cease from active work ; 
 but shall thereafter, with the consciousness of having 
 done his fair share in the work of the world, and with an 
 assured income sufficient to keep his mind at ease 
 against want and the workhouse be enabled to spend 
 the evening of his days in serenity and peace. In a 
 sense, the parish workhouse is the superannuation retire- 
 ment for aged ratepayers, and ought to be a quiet and 
 cheerful haven of well-earned rest ; but, to save the rates, 
 the workhouse is made a restrictive and uncongenial 
 retirement, is looked upon as a degradation, and 
 instinctively shrunk from and disliked. It would be 
 otherwise with the pension scheme now proposed; it 
 would be carrying out generally, and under Government 
 
POPULAR MOVEMENTS HELPING ON SOCIALISM. 59 
 
 auspices, what is now done in many Friendly and Trade 
 Societies so many years of membership entitling to a 
 certain weekly amount during all the after life. 
 
 And every improvement in the sphere of labour would 
 tend to raise the status of labour itself. For manual 
 labour is now considered if not a disgrace yet, as 
 relatively, a lower and meaner plane of life than idleness. 
 To get out, or to keep out of the rank and file of labour 
 is looked upon as a high privilege, as an honour. 
 The time-honoured behest to young manhood: "Do 
 your best to succeed in life," is never, or very rarely, 
 given on the supposition that success in life means being, 
 or continuing to be, a workman. It means, " you are 
 by fair means if possible, but by some means to do your 
 best to evade the primeval mandate of life, ' in the sweat 
 of thy brow shalt thou eat bread.'" And so we have 
 it that the learned professions are overstocked, our cities 
 are thronged by mercantile adventurers, and crowds are 
 hanging on to the skirts of what ought to be one of 
 the smallest factors in social economy the mere 
 distribution of wealth. When a suburb buds out into 
 a dozen new houses, the corner-house must be a shop ! 
 
 And so it has come to pass that, uhder this stampede 
 from labour, out of some eight millions of able-bodied 
 men and lads upon our island, who might all be effective 
 producers of real wealth, either by their own hands' 
 labour, or by usefully facilitating the labour of others, 
 about three millions are either altogether idle, or are 
 employed to little good purpose, many indeed 
 mischievously employed. And this great host of non- 
 effectives must, with all their belongings, be supported ; 
 
60 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 their food must be produced, their clothing spun, woven, 
 and made into garments, their dwelling-houses built and 
 furnished, all by the work of other hands. Nay, more, 
 although the " upper crust " of these non-effectives, like 
 the lilies, "toil not, neither do they spin," they generally 
 contrive to live in higher style than those who do the 
 toiling and spinning for them. They fare more 
 sumptuously, wear finer clothes, dwell in larger houses, 
 have servants to wait on them, require expensive 
 amusement, all of which must be provided from the only 
 source of all human acquirement pride, pomp, and 
 circumstance of affluence and magnificence labour ! 
 
 Let us not be misunderstood. Under the present 
 conditions of labour, we do not blame those who leave, 
 or endeavour to leave, its ranks ; to do so would be 
 both foolish and unjust; these are only following their 
 reading of the natural instinct of self-preservation. To 
 cope with this scramble from labour, we must enhance 
 its relative position, make it more desirable, more 
 respectable ; we must, as far as possible, root out all 
 degrading and deteriorating influences ; preserve and 
 foster every circumstance which tends to soften the 
 asperities of working life, to relieve its hardships, and to 
 assert its worthiness and dignity. 
 
 But we may be told : " What does it matter although 
 numbers do leave the working-ranks ? There is no lack 
 in the supply of labour ; it is superabundant ; there are 
 always many out of employment ; and, with their families, 
 in poverty and distress. We ought to hail as benefactors 
 of such, those who, by leaving the field of labour, make 
 openings to be filled up from those whom no man had 
 
POPULAR MOVEMENTS HELPING ON SOCIALISM. 6 1 
 
 hired." Thus, the desertion from the army of labour, 
 abstractly considered a great evil, entailing more work 
 upon the remanent army, is yet declared to be, as 
 things are, a great good a palliative to a still greater 
 evil ! This anomaly furnishes matter for thoughtful 
 reflection, as does that other common idea, when a 
 ship is lost at sea, or a full warehouse burned to the 
 ground : "No great matter, more work for working-men." 
 There is something fundamentally wrong^ when evil is 
 held to be a remedy for evil. 
 
 And again, let us not be misunderstood. In speaking 
 for usefulness in labour, we are not advocating bareness, 
 or mere utility in the economy of life. Art and orna- 
 mentation things dainty in design, costly in labour and 
 material, are useful ; they educate the tastes, and make 
 for refinement. The innate sense of beauty, which 
 impels a savage to spend many moons in elaborately 
 carving the paddles of his canoe ; or a Michael Angelo 
 to, in his great temple, "raise the Pantheon on the 
 Colosseum," will ever crave for its gratification. But the 
 "joy for ever" from "a thing of beauty " ought to be a 
 joy participated in by the many not monopolized by 
 the few. We can hardly think of a poorer or more 
 barren investment for genius, and the evolution of many 
 generations of art, than for a painter to expend his very 
 best of high thought,, of culture, and of technical skill on 
 a picture, which, being sold, is thereafter immured in the 
 seclusion of a rich man's gallery. 
 
62 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 MODERN LITERATURE IN RELATION TO 
 SOCIAL PROGRESS. 
 
 There is a trite saying of the songs of a people, 
 taking in the moulding of their national life precedence 
 of the laws. National character and popular literature 
 act upon and reflect each other. Rather strangely it 
 seems that the literature, which has been one of the 
 chief factors in modern civilization, should be one of 
 ancient, oriental origin, adopted and naturalized in 
 Europe. There can be no doubt that the long intimacy 
 of our English people with the graphic pictures of life, 
 the ever nearness to free open nature, the high tone of 
 thought and aspiration, the fine imagery, and the grand 
 diction of the book most generally found in the cottage 
 homes, and familiar to all from childhood, has been a 
 mighty influence in forming the character and directing 
 the history of the nation. 
 
 We are justly proud of our English heritage of native 
 literature, stretching back for a thousand years. There 
 are many world-renowned names in its annals names of 
 men who have ennobled and enriched the language, and 
 given it its impress and consolidation. But with its many 
 excellencies, this literature has also had the trail of the 
 serpent running through it. Much of the poetry and 
 romance bright with wit, replete with clever portraiture 
 and graphic scenes and descriptions have yet too 
 frequently been ministrants to the lower passions, their 
 tendency being to " exalt the brute and sink the man," 
 as poor Burns writes. Amidst the many social changes 
 in late years, there has been a growth in our ideas of 
 
MODERN LITERATURE, ITS WIDER HUMANITY. 63 
 
 sobriety, seemliness, and decorum. Not all the wit and 
 literary talent of a Fielding or a Sterne although these 
 would find it many readers would now insure a work 
 through which a strain of impurity ran, or which made 
 drinking deeply a manly art, a permanent place in the 
 standard literature of England. Any success which 
 sudden notoriety might seem to achieve, would be but 
 short-lived. True, and " the pity of it," we have talented 
 writers who appear to have a morbid liking for the 
 unseemly ; and when these writers are of the sex to 
 which we naturally look for the conservation and enforce- 
 ment of delicacy in thought and expression, our regrets 
 are the deeper. 
 
 To the litterateur alike to male as to female writer 
 the behest is : Thou shalt not profane the gift that is 
 in thee, by throwing a false halo around grossness and 
 impurity. Sensuousness is an essential factor in our 
 humanity, and all natural functions and desires are 
 wholesome, as they are necessary. But these functions 
 and desires are apt to froth over into sensualism, when 
 inflamed by circumstances which place them out of 
 balance with corrective influences. In the old Greek 
 legend, Ulysses would hear the fascinating songs of the 
 sirens, but only when firmly bound to the mast, when 
 under infrangible law ; the common seamen had their 
 ears stopped so they could not hear, could not be placed 
 under temptation ; only the diviner-souled Orpheus could 
 listen free yet unscathed, his own finer harmonies 
 drowned the siren-songs. 
 
 The writer who, now-a-days, can take and keep firm 
 hold of the world's heart, must have strong sympathies 
 
64 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 with humanity, and a living faith in human progress. Of 
 gentle Will Shakespeare it could be said, as was said of 
 Milton, "his soul was like a star, and dwelt apart." 
 Great men are the solitaires of the race. In his wonderful 
 pictures of life, Shakespeare travelled beyond his own 
 experience, into rose-tinted realms of fancy and fairyland. 
 The courtiers, knights, and traders of his time, were 
 comparatively uncultured, rude in speech and in action ; 
 how much more so the common people. And thus he 
 never so far broke through the realities of the ordinary life 
 around him, as to depict a high-thoughted, noble-souled 
 groundling ; he would in this have held no mirror up to 
 nature. But there has been since Shakespeare's day a 
 rising faith in man as man ; all on one level as to rights 
 and duties, having like claims to social and political 
 regard. Crabbe, who has been called " Nature's sternest 
 painter, but her best," wrote in this faith of Isaac Ashford 
 as " a noble peasant." So does Gray, when he suggests 
 that amongst the rude forefathers of the hamlet, sleeping 
 in the village God's acre, were 
 
 " Hearts once pregnant with celestial fire, 
 Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed, 
 Or woke to ecstacy the living lyre." 
 
 In this faith Walter Scott depicts homely Jeanie Deans ; 
 she could not speak an untruth to save her sister's life ; 
 but with this object she could face all personal perils, and 
 undergo all hardships. As a sterling man a hero without 
 fear and without reproach, Fenimore Cooper's Natty 
 Bumpo ranks with the paladins of old romance. 
 
 This faith was rooted in the heart of Charles Dickens ; 
 and he lives in our hearts as the author with right 
 
MODERN LITERATURE, ITS WIDER HUMANITY. 65 
 
 instincts towards the true, the noble, and the good in our 
 common humanity. By his loving genius, the lowly and 
 common-place are raised into objects of high interest and 
 regard. Perhaps Thackeray's genius was of a higher 
 order in literature. But Thackeray sees humanity in its 
 lower strata, from the view-points of gentility, and the 
 windows of the Pall Mall Club : Jeames Plush, dropping 
 his aspirates, always seems to get between him and his 
 fellows at the base of the social pyramid. 
 
 Tennyson sounds with the plummet of his genius into 
 the depths and shoals of all phases of human life, throw- 
 ing on all loveliness and grace, inciting to duty, giving 
 courage and cheer to drooping hearts. Has he, in these 
 later years, lost some of his earlier faith in humanity 
 passed from the bright Jubilate of David into the vanitas 
 vanitatum of David's pleasure-sated son ? In a measure, 
 perhaps, although it may be unconsciously ; the 
 lofty and rather exclusive social atmosphere in which 
 he has lived and moved could not fail to influence. 
 In his " Maud," the evils in society, the many falsities, 
 the selfish hustling and competition, darken the 'whole 
 social horizon. Than the peace of such general pick- 
 pocket times, 
 
 " Better war loud war by land and by sea 
 War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred thrones." 
 
 Ah, but moral evil is not the antidote and corrective 
 for immorality. All departures from right can only be 
 met by retracing the erring steps, and getting into true 
 pathways. In his more hopeful moods, the poet hears 
 the New Year bells of the future 
 
 E 
 
66 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 " Ring out the thousand wars of old, 
 Ring in the thousand years of peace, 
 Ring in the Christ that is to be." 
 
 In the very foremost rank of living English writers, as 
 one who has given grace and dignity to the language, 
 has elevated the national taste, and, above all, who 
 has been a very prophet in warnings against falsity and 
 frivolity, and in trumpet-calls to truth and duty, stands 
 John Ruskin. He is specially an art critic ; but his 
 genius has a wide range. He is a great teacher of the 
 books of Nature and of common life. In Nature, he 
 often seems to have lifted the veil of the unknowable, 
 and to have penetrated into the inner secrets of life and 
 being. To him the great world, from its material dust, 
 its diversified scenery, and its marvellous life, up to the 
 summits of its snow-capped mountains and the wonders 
 of cloudland, is one rich treasure-chamber of the Great 
 King. In the economy of modern society, he has dared 
 to question many things which are commonly held to be 
 first principles ; to deny that the outcome of our civilisa- 
 tion is fixed and determined ; to assert in firmest faith 
 that man can attain to all conceivable real good; and 
 that, when duty has come to be an instinct and a habit 
 of life, a true golden age shall then dawn upon the race. 
 
 To be for one hour in communion with the mind of 
 Ruskin is to breathe the pure air of noble thought and 
 lofty aspiration, is largely an education in the truest and 
 highest purposes of life. We may not agree with all his 
 views and opinions, but these are ever put with such 
 earnest fidelity, and with such nobility of aim and 
 purpose, as to command our best and most respectful, 
 
MODERN LITERATURE, ITS WIDER HUMANITY. 67 
 
 almost our reverential, consideration. He is one in our 
 cloud of witnesses for righteousness, goodness, and truth. 
 
 From its earliest dawn, literature has, in poetry and 
 romance, assumed two distinctive phases ; one, an insight 
 and depicture of things as they are; the other, an 
 idealistic conception of things as, under certain con- 
 ditions, they might be. Heretofore, authors have generally 
 blended both phases in their writings ; now, as the mood 
 has taken them, finding their characters and incidents in 
 the realities of life, then, leaving these for the regions of 
 imagination. But, at the present time, two distinctive 
 schools in romantic literature are presented. The dictum 
 of the realistic school claims that every fibre in man's 
 being, every phase of his many-sided life, every outburst 
 of passion, all complexities of tendency and motive, are 
 theirs to portray, to analyse, to dissect. There are to be 
 no fig-leaves to cover physical, moral, or mental nudities. 
 The world is to be confronted by all its many ramifica- 
 tions of life. It is to see and to know all its realities. 
 
 And thus we have in literature the realistic is, the 
 positive, pitted against and distinguished from the 
 idealistic if, the subjective, the absolute. The hero of 
 the idealistic writer acts from a certain type of character. 
 An absolute standard of right and wrong is set up, or 
 taken for granted, by which all motives and all actions 
 are judged. The realistic writer, on the other hand, 
 recognises no definite types of character, no absolute 
 standards of conduct. He charges the idealist, who has a 
 moral parable in his mind as he writes, with the error of 
 the Aristotelian philosophers, who started from pre- 
 
68 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 conceived hypotheses, instead of, as under the Baconian 
 method of induction, from observation and experience ; 
 and thus, restricted in his survey, and with eyes half-shut 
 against the actual facts of life, the idealist's pictures are 
 not true portraitures of real men and women, but shadowy 
 figments of the imagination. The new realism taunts 
 the old teachings with taking man out of his place in 
 universal nature, and setting him up in unstable 
 equilibrium on a pinnacle as above nature, beyond her 
 laws and jurisdiction ; his mind, as that of a primal god, 
 uncontrolled by circumstance or environment. The new 
 teaching, on the contrary, regards man as a sensitive 
 development out of the common material of the universe, 
 all subjective to universal law. 
 
 Yes, but the idealist may reply : How are we to be 
 certain that what you present to us is pure and simple 
 realism ? A man can only express his own conceptions 
 of outward things. These conceptions are the percep- 
 tions of such things through the senses, modified by the 
 bent which is given to the impressions by his own 
 judgment ; and this judgment has been formed under his 
 special education and surroundings. Zola must see 
 everything through Zola's eyes ; he, no more than Victor 
 Hugo, can be relied upon as presenting to us the external 
 fact in its naked simplicity. 
 
 Graphic narration of the real, descriptions of the 
 actual, become, in the hands of genius, a high art. But it 
 is higher art to create ideals and aspirations which, based 
 upon, and rising out of the actual, become realities of 
 the imagination. Man is himself not simply the creature 
 of to-day ; he is ever projecting himself into the unknown 
 
MODERN LITERATURE, ITS WIDER HUMANITY. 69 
 
 to-morrow; ever striving to be, and ever becoming, 
 something different, different from his present self, his 
 former realities cast-off as worn-out garments, and 
 different from all other men, throughout all ages of time. 
 No poet's dream has ever yet embodied the climax and 
 consummation of human capabilities ; but each new 
 dream is a prophecy of the future, and is freshly watering 
 the seeds of realisation. It has been truly said : The 
 poetic idealism of to-day will be the prose reality of to- 
 morrow. 
 
 The being of man, not merely of the individual, 
 shooting his little thread across the loom of time, but of 
 the race, is only as a speck in the universe, a drop in the 
 illimitable ocean of eternity ; but in thought and 
 aspiration, man dares to grasp infinitude. Plato spoke 
 of the mind ascending from the contemplation of 
 visible beauty, to the vision of beauty in its essence. 
 Wordsworth speaks of " the gleam, the light which never 
 was on sea or land." It is the high function of literature 
 and of art to shed this gleam, this weird light over the 
 common things in nature and in human life. The 
 ancient sculptor is said to have combined in his goddess 
 of love, separate portions of highest feminine loveliness : 
 so does the poet select out of the wealth of all past 
 experience, and of all new knowledge, their choicest 
 qualities, and combine these in a harmony which is a 
 glimpse and a forecast of that absolute perfection to 
 which the soul aspires. 
 
 But whilst the literature which emanates from the 
 idealist's theory Tfman were so-and-so, he would thus 
 
70 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 act, may assume a higher place than the literature of 
 realism which is based upon As man is what he is, so 
 he acts ; yet here, as in politics and philosophy, a sound 
 general principle may be pushed into an absurdity. It 
 is not safe to lay down in contingent matters, hard and 
 fast lines. When literature has to speak to-day, as it has 
 often had to speak in the past, with the voice of the 
 prophet, the preacher of right, to lay bare the simple 
 realities of things may be its wisest and most effective 
 course. The picture of a woman 
 
 11 In unwomanly rags, 
 In poverty, hunger, and dirt, 
 Sewing at once, with a double thread, 
 A shroud as well as a shirt," 
 
 was, from the pen of Thomas Hood, a veritable Baptist's 
 " Repent ye, and do the things meet for repentance." 
 Graphic pictures of the realities of slavery, " truths 
 embodied in a tale," were Harriet Beecher Stowe's 
 contingent in the campaign for freedom, and might 
 rank in effectiveness with the life-work of Lloyd Garrison, 
 the martyrdom of John Brown, and Grant's army on the 
 Potomac. 
 
 We lately read Tolstoi's book, which he names "What 
 is to be done?" Our Shakespeare has said, "One touch 
 of nature makes the whole world kin." It is related of 
 Crillon, the French general, whom Henry IV. named 
 " the bravest of the brave," that when a monk was 
 preaching on the passion of Christ, describing the 
 mockings, the scourgings, the crown of thorns, and the 
 fierce howlings of the blood-impatient crowd, he leapt 
 to his feet, drew his sword, and exclaimed, " O Crillon, 
 
MODERN LITERATURE, ITS WIDER HUMANITY. 71 
 
 that thpu hadst been there to have struck one blow for 
 him !" And in the perusal of Tolstoi's fearful indictments, 
 the old Adam of conflict rises within us, suggests 
 Nihilism, anarchy, blood, an ending of such a condition 
 of things in any way which possibly could end them. 
 We long to exchange for the wilderness of misery and the 
 enormities of injustice, revolution death rather ; only 
 our better angel whispers to us that this is not the way 
 of salvation. The lessons of a century ago rise before 
 us. The world had been moving on, science and 
 philosophy advancing, caste and superstition losing 
 ground, the spirit of progress and reform permeating 
 Europe, America fairly started on its republican career. 
 What beneficial changes might have operated naturally 
 by the close of the century, we can now only surmise ; 
 but in France a plunge was made into physical revolt, 
 and the revolution became one of anarchy and bloodshed, 
 of wars and imperialisms, the tremors from which have 
 not yet passed away. 
 
 Ah ! that ever startling question in face of the many 
 ills of life : What is to be done ? How many ears are 
 yearning for the answer how many hearts are burning 
 to act on its behests. Honour and a respectful hearing 
 to every man be his name Hyndman, or Booth, or any 
 other, who, out of the fulness of his heart, honestly 
 attempts an answer. Carlyle few with clearer eyes to 
 see the evils yet had his great intellect no better plan 
 of redemption than the iron sway of the autocrat : he 
 would take us back from present-day agitation and unrest, 
 to the rigid forces of the past. But as a solution to our 
 social problems, these old forces are as vapid, as dead as 
 
72 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 twelfth-century feudalism. Man must get away from his 
 leading-strings, and walk his own free course, even 
 although his steps may totter for awhile, and pitfalls are 
 in the way. 
 
 Russia is at present the leading problem of the 
 civilized world. This mighty lone land, a continent, yet 
 a prison, a huge, strong, fettered Samson, groping 
 blindly, toiling aimlessly in his great mill, in line with 
 others in the European family of nations in art and in 
 arms, how is it to be brought into touch and harmony 
 with modern civilization ? Under a rigid censorship of 
 the journalistic press, and debarred from public con- 
 ference and assembly in the discussion of social and 
 political questions, romantic literature has become the 
 outlet for opinion ; and, rather strangely, utterances 
 which, otherwise expressed, would have immured their 
 authors in fortress cells, or exiled them to Siberian 
 deserts, have here passed unchallenged. Searching into 
 the lowest depths of profligacy and injustice, of misery 
 and despair, the Russian novel, if it cannot give 
 guidance and little of hope, yet boldly uncovers the 
 festering sores on every portion of the social frame, as 
 crying aloud, Behold, O heaven ! hear, O earth ! 
 this is the Niobe amongst nations, what other sorrow is 
 like unto this sorrow ? 
 
 And thus in circuits of action beyond the sphere of 
 simple literature as a leading factor in the gospel of 
 human amelioration as a sheaf of arrows for the unerring 
 bow of the wise and sound-hearted, the realistic novel is 
 a rising influence. " Lift up your eyes and look, 
 behold I shew you the actualities of things," is the 
 
PRUNING THE OLD THEOLOGICAL TREE. 73 
 
 challenge of the strong man armed, who dares to keep 
 his house against all adversaries. Strong in his position, 
 inflexible in his purpose, he disdains such feeble 
 weapons as if things were otherwise if they could be 
 but so. The only postulate in his argument is : O that 
 men were wise, that they understood these things ! And 
 with all his energies he bends himself to the task of 
 making them understood. 
 
 PRUNING THE OLD THEOLOGICAL TREE. 
 
 We have said that the principles of legitimate 
 socialism are not in themselves subversive of Theism, 
 nor preclusive of a high appreciation of the teachings of 
 Christ. But round these fundamental and essential 
 elements of the popular faith, many exotic dogmas have 
 clustered, which, like parasitic growths, have choked 
 and hidden the true ideals, and have indeed usurped 
 the name and functions of religion. Many of these 
 excrescences are gradually dying from inanition ; or the 
 healthy breezes of clearer, fresher thought are blowing 
 them into dust and ashes. We note a few of these 
 moribund ideas, which have all been considerable factors 
 in establishing and maintaining present society, with the 
 verdicts which the newer science and philosophy have 
 pronounced upon them. 
 
 That religion largely consists in participating in certain 
 ecclesiastical rites, in reading certain books, in repeating 
 certain words, in observing certain days, in diverting the 
 streams of life from their natural channels of thought and 
 action. 
 
74 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 The newer thought is, that such things are not religion 
 at all ; that religion essentially means, the best, fullest 
 use of all the powers and faculties of life, the growth of 
 good thoughts in the heart, the issue of sweet words 
 from clean lips, and the doing of right actions, helpful 
 to others' well-being. It recognises all times and seasons 
 as equally sacred, as every spot upon the earth is equally, 
 with every other spot, a presence-chamber of the Great 
 King ; and that the common life of man, its everyday 
 business, its natural relationships, its duties and 
 responsibilities, is the true sphere of religion. 
 
 That men are divided into praise-worthy and blame- 
 ivorthy, not on the basis of character, but of belief. 
 
 It is generally now held that beliefs are formed in 
 men's minds by what are, in their judgments, the 
 strongest evidence ; acknowledged authority being ever 
 a powerful influence in so moulding the judgment. 
 That the beliefs being thus necessary and unavoidable, 
 there can be no merit in holding one kind of opinions, 
 nor demerit in holding others. But it is for men's 
 ultimate advantage that they hold true opinions. 
 
 That virtue and vice have other foundations or 
 significance than their connection with human well-being. 
 
 The old systems of ethics, based upon the idea that 
 good and bad were absolute, not relative terms, are now 
 challenged. It is maintained that virtue means the 
 condition of mind and character leading to conduct, 
 which, not perhaps in its immediate or apparent 
 consequences, but in its inter-action with the many 
 ramifications of life, will ultimately promote human 
 happiness ; and that vice is the condition of mind 
 
PRUNING THE OLD THEOLOGICAL TREE. 75 
 
 generating conduct, which, although, perhaps, giving 
 present gratification to others besides the man himself, 
 will ultimately tend to produce human misery and 
 social disorder. 
 
 That human life, forming but a fractional portion of 
 man's existence^ its concerns are comparatively unimportant. 
 
 The newer thought about human life is, that it is the 
 very greatest thing in the universe of which we have any 
 definite knowledge. We may surmise, have faith in, 
 and aspirations towards, something higher, grander, 
 more abiding; but man's earthly life is the only 
 foundation on which a social fabric can be built. Man 
 is, as we see and know him, the noblest and most 
 complete outcome of .creative energy of which we are 
 cognizant ; it may be that there is no more perfected form 
 of life and intelligence in the universe. When we say of 
 such a one, he was merely a man ! what does that 
 merely include? An illimitable grasp of knowledge, 
 illimitable powers of love, without any limits in his 
 thoughts and aspirations. The problem, how to live 
 his life well, is the highest that can be placed before 
 sage or philosopher, the man of science or the religious 
 devotee.* 
 
 * In his striking address on what he calls The greatest thing in 
 the World, Professor Henry Drummond says : ' ' Paul, in three 
 verses, very short, gives us an amazing analysis of what this 
 supreme thing is. It is a compound thing, he tells us. As you 
 have seen a man of science take a beam of light and pass it through 
 a crystal prism, as you have seen it come out on the other side of 
 the prism broken up into its constituent colours, red, and blue, and 
 yellow, and orange, and violet, into all the colours of the rainbow. 
 So Paul passes this thing, Love, through the magnificent prism of 
 his inspired intellect, and it comes out on the other side broken up 
 
76 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 That man is naturally depraved, ever more inclined 
 towards evil than good. 
 
 This strange hypothesis, devoid of any scientific basis, 
 contrary to instinct and experience, and uncorroborated 
 by any analogy in nature, has evidently been brought 
 in to fill up a gap in systematized theology. We 
 know that in common life, for every evil word or act, 
 there are a hundred good words or acts. The smiles 
 and prattle of childhood, "of such the Kingdom of 
 Heaven," the love of woman, the fidelity of friendship, 
 the patriot in the dungeon, the philanthropist in the 
 lazar-house, the persistence through toils and privations 
 in every-day work and duty, nay, the courtesies of 
 common life all attest the predominance of good over 
 evil in human life. The old doctrine was never of 
 much practical account in social economies ; and its 
 
 into its elements. Will you observe what these elements are ? Will 
 you notice that they have common names ; that they are virtues 
 which we hear about every day, that they are things which can be 
 practised by every man in every place in life ; and how, by a 
 multitude of small things and ordinary virtues, the supreme thing, 
 the summum bonum, is made up ? The spectrum of love has nine 
 ingredients: Patience ( Love suffereth long;' Kindness 'And 
 is kind; 5 Generosity 'Love envieth not;' Humility 'Love 
 vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up ; ' Courtesy ' Doth not 
 behave itself unseemly ; ' Unselfishness ' Seeketh not her own ; ' 
 Good Temper 'Is not easily provoked;' Guilelessness 'Thinketh 
 no evil ; ' Sincerity ' Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in 
 truth.' You will observe that these elements, which, together, 
 make the supreme good, the stature of the perfect man, are all 
 in relation to life, in relation to the known to-day and the near 
 to-morrow, and not to the unknown eternity. Religion is 
 not a strange or added thing, but the inspiration of the secular 
 life, the breathing of an eternal spirit through this temporal 
 world." 
 
PRUNING THE OLD THEOLOGICAL TREE. 77 
 
 tenure of life, even in what is called "the religious 
 world," seems very insecure.* 
 
 That the maintenance of a priestly caste is essential to 
 religion. 
 
 As, when the first king assumed the insignia of 
 authority, and asserted his leadership of the nation, so, 
 when the first priest put on his sacerdotal robes, and 
 took his place at the altar of sacrifice, speaking the words 
 which none other must utter, a big event for both weal 
 and woe was inaugurated in human history. The king 
 and the priest have ever been important factors in 
 society. Nowadays, the doctrine that all men have 
 equal claims to social regard, and equal claims in the 
 measure of their fitness and capacity to social position 
 amongst their fellows, is fast obtaining general 
 recognition. The world, the country, the commune, 
 will always have their foremost men ; there will ever be 
 leaders and teachers in society. But these will hold 
 their places in the future, not by the accident of birth, 
 or the laying on of other men's hands, but more and 
 more the best men, the men of larger capacity, of 
 greater wisdom, of wider sympathy, will be chosen for, 
 or rather, will naturally fall into, these foremost places. 
 
 That laivs of right and wrong, which men have formed 
 from experience, and the lights of reason and of conscience, 
 and which are applicable in their mutual relations, are 
 
 * The General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, which 
 met in Edinburgh this year, issued a Declaratory Act, which, 
 amongst other matters, affirms "the remaining nobility of man's 
 nature even as fallen." A pity they could not give, in definite 
 figures, the proportion between this "nobility" and the total 
 depravity of their creed. 
 
78 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 inapplicable in what has come to be called "sacred history" 
 and in judging of what is declared to be " divine" 
 
 When complex and extensive measurement has to be 
 done, as in the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, all 
 aids from science and art are brought into requisition to 
 lay down one exact mile. From a mile so laid down at 
 Blackwall, every field, and every distance from point to 
 point in the triangulations of England, were measured. 
 Nay, more, that mile has been projected into the very 
 heavens. The diameters of the sun and of all the planets, 
 the distances of the moon from the earth and of the 
 planets from the sun, the velocity at which Sirius is 
 retreating from the earth, the velocity at which the Solar 
 system is moving towards the constellation Hercules, and 
 the velocities of sound and light, are all in terms of that 
 Blackwall mile. And man can apply only his earthly- 
 formed ideas of right and justice to things called 
 " sacred," to things appertaining to the highest heavens. 
 It is with him this criterion, or none.* 
 
 That, under certain conditions and through certain 
 instrumentalities, the natural laws may be broken 
 
 Man's whole personal experience is of infrangible, 
 changeless law. All of science is founded on the assump- 
 tion that, at all times and in all places, like causes will 
 
 * Dr. Edwin A. Abbot wrote recently in the Literary World: 
 "Many, out of a false sense of reverence, say in effect: 'God's 
 justice may be altogether different from our justice ; we are incapable 
 of judging of or testing it.' Such people may consistently go on to 
 say : * God's love is altogether different from ours ; ' and so of the 
 rest of his attributes ; finally, reducing our Father in heaven to an 
 unknown quantity, an algebraic x. We say, instead : ' God's justice 
 must be more just and more merciful than the most just and the 
 most merciful human justice.' :J 
 
PRUNING THE OLD THEOLOGICAL TREE. 79 
 
 produce like effects. The order, the stability of the 
 universe, hangs upon this certainty ; otherwise than this 
 would be disorder, chaos. We must have a mean idea 
 indeed of the Infinite Wisdom, if we can imagine that, to 
 prove the truth of some proposition, which was capable 
 of proof by experiment, or by reason and argument, there 
 had to be recourse to such incongruous procedure as 
 breaking the continuity of natural laws. As essentially a 
 portion of the universe, man is, in every grain of his 
 constitution, in all his attributes, the subject of law, as 
 much as is the fall of a stone, or the liquefaction of water. 
 In every phase of his being, certain effects will necessarily 
 be evolved from certain conditions, and it is on this 
 certainty that the higher hopes of socialism are founded. 
 And to our list of quasi-religious dogmas, which have 
 been factors in moulding social life, but which the 
 broadened thought of the present age is quietly passing 
 by, we may add this other : That the more sacred times, 
 and the more important events in human history, occurred 
 in the far past, and in distant lands. The newer faith is, 
 that the Infinite goodness and mercy are as near to us, 
 as present with us to-day, here, in this England of ours, 
 as they were in burning bush, in Sinai thunderings, or 
 between the wings of the cherubims in the temple holy 
 of holies ; and that the events and the life-conditions of to- 
 day are, to the men and women now living upon the 
 earth, the most significant and important of all within the 
 range of human history. 
 
8o STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 THE CHURCHES IN THEIR RELATINS 
 TO SOCIAL PROGRESS. 
 
 All the Churches are consciously or unconsciously, 
 and with more or less of abruptness in the descent on 
 what the remnant of sticklers for old-use-and-wont call 
 the "down grade." This means, that their ancient 
 formulas are being penetrated by the freer thought, the 
 newer science, and the more incisive criticism of the 
 present day. It is truly wonderful how elastic these 
 formulas are found to be ; how, with little apparent strain, 
 they quietly accommodate themselves to the inevitable. 
 The lopping-ofF of the bind-weeds, which were choking 
 out the healthy life, will let in the free winds of heaven, 
 and give expansion, and fuller, more wholesome vitality. 
 Churches are still to be important factors in modify- 
 ing and giving form and pressure to social ideals/' As 
 bonds of fellowship, for mutual edification in righteous- 
 ness and goodness, they are doing, and must continue to 
 do, useful work in the world. / 
 
 They have been speaking out nobly and hopefully on 
 the social questions of the day. Witness, the English 
 Church Congress of last year, under the presidency of 
 the Bishop of Durham. /In his opening address, he 
 made the social problem the leading topic, and, in wise 
 and sympathetic words, urged the necessity for changes 
 and ameliorations. ^ In after discussions, the Congress 
 took its tone from that of the good Bishop. At what 
 might be called the opposite pole of ecclesiasticism, the 
 Unitarian Triennial Conference, recently held in London, 
 gave social questions a leading place on their agenda of 
 
THE CHURCHES : THEIR SOCIAL TENDENCIES. 8 1 
 
 procedure. Most of the Nonconformist bodies have, at 
 their annual meetings, spoken out bravely for social 
 progress. Whilst the Salvation Army, hardly yet 
 recognised as in the roll of legitimate denominations, 
 has, under its redoubtable chief, done more than utter 
 kind words and sympathetic phrases. It is now 
 endeavouring to pioneer the way out of England's Slough 
 of Despond, by concrete action. The elaborate and 
 extensive plans of General Booth have provoked much 
 criticism and discussion, but also much of sympathy, 
 very slight opposition, and hardly a shred of ridicule. * 
 
 And the pulpit is still a living power in the land. The 
 great body of the clergy, and of the ministers in all 
 denominations, are men of rich culture. We believe 
 they are honest and single-hearted in their high vocation. 
 Lofty in soul and purpose, they zealously strive to carry 
 out the spirit of the Master. As parish priests and as 
 pastors, they see very much of the inner life of the people, 
 the insufficient means, the precarious employment, the 
 squalid homes, the drunkenness and unthrift. They 
 have not been deaf to the voices of the day ; many of 
 their own voices have been nobly raised for progress and 
 
 * The Rev. Donald Fraser, D.D., thus writes in the Christian 
 World: "An eminent scientist has been tilting with all his might 
 at the General of the Salvation Army, and deploring the silliness 
 and temerity of those who have subscribed ,100,000 to enable Mr. 
 Booth to set on foot a comprehensive scheme on behalf of the lowest 
 orders of our population. It would have looked better if Professor 
 Huxley, and those who are of his mind, had tried to face, in their 
 own way, the problem with which the wSalvation Army has stoutly 
 resolved to grapple. The scientific lectures and public libraries, 
 which seem to be their only resource, cannot touch ' Darkest 
 England.' They are out of it when the question is of raising the 
 sunken and saving the lost." 
 
 F 
 
82 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 amelioration, and many are penetrated with a startling 
 sense of personal responsibility. 
 
 It has been truly said that no one can live well who 
 lives amidst evil. O, the frightful evil in the world 
 frightful in its mighty mass aye, and frightful as lurking 
 in a single heart ! And upon every awakened conscience 
 weighs the responsibility of this evil ; against each, comes 
 the stern denunciatory voice of the prophet of old 
 " Thou art the man ! " In a sense, the foul word of the 
 streets is my utterance ; / am the sweater who, vampire- 
 like, is sucking the life-blood of women and children ; 
 7 am the owner of these mean fever-dens, less truly 
 homes than the tents of nomadic, desert tribes ; it is / 
 who licence the dram-shops, send opium along with 
 bibles to the Chinese, maintain stews and gambling- 
 houses. I am my brother's keeper. 
 
 Many of the popular leaders in the socialist and labour 
 movements are men, and also women, who have separated 
 themselves from the old faith ; and that the masses 
 follow and give heed to their leaders is often taken as a 
 token that they also have, to a large extent at least, 
 drifted away from the orthodox folds ; but the question 
 of dogmatic faith has really very little to do in the matter. 
 It is the heart of sympathy, the spirit of comradeship, 
 and courageous efforts towards amelioration, which are 
 the chief credentials for leadership. >When ministers and 
 clergymen shew like sympathies and put forth like efforts, 
 they, also, become popular leaders.^ 
 
 Recently, the Trades' Unionists of Hull had a Sunday 
 Church Parade. About 1,100 marched in procession to 
 the largest Wesleyan Chapel in the town. The minister 
 
THE CHURCHES I THEIR SOCIAL TENDENCIES. 83 
 
 gave them warm welcome ; he would take them eighteen 
 centuries back, and bring them face to face with the 
 Carpenter of Nazareth, who gave his life for the poor and 
 the suffering, and taught the brotherhood of man. 
 Never since had that brotherhood been more earnestly 
 re-taught tha-n in the present day, and the glorious 
 principle was changing all hearts, and making a straight 
 path for bettering the condition of the working classes. 
 What must result from this doctrine when it was generally 
 believed in, and practically followed out ? Why this it 
 would be impossible for tyranny to exist, or drunkenness, 
 or lust, or war. There would be a great uplifting power, 
 which would revolutionize society, abolish slavery all 
 over the world, and make one, in heart as in blood, all 
 nations upon the earth. The Trades' Unionists who 
 listened to such word, would hardly be inclined to 
 interrogate the speaker about his views on the trinity, 
 an eternity of punishment, or baptismal regeneration. 
 
 Quoting an expression of Dr. Fairbairn, " The nine- 
 teenth century will be known, theologically, as the age 
 that re-discovered Christ," the. President of the 
 Methodist New Connexion Conference, recently held in 
 Leeds, said, in his opening address i^^The Church lost 
 her Christ when she shut herself up to theologize con- 
 cerning him, and to elaborate metaphysical theories 
 concerning his person and work. She re-discovers him 
 to-day in the slums of the city, the abodes of poverty, 
 and the haunts of vice ; and there, with the living voice 
 of tender pity and loving brotherhood, holding out his 
 hand strong, but gentle to the drunkard, the lost 
 woman, the perishing little ones, the oppressed victims 
 
84 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 of the gorged capitalist and the sweater. The re-dis- 
 covered Christ is not the Christ of the mediaeval cloisters 
 of stillness and seclusion, but of the world of daily life, 
 offering it his key of love to unlock all its social problems. 
 Depend upon it, much history will be made in the next 
 twenty-five years. In the material, social, and political 
 world, vast forces are waiting to be born, that will tell 
 mightily in the immediate future of humanity. Twenty- 
 five years more of science, of the telegraph and 
 telephone will have brought together the ends of the 
 earth, and bound the human race into a brotherhood. 
 Twenty-five years more, in which the leaven of socialism 
 will have had time to work, in our national and 
 ecclesiastical institutions, who dare predict what it 
 means ?^ 
 
 No one in high place and position in England has 
 spoken out more boldly for the rights and dignity of 
 labour, than his Eminence the Catholic Archbishop of 
 Westminster. There is ever in his words such a ring 
 of heartfelt sympathy, that the working men turn to him, 
 in their hour of difficulty, as to a trusty guide, a wise 
 counsellor, a kind and faithful friend. At a meeting 
 of the Catholic Truth Society, held the other day in 
 London, the leading topics were not Roman Catholic 
 theology, but sanitation, temperance the care of young 
 servants, and the protection of children Cardinal Man- 
 ning said, " Social questions are the questions of the 
 day." 
 
 And surely no higher duties can be laid upon cultured 
 and set apart exponents of religion and morality, than to 
 help in making the conditions of life such that religion 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE GLOBE IN RELATION TO MAN. 85 
 
 and morality can find ready entrance, and have free 
 course therein. It has been said that the Church from 
 its calm elevation, above the business worries, and out 
 of the scramble and the turmoil of common life, has a 
 more excellent point of view, and can more clearly 
 discriminate the different bearings in social questions, 
 than those who are more directly involved therein. Just 
 as the man on the bank of a river, wherein a fellow- 
 creature is drowning, has a clearer view of all the pros 
 and cons in the case than the other man below, who has 
 scrambled into the water in an endeavour to save life ; 
 and the man above may thus be able to shout down 
 some wise and helpful directions. 
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE EARTH IN 
 RELATION TO HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 " Unchangeable, save to thy wild waves play," writes 
 Byron, of the Ocean ; but the word is inapplicable to any 
 created thing. We speak of the everlasting hills ; 
 " Sovran Blanc rears his bald, awful head " into the 
 
 heavens 
 
 " Its habitation from eternity : 
 And its precipitous, black, jagged rocks, 
 For ever shatter'd, and the same for ever. " 
 
 " From eternity," when the geologist tells us that the 
 upheaval of the Alpine range is in the later chronicles of 
 the globe. "The same for ever," when every wind 
 which ruffles through the lofty crags, and every shower 
 upon the mountain's breast, are triturating its huge mass 
 into dust. Each little descending rill, denuding it grain 
 by grain, is murmuring a funeral march to its grave. 
 
86 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 There are two things, and absolutely two things only, 
 in the universe which for ever remain the same, matter 
 and energy. No combustion or absorption, dissipation or 
 decay, can drive one atom out of existence, or disfranchise 
 it of its innate rights as a constituent of the universe. 
 And the twin-factors of all natural force, heat and 
 motion, are interchangeable, and the rate of exchange 
 is always at par. The conservation of energy, through all 
 permutations and circulative return to old conditions, is 
 the eternal law, written alike on stars and systems of 
 worlds, on the rising vapours, and on ivy leaves. 
 
 And this great Earth, which, out of nebulous fire and 
 meteoric dust, was formed into a solidly encrusted globe, 
 shall go through the planetary life which is due to 
 its conditions ; and there will then but in what manner 
 we know not be resolution into mutually repulsive 
 elements, flying from each other into space. But no 
 resting there, again the trumpet-call to new activities, 
 to new developments. 
 
 And what of the universe ? Is it, throughout its 
 multitudinous firmaments of glowing stars and revolving 
 systems, with all its laws and energies, its attractions and 
 repulsions, its incandescent heats and uttermost zeros of 
 cold, tending towards some far-off, all-comprehensive 
 event, the final completion of all epochs, the consumma- 
 tion and very ending of the mighty whole ? Or is each 
 partial ending, the completion of each separate cycle, but 
 as a midnight in one region of the earth, answering to a 
 sunrise or a noon-day in another region, and to be 
 followed by a new dawn in its own ? The pathetic 
 pleading of the Hebrew exile to be told the issue of 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE GLOBE IN RELATION TO MAN. 87 
 
 current events was answered by : " Go thy way, Daniel," 
 do thou thine own proper work, fret not thyself about 
 the future, waste not thy life-energies on the unknowable. 
 We never can know anything of the origin of matter, or 
 of how it became possessed of those properties which 
 appear to be essential to it. And no more can we 
 formulate in our minds an idea of the destruction of one 
 atom of matter, or of its being dispossessed of its 
 properties. But yet, eternal continuance is more easily 
 imagined than no beginning the stream meandering 
 through the rural vale, to human experience as to the 
 poet's fancy, seems destined to "go on for ever." 
 
 The transcendant mystery of a past eternity ! Out of 
 universal void, nothing could, by any possibility, have 
 proceeded ; and all the powers and potentialities in the 
 universe could not add to it one atom of new matter ; 
 and thus every particle of matter in stars and systems of 
 worlds, in meteoric clusters, and in the ether of illimitable 
 space, must have existed from all eternity ; and all 
 essential properties of matter must have been co-existent 
 with it. If matter had ever been devoid of gravitation, it 
 could never have given itself, to its minutest atom, that 
 property. And thus gravitation and energy and chemical 
 affinity have had no beginnings ; from all eternity, the 
 cohesion of molecules, the nebular confluence of meteors, 
 the evolution of suns and systems, the permutations xDf 
 matter through all phases of substance and of being. 
 
 And, amidst all changes and permutations, the universe 
 abideth for ever. Reason tells us that if, under the 
 operation of natural laws, any final issue or consummation 
 were possible, it would, through a past eternity, have 
 
88 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 been reached untold ages ago. An infinitude of duration 
 has "ample space and verge enough" to include all 
 possibilities of relative position and mutual influence, of 
 stars and firmaments. If there had been one collocation 
 adverse to the stability of the universe, in which there 
 would have been a general confluence, a rushing together 
 into one incandescent mass, it would have been reached 
 within an eternity of changeful development ; but, even 
 then, the mass would have rotation and contraction, 
 would throw off fragments, to re-develope into stars and 
 firmaments. 
 
 We conclude that the universe is an eternal continuity 
 of changing dispositions ; its multitudinous cycles inter- 
 woven with each other throughout all space and all time. 
 Each system of stars and of worlds comes into being 
 from the wreckage of older stars and worlds ; each has 
 its evolution to the maturity due to its conditions ; and 
 then it has its decay as a system, and a resolution into 
 mutually repulsive elements, scattering in space ; and 
 then, fresh gatherings into new systems, into other cycles 
 of star and world developments. 
 
 How bewildering, how awe-inspiring are these thoughts ! 
 A mighty maze, but yet under the dominion of immutable 
 law. The image and superscription of the Great King 
 are alike upon the firmaments, on grains of dust, and on 
 insects' wings. Do we ask for miracles ? The sublime 
 order of Nature the stars in their courses, the waves 
 breaking on the shores, the bud bursting into life and 
 beauty, our own wondrous being, are all blazoned 
 miracles. The divine presence-chamber is the infinitude 
 of space. The divine Word has been the energy, the 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE GLOBE IN RELATION TO MAN. 89 
 
 inspiration, the very soul of an eternal universe. If we 
 say God is power and wisdom, goodness and love, we 
 imply that these attributes are the correlatives of concrete 
 things, of objects for their exercise ; they could have no 
 place or meaning, no existence even, in utter vacuity. 
 The Great King has never been without his great 
 kingdom ; the infinite goodness and mercy has ever been 
 good and merciful ! 
 
 But, so far as modern science can tell us, the Earth 
 will continue for many thousands of years to be a fitting 
 habitation for man. In the far past, long-reaching glacial 
 and interglacial epochs have been important factors in 
 changes in the crust and in the conditions of life. 
 There will not within the next 100,000 years be such an 
 increase in the ellipticity of the Earth's orbit as to cause 
 even a moderately great glaciation. The Sun will, for far 
 beyond that period, radiate light and heat without material 
 diminution. The tidal movements due to solar and 
 lunar attractions, acting as a brake upon the Earth's 
 rotation, will, by the end of that period, have lengthened 
 the Earth's day about four hours ; that is, there will 
 then be only six evening and morning days in a period 
 equal to that of a present week ; but the prolongation 
 will come so imperceptibly slow about a minute .in 400 
 years that there will be ample time for life to adjust 
 itself to the variation. 
 
 But within the next 10,000 years there will be con- 
 siderable physiographical changes on the Earth's surface. 
 The eccentricity of the orbit is at present low, and for 
 the next 24,000 years it will still diminish; but it is never 
 
90 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 so low as to be without climatic influence. About the 
 ist of January the Earth is in perigee, about three 
 millions of miles nearer to the Sun, than when it is in 
 apogee, about the 2nd of July. In accordance with 
 Kepler's second law of planetary motion, the Earth 
 moves more quickly through the perihelion than through 
 the aphelion portion of its orbit ; and thus the equinoxes 
 do not equally divide the year. The summer portion 
 of the year in the northern hemisphere is about eight 
 days longer than the winter portion ; and the reverse in 
 southern latitudes. Stronger southern trade winds 
 blow warm equatorial currents into the northern hemi- 
 sphere ; and ocean currents are important factors in 
 climatology. The sweep of the Gulf Stream through the 
 North Atlantic, gives us moist and genial south-westerly 
 winds, and raises the mean temperature of our islands 
 about 15 degrees above the normal mean. 
 
 The effects of the eccentricity of the orbit are thus 
 accumulative, producing a marked distinction between 
 the climates of the northern and southern hemispheres. 
 Now, the point of perihelion has a movement round the 
 orbit, completing a tropical revolution in about 21,000 
 years; it will be at our vernal equinox in about 4,650 
 years. There will then be nearly an equilibrium between 
 the climatic conditions of the two hemispheres. For 
 10,500 years thereafter the present conditions will be 
 reversed ; there will be greater extremes of temperature, 
 but a diminished mean in the northern hemisphere ; the 
 southern hemisphere will have a more equable climate, 
 with a higher mean temperature. 
 
 But these climatic changes between the two hemi- 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE GLOBE IN RELATION TO MAN. 9! 
 
 spheres will not complete the comparative distinctions. 
 The mighty ice-cap, nearly 3,000 miles in diameter, 
 and supposed to have a mean thickness of about twelve 
 miles, which now surrounds the South Pole, will, in the 
 coming centuries, begin to dissolve ; part of it will 
 become liquid water in the seas, raising their level, and 
 flowing over much low-lying land ; and the remainder 
 will go into north-polar ice accumulations thus dis- 
 placing the ballast of the globe, and deepening the 
 northern seas. The effect will be an extensive submer- 
 gence of northern lands. Within the next 5,000 years 
 one-half of Europe including our own islands, Canada, 
 and Asiatic Russia, will disappear as continents ; their 
 higher lands forming island archipelagoes. This immense 
 loss of territory will be only partially made good by an 
 emergence of islets and coral reefs from the deeper 
 southern seas. There will probably thus be a consider- 
 able diminution in the habitable land of the globe. 
 
 Many social philosophers have largely exercised their 
 minds on the question : If the human population of the 
 globe doubles itself in so many years, and again, and yet 
 again so doubles itself, how long will it be until the 
 earth is unable to support its inhabitants, and starvation 
 is the general doom ? 
 
 It has been said that the gross amount of life on the 
 earth is always nearly a constant. So much vegetation 
 springing out of the soil ; so much animal life sustained 
 directly and indirectly by this vegetation. When the 
 human population begins to trench on the means of 
 subsistence, man, at the expense of the lower life, will 
 
92 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 economise for his own use the fruits of the earth. He 
 will extinguish the larger carnivora, and also herbivorous 
 animals which consume more food than their carcases 
 repay, or which do not in utility recoup the value of 
 their food. Man himself will probably become largely 
 vegetarian in his food ; partly through finding such 
 food better adapted to a more placid life, and partly 
 that he will be curtailed in the use of food which has 
 passed, with much waste, from its necessary origin in the 
 soil, through intermediary animal life. Much land now 
 considered barren will be brought into cultivation ; and 
 the husbandry will be that of the kitchen and flower 
 garden. All that ingenious mechanism, drainage, irri- 
 gation, scientific fertilization, and rotation of crops can 
 do to increase the yield, will be done. If found 
 beneficial, any extent of land will be roofed in by glass, 
 or protected by walling. Probably more nutritive cereals 
 than we at present possess may be discovered and 
 developed ; and the seas will be trawled to the safe 
 limits of a full maintenance of the fish supplies. 
 
 But man will ever be man, and master of his fate, 
 capable, progressive, fore-seeing ; he will still bend his 
 powers to conquer adverse circumstances, and to solve 
 all the problems in his life. Human advancement must 
 ever imply the subjection of the merely animal instincts 
 to judgment and forethought. The common sense of 
 the future will surely be able to maintain an equilibrium 
 between the mouths to be fed, and a certain and safe 
 commissariat.* If the world's population doubles itself 
 
 * Even at present, a year of good trade means an increase in 
 marriages and births ; of bad trade, their diminution. 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE GLOBE IN RELATION TO MAN. 93 
 
 in the coming thousand years, it would probably take 
 half as long again for the next doubling ; and so on, 
 with increasing periods. 
 
 With an ever-widening civilization diffusing the arts of 
 life over the entire globe, and making the forces of 
 nature generally subservient to human requirements, the 
 practical working out of the coal storage, as also of 
 the bitumens and petroleums, will fall much within 
 the probable existence of man on the globe. The full 
 extent of the carboniferous area is not known, nor to what 
 depths coal may be found ; but that area is limited ; and 
 from the increasing heat in descending into the crust, it 
 can only be worked to a limited depth. But coal is now 
 used as recklessly as if there were an unlimited supply. 
 
 It has been calculated that, at the present rate of 
 consumption about 160,000,000 of tons annually 
 our English coal-fields will be practically exhausted in 
 about 250 years. Our steam-engines are even under 
 their latest improvements very spendthrifts of fuel. A 
 triple-cylinder marine engine, with surface condensation, 
 and boilers of the best known construction, gives out in 
 hard, practical work, only about one-tenth of what is due 
 to the kinetic energy of the expended heat. A locomo- 
 tive engine will thus account for about only one-twentieth 
 of the theoretical energy of the fuel consumed. The 
 steam-engine is a great factor in modern civilization, 
 but another James Watt is needed to devise a less 
 wasteful motive power ; and under all possible new 
 inventions and appliances, there still remains the 
 question, What is to be the future substitute for coal? 
 
94 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 Electricity has been named as an available power ; and 
 wonderful fancy-pictures have been drawn of the world 
 under the motor forces of electricity. Touching a knob, 
 or changing an index, is to summon at will the genii of 
 perpetual motion, to obey all human behests. But there 
 is never any use attempting to cajole Nature ! Electri- 
 city, as natively diffused in the globe, is not in itself a 
 kinetic force. It can, like hydraulic pressure, or a 
 leather strap, be used for the storage or the transference 
 of force ; but for this it has to be accumulated by the 
 expenditure of theoretically equal but practically greater 
 force. So accumulated, electricity will often be found a 
 convenient motor, and may be largely used as an artificial 
 light ; and natural forces, as tides, winds, and water- 
 descents may be extensively used in its accumulation. 
 But for his requisite fuel in the future, man will doubtless 
 have to depend mainly on the source of heat in the coal, 
 and of all our surface warmth, the sun. 
 
 Through the action of sunlight, plant-life has the 
 power of freeing the carbonic-acid in the atmosphere 
 from its oxygen, and assimilating the carbon into plant 
 substance. Certain conditions of plant-life in inter- 
 glacial periods produced the coal measures. When 
 these have been worked out until their yield becomes 
 diminishingly less, and increasingly more difficult, then for 
 his supplementary fuel man will have to fall back upon 
 the chemistry of nature in the growth of forest trees. 
 Woodlands will encroach upon corn-fields ; and the 
 maximum population of the globe will thus be farther 
 restricted. But the atmosphere will be more wholesome, 
 the landscape more diversified, and the life more vigorous 
 
SOCIALISM BASED ON NATURAL LAWS OF LIFE. 95 
 
 than if a never-failing coal supply had enabled man to 
 largely disforest the earth. 
 
 THE ELEMENTS IN HUMAN NATURE ON 
 
 WHICH ULTIMATE SOCIALISM MUST 
 
 BE BASED. 
 
 In every age, and in every clime, there has been in 
 all men, from the legendary Adam down to his 
 youngest son, one predominant instinct, passion, 
 attribute, name it what we will, ingrained in the 
 constitution, as much an essential portion of themselves 
 as their hands or feet, the desire for happiness. To 
 live an ideally best life ; but the ideal best has varied 
 with the varied bias and training, the disposition and 
 the environments of each individual. In one, it has 
 simply meant bodily health and a sufficiency of the material 
 necessaries of life ; in another, it has meant affluence, 
 that superabundance of the means of life which is called 
 wealth, and which brings with it the privilege of getting 
 others to do things for the possessor, which he does not 
 care to do for them, or for himself; in another, it has 
 meant increased knowledge; in another, the power of 
 doing good to others, or of inflicting injury upon others, 
 or of influencing the minds or the conduct of others ; 
 in many, it has meant unlimited pleasure, implying, from 
 one point of view, baccarat, horses, and yachts, or 
 personal adornments, settlements, and high society ; and 
 from another point of view, unlimited ease, hard twist, 
 "beer and skittles." 
 
 Self-preservation is said to be the first law of nature. 
 
96 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 Whether, as philosophers have argued, and do argue, 
 selfishness, an exclusive regard for one's own interests, 
 as such are regarded and are present in the mind, be 
 the natural and absolute basis of all human action ; or 
 whether it be only one powerful factor in our constitu- 
 tion, it is there, ever assertive, ineradicable. We 
 know, from sad experience, that all the social evils in 
 the world, the wars of nations, and the conflicts of 
 individual men with their fellow-men, slavery and 
 oppression, over-reaching and theft, "the lust of the 
 flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life," have 
 been outflows from selfishness. Is this, then, a dissonant 
 note in the harp of humanity, which must always make 
 the music a jar and a discord; or can this note be 
 attuned to harmonize with every other note. May it not 
 even be made the key-note in a grand oratorio of life ? 
 Surely there is some way out of the tangle ; surely there 
 is, within the natural constitution of things, a possibility 
 of unifying the individual good with the general good 
 and welfare. 
 
 Will not the probabilities of our own good health be 
 increased, if all the neighbouring dwellings are as 
 wholesome as our own ? Shall we less enjoy our dinners 
 if we know that there are equally good dinners, smoking 
 hot, in all the alleys and bye-lanes ? Will the novel and 
 the poem please us less, that they are also read and 
 appreciated by the men who build houses and sweep 
 chimneys ? Would it not be a great ease to our minds 
 that we were not required to scramble, with much 
 jostling against others, up the hill of gentility, of caste 
 and fashion ; but could walk in friendly companionship 
 
SOCIALISM BASED ON NATURAL LAWS OF LIFE. 97 
 
 with others along the quiet ways of natural freedom, of 
 convenience, and moderation ? Would it not be a 
 comfort to us to know that not a single human being 
 had other than kind thoughts towards us ? Nay, will 
 not every sweet word and thought, and every friendly 
 act of our own towards others, be twice blessed, our- 
 selves the greater recipients of the blessings ? The one 
 great problem in social science is, how best to turn 
 this long-time turbulent, and often destructive flood of 
 selfishness, into a river of God, to cleanse, to beautify, 
 to irrigate, and make fruitful. 
 
 By our natural constitution, we must like what is 
 what from our disposition and our life-conditions has 
 come to be agreeable to us ; and in all our actions, we 
 must, in correspondence with all natural law, obey the 
 strongest motive power, towards the advantages which 
 are, at the moment, present in our minds. But this does 
 not mean that we are to act in the way which is most 
 pleasant to the senses, or which is smoothest and easiest 
 for ourselves, or which will gain the applause of others, 
 or bring us material profit or advantage. Conscience, 
 duty, manliness, principle, often predominate over 
 sensuous gratification, personal ambition, and worldly 
 aggrandizement ; they are then the strongest motives, 
 the rulers of the will, as Pope says 
 
 " The master passion in the breast 
 Like Aaron's serpent swallows all the rest." 
 
 With what scorn, even apologetically for naming such 
 meaner things, does Paul speak of his infirmities and 
 necessities, his scourgings and wild-beast fightings, when 
 
 compared with the all-absorbing mission of his life. 
 
 G 
 
98 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 His friends are not to pray for his deliverance from 
 bonds and imprisonment, but only that in the supreme 
 moment of trial, utterance may be given him to speak 
 boldly the things which are in his heart. 
 
 To that Roman girl to whom was given the choice, 
 "Diana or Christ?" On the side of the national 
 goddess stood life, life sweetened by love and popular 
 applause ; on the side of the despised Nazarene, death 
 glared through cruel, tiger eyes ; death, tearing her from 
 her love, from home and friends, and all the bright 
 expectations of her young life, and embittered by popular 
 execrations. And yet the choice, out of this same 
 instinct of what was felt to be the greatest good, was 
 Christ.* Epicurus taught that the pursuit of the greatest 
 good in life, was the true end and aim of philosophy ; 
 but this pursuit would best accomplish its purpose by 
 running wide of sensual gratification, by ever being side 
 by side with virtue, with temperance, magnanimity, and 
 fidelity to conscience. 
 
 Given then the prospective greatest good to ourselves 
 as the basis of every motive and of every action, can 
 there be such a development of individual character, as 
 that the greatest personal good, present in the mind, 
 shall coincide and be at one with the common good? 
 This is a question of questions ; upon the answer hangs 
 the welfare of future society. What is individual 
 
 * Father Damien, companioned only by lepers on that lone 
 isle in the seas, constant misery in his sight, foulness and disease 
 in every breath of his nostrils, the shadow of death ever hovering 
 near, was yet in that sphere, and doing that work in life which 
 yielded most satisfaction to his heart, which was, to him, the highest 
 good, for the accomplishment of which his life was worth living. 
 
SOCIALISM BASED ON NATURAL LAWS OF LIFE. 99 
 
 character? Is it a something made up of chance and 
 haphazard, beyond the range of natural law ; a kind of 
 will-o'-the-wisp, eluding the grasp of cause and effect; 
 a very monstrosity in the universe? We can never 
 have it too much urged and insisted upon, that in this 
 universe, chance and haphazard have no place, that there 
 is not, throughout its mighty domain, one inch of space 
 beyond the grasp of inflexible law. The human 
 character is as much a natural formation as is the 
 composition of water from its essential elements. Like 
 water, that character is formed by the blending and 
 inter-action of two elements, namely : the special 
 organization giving a certain quality of faculties and of 
 tendencies, which has been inherited from parentage 
 proximate, and more remote ; and the circumstances 
 and conditions of life, which have, from birth, been acting 
 upon, and influencing, these faculties and tendencies. 
 There cannot possibly be any other factors in the 
 production of any result, than the entity concerned, and 
 the action upon it, of everything with which it has come 
 into contact. 
 
 Animated life, in even its simplest or minutest form, 
 ever gives, as a first impression, the idea of its being a 
 centre of inherent force of self-generated energy 
 within its capabilities of action, a free, unfettered will. 
 The eagle selects his prey, the bee chooses on which 
 flower it shall alight. Does life, to some extent, free 
 its possessor from the chain of natural causation, and 
 endow with attributes of the uncaused, the absolute? 
 Or, is law here acting as rigidly as in chemical affinity, 
 
100 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 but now through the instincts, perceptions and desires 
 of life ? Has not the life originated and been conditioned 
 as a natural and necessary sequence of all the energies 
 which have converged towards it from an infinite past? 
 And thus determinate in its origin and constitution, can 
 it ever operate otherwise than determinately ? 
 
 We might, without much question, accept the principle 
 of rigid law as dominating all the lower life of the world, 
 and yet demur to its domination over our own lives. 
 Are all of a man's actions determined by the impress 
 from outer agencies combining with, modifying, and giving 
 character to, his inherited individuality ? Must those 
 things which are essentially personal, his very own, the 
 thoughts of his mind, rise necessarily, and flow in a 
 certain sequence? Our pride of manhood rebels 
 against and repudiates such servility to arbitrary laws 
 and mere outside conditions. Are we, with our grand 
 intellects and lofty purposes, mere automata, wound up 
 to act as within the limitations of springs and wheel- 
 work, only so? Do we not feel our freedom, our 
 independence of thought and will, and our ability to act, 
 if we so choose, contrary to "strongest motive ?'\ 
 
 Yes ! but there is still a whisper in our heart of hearts, 
 Thou vain boaster, thou clay in the hands of the 
 potter, what hast thou that thou didst not receive? 
 We feel no curb of law ! No, the law is not an external 
 force bearing down overtly upon us ; we act through the 
 law, it is within us, inseparable from our being. " If we 
 so choose," but in such choice, it may be one of 
 contradiction, of perverseness or obstinacy, we are 
 still obeying the strongest impulse. And what foolish- 
 
SOCIALISM BASED ON NATURAL LAWS OF LIFE. IOI 
 
 ness to speak of a living being, replete with vitality, 
 perception, judgment, and passion, as an automaton ; 
 that is a dead thing, constructed to partially imitate, by 
 mechanism, a living thing; the two things are utterly 
 incommensurable. 
 
 When, with earnestness of mind we face the problem 
 of life, we find that consciousness, even in its lowest 
 form, is to us an utter incomprehensibility. Strict 
 analysis of the composition of a living thing, will give 
 certain common elements, as nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, 
 and phosphorus. Dead elements, and yet their molecules 
 were so organized, so placed in relation to each other, 
 that the thing knew of its separate existence,^// certain 
 instincts and desires, and, in response to these instincts 
 and desires, willed special movements. What was the 
 vital principle which our analysis failed to detect ? With 
 bated breath and whispered humbleness, we must 
 confess our inability of conception. And surely before 
 this insolvable mystery of life, our very last refuge 
 should be in flippancy of speech, or in mean and 
 incongruous metaphor. And further, we would submit 
 to dissentients from the principle of the universality of 
 natural law, that it is well not to be over presumptuous in 
 their utterances, but to admit into their minds just the 
 possibility that they may be in error ; lest, haply, they be 
 found even fighting against the ordinance of God. 
 
 We speak of education and training ; what do we 
 mean thereby? Is education simply school and book 
 learning, training merely moral instruction and good 
 advice ? These are but fractional parts of the influence 
 
102 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 of society and outer circumstances upon the individual 
 life. The mother's smile, the father's voice, the toys, 
 play-games, and discipline of the nursery, every word 
 heard in the streets, every talk with young companions, 
 every action it sees, are all training and education of 
 the child humanity. Nay, every circumstance and event 
 throughout life, every transaction with fellow-men and 
 fellow-women, every book that is read, the theatre, the 
 lecture-hall, and the church, are all in varying degrees 
 giving their tone and impress to the character. A man's 
 education ends only with his conscious life, with the 
 last "more light" sigh of the octogenarian. We have 
 all seen posted on the walls a cartoon, "The child, 
 what will it become?" One series of various stages of 
 life shew how, under good and wholesome influences, 
 there is a development of high character ; its index 
 being plainly written on the very countenance. Another 
 series gives the results of malign influences in meanness 
 of character and of countenance. No more plastic 
 material in the arts of life, than is human nature. As 
 the potter, out of the same lump, can fashion one vessel 
 to honour and another to dishonour, so, out of the 
 common material of humanity can be formed men, 
 "but a little lower than the angels," and men, fit 
 comrades for very devils of the pit. 
 
 To separate the idea of Socialism from Individualism, 
 to fancy that there ever can be such a perfect system 
 instituted, as that the system itself, and not the units 
 within it, shall be the permanent motive-power ; to think 
 that there will then be less need for individual excellence, 
 is a grievous and palpable mistake. No system of 
 
SOCIALISM BASED ON NATURAL LAWS OF LIFE. 103 
 
 society can be that of fullest maturity which is not the 
 choicest possible nursery-ground of noble individualism. 
 The problem of socialism depends entirely on that of 
 individual life Dost thou live well? Dost thou do 
 right actions, speak right words, think right thoughts? 
 These are the crucial questions for every candidate for 
 fellowship into this new church. To help to build up 
 this higher personal life in a people, or, as one great 
 teacher did, into a little circle of friends, or even into 
 one other, is a fitting task for the fullest powers of a 
 man ; be they powers of prophetic eloquence, or of the 
 wayside word fitly spoken, or, it may be, only of quiet 
 example. 
 
 " Know thyself," was the striking precept of the 
 ancient philosopher. "An impossible precept," says 
 Carlyle, " until it be translated into this partially possible 
 one : Know what thou canst work at ! " To know 
 what we are best fitted to do materially is good ; good to 
 be able to turn the barren moor into a fruitful corn- 
 field, or, out of the rude materials which are laid about 
 us, to make things of use and things of beauty. But 
 better still, as seen in the clearer insight of the Christ, 
 to till the garden of the soul ; to lay up in its treasure- 
 chambers, personal riches. Honour and integrity, high 
 thought and nobility of character, these are enduring 
 possessions engrafted upon the life itself; these things 
 moth and rust cannot corrupt, force or chicanery cannot 
 despoil. So endowed, a man may truly say with Paul, 
 " Having nothing outwardly, yet possessing all things." 
 
 The cares of present-day life, its rivalries and business 
 worries, waste the motor-powers of life in useless 
 
104 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 friction, choke the growth of the true humanity, and 
 crush down and repress Individuality. On the one hand, 
 is poverty and precariousness. No man can give much 
 place in his thoughts to the higher aims of life culture 
 and refinement, knowledge and lofty aspiration who 
 has to face the problem : How are I and mine to live 
 through the coming winter? Money-getting must be 
 ever more in the thoughts of the very poor than of the 
 rich or the fairly prosperous. On the other hand, the 
 acquisition and disbursement of wealth are very quick- 
 sands, too often engulfing the Individuality, making 
 shipwreck of the true purposes of life. In either case, 
 there is slavery to outward things ; the greatest thing in 
 the world, the personality, the man himself, has no 
 healthy development, but is " crushed, cabined, and 
 confined." 
 
 In the New Society, government will not mean 
 authoritative compulsion, or, as it has been put, " the 
 forcible and complete subordination of the will of the 
 half minus one, to the will of the half plus one." With 
 even a large majority of votes for a proposed measure, 
 but with a dissentient minority, there would be a pause 
 in the legislation. Under free discussion, mutual 
 respect, and the animating spirit of the commonweal, 
 the right thing to do for the common welfare would, as 
 a general rule, be in self-evidence ; and it would be felt 
 that something was essentially wrong, when an idea 
 did not commend itself to practically universal 
 acceptation. In matured society, the functions of the 
 State will be chiefly administrative, as the carrying out 
 of arrangements for the production, exchange, and 
 
SOCIALISM BASP:D ON NATURAL LAWS OF LIFE. 105 
 
 distribution of commodities. But every individual will, 
 after the best training then known, be largely left 
 to choose his own path in life ; all will be so enfolded 
 by wholesome environments, that industry and virtue 
 will be natural outgrowths. The law of evolution in 
 human life maketh for individual excellence. 
 
 And this self-preservative instinct is the axis on which 
 the whole frame-work of human society revolves. Like 
 every other essential element in man's complex nature, 
 it may be misdirected and abused, with results 
 detrimental both to himself and to those within the 
 sphere of his influence ; but, under the guidance of 
 conscience and the sway of high character, it ever, and 
 with undiminished power, maketh for ultimate good. 
 Instead of its being an evidence of " total depravity, "- 
 preclusive of any advancement towards perfectibility, 
 and dooming man to be for ever a groveller in the dust, 
 it is, when rightly understood, the grand certainty in 
 human nature, on which, and on which alone, the 
 individual, and the society which is made up of in- 
 dividuals, can attain to a full maturity of growth. Once 
 let the fact be thoroughly rooted and grounded in a 
 man's innermost being, that it is, in the true sense of 
 the words, best for himself to be industrious, -to be 
 temperate in all things, to be of clean lips and of pure 
 heart, to be thoughtful for, and helpful towards, others ; 
 and he has been born again into full citizenship of 
 the new kingdom of goodness and love; and that 
 kingdom has advanced, by a farther stage, towards 
 universality and perfection. 
 
106 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 HUMANITY IN THE FUTURE. 
 
 Like everything else in the wide universe, human life 
 is a continuity. The pulse-beat of a hundred generations 
 ago, has overlapped each new birth, and is to-day 
 throbbing in ceaseless vibrations through our veins. In 
 a sense, all that is, is everlasting ; at all times the then 
 present is the lineal descendant of the past, and is the 
 parent of all that comes after it. In art and science, in 
 the experiences of life, in great thoughts and noble 
 aspirations, the man of the future will be the heir of all 
 the ages. He will not be a Cceur de Lion or a Wallace 
 in bodily strength and physical endurance, such 
 qualities will not then be essentials in his life, but in 
 the higher attributes of his nature, his morale, his plane 
 of character, there will be continuous progress and 
 development. He will ever be capable, progressive, 
 foreseeing ; bending all his powers to conquer adverse 
 circumstances, and to solve all new problems in his 
 life. 
 
 The world and all its concerns will belong, in all 
 coming time, to the men and women who are then 
 living upon it. Man's reverence for the past is 
 reverence for his own noble nature ; the past will ever 
 be blest for what it has done for the present. " Other 
 men laboured, and ye are entered into the fruits of their 
 labours." But the dead hand of the past is not to hold 
 its moveless sceptre over the living present. Each new 
 generation has, with all its aids from past experience, 
 and its own new wisdoms, to work out for itself, all its 
 social, political, and philosophic problems. The 
 
HUMANITY IN THE FUTURE. 107 
 
 institutions, the modes and methods of life, which are 
 fitted to one time, to one phase of civilisation, will be 
 worthless in other times, or under other phases ; just as 
 the huge battle-axe of the great Earl of Warwick would 
 be a useless encumbrance in modern warfare. Certain 
 abiding principles there will be : First, that no 
 institution, form of government, or mode of society, can 
 be in stable equilibrium, which is not broad-based upon 
 general consent, and its adaptation to current require- 
 ments ; secondly, that all institutions are merely stages 
 in man's progressive development, and no final word is 
 to be said here any more than in problems of science ; 
 and thirdly, man can attain to all his reasonable that 
 is to all his beneficial aspirations. 
 
 A coming golden age has been the poet's dream, the 
 prophet's inspiration. Out of primeval barbarism, with 
 its stone hammers and flint-tipt arrows, a Zoroaster, a 
 Plato, a Marcus Aurelius were evolved, "each in his 
 own order." Shall there in the future be a higher type 
 of manhood than in our foremost civilisations now stands 
 upon the earth? It is only on this assumption that we 
 can forecast an Eden in the future. Do we feel that 
 there are in ourselves the elements of such nobler man- 
 hood? Have we, "longings, yearnings, strivings," for 
 the final victory of the spirit over the meaner Jife of 
 sensuousness and pride ? If so, then there is hope, there 
 is certainty of the better things. 
 
 The future is at times spoken of forebodingly, as a 
 more prosaic, dull, and spiritless age looming upon the 
 race ; an age in which conventionalism and utility, and 
 the calm pulse of realism, shall take the places of beauty 
 
108 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 and sentiment, of imagination and romance, of soul- 
 stirring difficulty and adventure. Is the current of 
 human life to become one monotonous, smooth-flowing 
 stream, within artificially-trimmed banks, with scarce a 
 ripple on the surface or a swirl in the deeper waters ? 
 Shall there be no more of wonder or enthusiasm, of bold 
 achievement, or the equally noble, though unsuccessful, 
 daring to achieve? What would then be left as 
 incentives for men to rise above their meaner selves 
 into higher efforts ; or in their thoughts to soar into 
 fairy realms of art, of poetry, and romance ? 
 
 Mighty nature, the unfathomable, the unsearchable 
 universe will still be left ; the being of each single entity 
 therein will, under every increase of knowledge, be an ever- 
 increasing marvel. And man will be left ; his eyes still 
 searching for things of beauty, his ears await for melody. 
 Man, with his passionate nature, and his heritage of a 
 strange eventful history, the strains of the Nimrod, the 
 Leonidas, the Viking, the Crusader, and the Martyr in 
 his blood ; the love-lyrics of Sappho and the Troubadours 
 still vibrating in his heart. With wonderfully plastic 
 powers of adaptation to his environments, the germs and 
 first principles of humanity are constants ; they are 
 strong cords of unity in all places and in all times. " In 
 all ages, every human heart is human." In every life- 
 story there is a forest of Ardenne with its community 
 of soul, its bright welkin of serenity and love ; a Diet 
 of Worms, with its trumpet-call to steadfastness and duty ; 
 aye, and a Via Dolorosa, with its bloody-sweat, and its 
 cross of suffering and isolation. 
 
PRELUDES TO SOCIALISM. 1 09 
 
 PRELUDES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 As the development of life upon the globe, from the 
 simplest to the most complex, from the minutest 
 diatoms to man, was a grand march, the mass ever 
 moving onwards ; yet, not a march of continuous progress 
 in all its parts, not uniform or always direct, but with 
 many divisional retreats and many fallings-out from the 
 ranks ; so has been the history of human society. It is 
 a chronicle of distinctive civilisations, by the Nile, the 
 Euphrates, and the Ganges, the Yellow-river of China, 
 the Amazon of America, and by " the great sea in the 
 middle of the earth." Legends and traditions, the ruins 
 of tombs and temples, the root-words of languages, 
 hieroglyphics, and inscriptions, tell, with more or less of 
 definiteness and credibility, of empires and nations which 
 attained to supremacy of power, and made considerable 
 progress in the arts of life ; then, generally from their 
 very success turning into a canker, and rotting inwards, 
 they fell from their comparatively high estate, became 
 effete, and were over-shadowed by clouds of barbarism ; 
 and then, in time, man's innate instincts for order and 
 progress again began to assert themselves. 
 
 But no special phase in man's history has ever come 
 abruptly, nor was it previously planned and laid out for 
 him. Each new phase has been a growth from former 
 conditions ; not always a more wholesome or luxuriant 
 growth. As in natural history the "survival of the 
 fittest " does not always mean the survival of the best ; 
 but rather of those forms of life which will most readily 
 adapt themselves to new conditions ; it may be that these 
 
110 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 conditions are detrimental to the higher forms, and 
 whilst the meaner forms survive intact, or even rise in 
 the scale of life, the higher must retrograde or perish. 
 
 And thus we predicate that the higher social life in the 
 future will not be the outcome of any one elaborately 
 prepared plan, of an experiment, or of a series of 
 competitive experiments. It will be a natural develop- 
 ment, a growth out of long-tried 'methods and activities, 
 a confluence from all the various streams of experience. 
 How did the race, in journeying through untold ages 
 along its special line of life, become man ? Physiological 
 experience is against the notion of an order of progressive 
 creatures, culminating in the production of one super- 
 latively developed pair, solely from whom a pre-eminent 
 race afterwards proceeded ; the great mass of waste life 
 in the production, all dying out without issue. Evolution 
 is a rolling out, an expansion, not a contraction. The 
 progressive stages towards human development must 
 have been through the social habits, the mental friction, 
 the growth of language, and the intermingling of blood, 
 through hundreds of generations. It was throughout, 
 from its earliest segregation as a species, the progress 
 of a race : a progress so gradual, that of no single 
 generation could it be specifically said, "The race has 
 here become man !" And indeed the genus Homo has 
 not yet reached its full maturity, has not attained to 
 the measure of the stature of the fulness of manhood. 
 
 And akin to the evolution of man will be that of the 
 ultimate form of human society. It will not be one 
 mighty bound into a new and strange kind of life, 
 the adoption of a new invention of the study, charted 
 
PRELUDES TO SOCIALISM. Ill 
 
 and designed to rule and hypothesis. "The Kingdom 
 of heaven," said the teacher, "cometh not by observa- 
 tion," it is within you, or it is nowhere ; it is the 
 fulfilment the expansion and completion of old things, 
 of things which are now here upon the earth. The 
 advent of matured socialism will not be announced 
 by notable signs and wonders ; it will not rise up out 
 of the seas, nor like -the New Jerusalem in the seer's 
 vision, be let down from the clouds : its herald angels 
 will be matters of fact in the everyday life of the current 
 times. 
 
 "Then are we not to try experiments, but to sit under 
 all our evils with folded hands, and make no endeavour 
 to realize better things, until the time for the best things 
 is fully ripe?" Yes, try every expedient ; you are now 
 trying many and others will suggest themselves before 
 long. Organize labour into a grand world-wide federa- 
 tion ; say that spite of musty old saws about supply and 
 demand, wages must be such as to ensure a decent 
 living for the workman, and hours of labour shall not 
 be too many for his strength, or for leaving a margin 
 for the employment of all ; constitute efficient councils 
 of arbitration in the conflicts of labour with capital ; 
 extend the principles of profit-sharing and of co-partner- 
 ship in manufactures and trading-enterprise ; found 
 agricultural colonies, and encourage garden and field 
 holdings by the labourers ; make the land of a nation 
 the heritage of a nation ; work for temperance, for social 
 purity, for free education, for sanitary towns and dwelling- 
 houses. All these are as the meteoric streams from all 
 
112 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 points in space, which, converging under the law of 
 gravitation into an autonj^nous nebula, gave birth 
 to the Solar system. Out of divergent streams and 
 of competitive seethings and mutual disturbances, 
 harmony and order were evolved. So, by giving them 
 new directions, out of the old elements of social discord, 
 concord and peace will be evolved. 
 
 " Has mankind still to work through that great and 
 ever increasing host of movements and expedients 
 before the narrow way of life broadens out into the 
 highway which leads into the promised land?" It 
 may be. There must be a novitiate, a more or less 
 lengthened period of probation ; as by purgatorial fire, 
 humanity has to be purified from its dross and defilement 
 before it is fitted to enter the inner courts of the temple. 
 It is an oft-quoted proverb, " There is no royal road 
 to knowledge." Incommensurable vulgar fractions can 
 only be brought into comparative values by the rule 
 of reduction to a common denominator ; the forty- 
 seventh proposition of Euclid can only be safely reached 
 through the previous forty-six propositions. The great 
 thing is, to keep on the right road ; it may seem long, 
 but is really the very shortest way to the goal. Side- 
 tracks, which seem at first to be short cuts, will lead 
 to sloughs and entanglements, and will have to be 
 retraced. The chain of continuity cannot be broken ; 
 we cannot join the golden links to the iron links, but 
 must pass thereto through the bronze and the silver links. 
 
 But all rightly directed endeavours towards the goal 
 are in themselves forecasts and foretastes of it, as well 
 as discipline and preparation for it. Each will bring 
 
FORECASTS OF THE NEW ORDER OF SOCIETY. 113 
 
 in its due tribute of amelioration. There is a verse 
 in an old hymn, 
 
 "The hill of Zion yields 
 A thousand sacred sweets, 
 Before we reach those heavenly fields, 
 Or tread the golden streets." 
 
 So all issues which have in them the seeds of truth and 
 goodness, will in themselves bear wholesome fruit. All 
 are necessary links in the mighty chain of social evolution. 
 We hail, and bid good speed to every movement which 
 carries reformation and improvement on the face of 
 it ; which helps to break down old caste and exclusive- 
 ness, and knits together human hearts ; or which sets 
 up, as the great thing needful in all progress and 
 amelioration, a higher standard of human life, To raise 
 this standard will, in itself, and even under present 
 mean conditions, be a benediction upon the life. And 
 the present age is one of comparatively rapid progress. 
 The old actuarial rates of advancement in science, art, 
 philosophy, and social economy, are inapplicable to 
 the present era. As we have previously said, What 
 in former times it took centuries to accomplish, would 
 now be the work, not of generations, but of decades. 
 
 FORECASTS OF THE ULTIMATE FORM 
 OF SOCIETY. 
 
 We have said that the men of the future will be far 
 better able to settle the things of that future than we 
 are able to settle these things for them. The world, 
 with all its heritage from the past, will then be theirs ; 
 and in all matters pertaining to their own conditions 
 
114 STEPPIXG-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 of life, they will go their own way, and will be very 
 little influenced by previous views and prognostications. 
 Still we cannot help speculating, What is to be the 
 denouement of the long-reaching drama of social life ? 
 What for the final act will be the nature of the set-scene 
 upon the great world-stage ? We may perhaps make 
 some near guesses, especially on the negative side of 
 the question. In the spirit then of the views and 
 principles which we have submitted, we venture, but 
 with due deference to the greater experience and the 
 better judgment of these times, upon a few forecasts 
 of the world, under ultimate or ripened socialism. 
 
 And in the foremost place, it will not be an age of 
 competition. Experience will have fully demonstrated 
 both the economy from a material point of view, and 
 the wisdom in a moral sense, of co-operation in the 
 production and distribution of wealth and of the 
 necessaries of life. As a rule, every capable man will, 
 in some way, and generally in the way of his own choice 
 and personal aptitude, earn his own living, and also 
 contribute his fair share of actual work for the main- 
 tenance of those who are themselves incapable of work. 
 Very few will be so defective in conscience, in manliness, 
 in the sense of right and justice, or even in the sense 
 of following the prevailing modes and fashions of the 
 times, as to live upon the labours of others. The old 
 figment of living upon their means, will have departed 
 hence, and be heard of no more. The wonder will be 
 that it ever could have been believed in the world, that 
 money, previously accumulated, was in itself a means 
 of present subsistence, and not merely a talisman or 
 
FORECASTS OF THE NEW ORDER OF SOCIETY. 115 
 
 conjuror's wand, to compel that present labour, which 
 is the only source of such means of subsistence. Any 
 capable men who will then try to evade the general 
 rule of personal labour, will be looked upon as mental 
 or moral weaklings ; and if, after all kindly efforts to 
 bring them to health, they are found to be incurable, 
 they might be kept away from the young and the 
 immature, lest, as by a contagious disease, or like a 
 rotten grape in a bunch, they might contaminate others. 
 
 And of the wealth so created by common labour, all 
 will share in common ; not equally, for all will not 
 have equal wants and requirements, all will not have 
 equal capabilities of participation ; but " according to 
 their needs." All the means of life, not only the 
 necessaries, but also the comforts and refinements of 
 the highest civilization, will be then so abundant 
 there is not a general deficiency of these even in the 
 ill-regulated present that there will be plenty of the 
 best things for all, even for those who, from incapacity, 
 or from moral defects, do not themselves produce an 
 equivalent to their requirements. 
 
 And society will charge itself with the conduct of all 
 social affairs ; with the education of the young, so as to 
 train them up in the way they should go, as good and 
 reliable citizens of the commonwealth ; with the kindliest 
 care of the aged and the infirm ; with the efficient regula- 
 tion of production, and of trade and commerce ; with the 
 means of social intercourse and commercial reciprocation, 
 roads, railways, and canals, postal and telegraph 
 services, docks, ships, and light-houses ; with food, water, 
 fuel, and gas supplies ; with the preservation of history, 
 
Il6 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 of language, of records of the earth and of its varied 
 forms of life ; with the means of recreation ; with means 
 for the acquisition of knowledge ; for the maintenance of 
 high physical, mental, and moral organisations ; for the 
 most perfect sanitation of dwellings and employments, 
 for the efficient counteraction of zymotic diseases, and 
 for the disposal of the dead. In everything affecting the 
 life and well-being of what would now be called the 
 meanest of its citizens, there will be no aloofness, no let- 
 aloneism in the society of the future. 
 
 And here we may anticipate a stricture upon our 
 programme of the general surveillance of society over the 
 social affairs of its members that it interferes too much 
 with individual liberty ! But it must ever be borne in 
 mind that this ultimate state of society can only exist 
 when the general voice, the general desire, the general 
 conviction that it is for the best, will it to exist. And, 
 after it has come into being, its sole raison tfetre will be 
 that it expresses the wishes and fulfils the requirements 
 of its individual members. True liberty never means 
 the absence of order, of discipline, of an understanding 
 of what it is for the common good should be the rule in 
 social life. Men will then know what it is to sink, and 
 willingly sink, personal likings to the general wishes of 
 their neighbours. 
 
 But what is to be the mechanism, the outward and 
 visible form of this socialism? The world has seen 
 many modes of domestic and social life the Bedouin in 
 his tent, the feudal baron in his castle, the huts of his 
 retainers clustering round its walls, the country village, 
 
FORECASTS OF THE NEW ORDER OF SOCIETY. Iiy 
 
 the market-town, the great city, with its Belgravia and its 
 " Grigg's Court " slums. Whatever models, modifications 
 of old things, or entirely new designs men choose for 
 their new homes and their belongings, they can very 
 easily realize. Given a desire, a willing mind, a convic- 
 tion of what is best in any factor of social life, and the 
 accomplishment is not far distant ; the modus operandi 
 will be found without much difficulty. 
 
 We think we are very safe in prognosticating of the 
 future socialism that men will not then huddle themselves 
 together by tens and hundreds of thousands in towns, or 
 by millions, as in some of the greater capitals, utterly 
 divorced from the soil, the mother of terrestrial life ; but 
 all will, to some extent at least, be in personal touch with 
 free, open nature. It will be found that more restricted 
 clusters of population, not exceeding the number in 
 which all would know and have personal interest in each 
 other, would be better for social intercourse, for the 
 maintenance of character, of order, of an esprit de corps, 
 and for the proper training of the young, than larger 
 clusters would be. On the other hand, the population in 
 any one cluster ought to be sufficient to ensure economy 
 in the production of wealth, and to obtain diversity in 
 choice of occupations ; as also to secure the best tuition 
 for the young, congeniality in personal and more familiar 
 intercourse, and to furnish adequate attendance at 
 recreative, educational, religious, or other assemblies. 
 
 Great towns and cities, with their scores or hundreds 
 of miles of house-walled streets, will, except under special 
 conditions, be known in the coming time only in histories 
 of the past. The tendency of modern civilisation has, in 
 
Il8 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 the scrambles of competitive life and the eagerness to 
 escape from manual labour, been to deplete the country, 
 and drive population into the over-crowded towns. The 
 recent census gives generally reduced returns for country 
 villages and small market towns. Out of the twelve 
 Welsh counties, nine shew a falling-off in the population. 
 The rise of the towns has been a natural result in the 
 evolution of society; to it we largely owe our political 
 and religious freedom, the advancement of knowledge, of 
 broadened thought, of education, of philanthropy, of 
 commerce, and the arts of life ; but, under the very 
 influences which the towns have themselves created, they 
 are doomed to, sooner or later, pass away. 
 
 Man's natural place on the earth is as a tiller of its 
 soil, a teeming soil, but not of itself fruitful in man's 
 requirements. He has, by labour, to change the, to him, 
 barren wilderness into fruitful fields. Even a grass 
 meadow occurs nowhere in nature, it is the outcome of 
 art and industry. If a highly cultivated garden be left 
 alone for a year or two, the carefully-reared and tended 
 dahlias and lilies will have disappeared, and in their 
 places, having choked them out, are thorns and thistles, 
 coarse-leaved docks and stinging nettles. The "land 
 hunger " which impels the poor cotter or crofter to cling 
 so tenaciously, and against the cock-sure dicta of political 
 economy, to the bit of the great mother's bosom which 
 he and his fathers have tilled, is an instinct which it is 
 not wisdom to despise or disregard. The cities of the 
 far future are to be mostly at least country villages ! 
 
 But does not this seem rather a mean proposition, a 
 
FORECASTS OF THE NEW ORDER OF SOCIETY. 119 
 
 degradation of the higher civilisation of the world, almost 
 a reversion into semi-barbarism ? Can such a retrogres- 
 sive notion be seriously given as the solution of the most 
 difficult problem which has been exercising the highest 
 intellects on the earth ; which is daily sending forth 
 philosophic treatises, and leading articles from capable 
 editors; which produces Royal Commissions, organises ,?jj 
 monst* Hyde Park demonstrations, and is seething 
 through the masses in all the more advanced nations? 
 The term " country village " conjures up a picture of the 
 typical clustering of a few cottages and houses of petty 
 tradesmen, at cross-roads or by the wayside, of slouching, 
 dull-eyed agricultural labourers, of tawdry, gossipy women 
 and ill-tended children, of the ale-house, with its poacher- 
 talk, whispered in the reek of bad tobacco, of the church, 
 hardly in touch with the hearts and the daily lives of the 
 "parishioners," and of the parish workhouse, looming 
 large a little way off, and never far off from the daily life. 
 Is such a picture a forecast of the social Eden of the 
 future of the climax and consummation of highest hopes 
 and aspirations ? Yes, and No ! The ground-work is 
 there, but not the superstructure ; the stocks and the 
 materials are there, on and from which a new ship will 
 be built and launched; but it will be a very different 
 kind of a vessel, to be manned by a very different kind 
 of a crew. 
 
 And here we may say a few words about the potency, 
 in nature and in life, of what may appear little things. 
 Our earth is swayed in its yearly orbit, not by the sun as 
 a single mass, but by the sum of the attractions of each 
 separate atom of matter in the mighty sphere. The 
 
120 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 tilting of the axis of the earth out of the plane of the 
 orbit seems a small matter, but it produces the changing 
 seasons of the year, making the living world a possibility. 
 It is the invisible, impalpable dust floating in the 
 atmosphere which, furnishing nuclei for vapour particles, 
 produces the wondrous realm of cloud-land. In human 
 affairs, little things have swayed the moral world. The 
 every-day life, the conversations with his friends, and the 
 humiliating death of a Nazarene carpenter have been for 
 nigh two thousand years the fulcrum on which have 
 turned the life and thought of the higher civilisations of 
 the world. "Go wash in Jordan, and thou shalt be 
 clean," said the prophet to the Syrian leper. He, in 
 expectation of strange ceremonial and mystical invoca- 
 tion, contemned the simple precept, naturally thinking 
 some great thing had to be done to effect the cure of his 
 leprosy. "What shall we do?" asked the fearful, 
 conscience-stricken people, publicans and soldiers, when 
 the Baptist's denunciations sounded in their ears like a 
 trump of doom ! " Do ? what else is there for you to do, 
 but to be just and kind, to live in quietness and content, 
 to cease to do evil, to learn to do well ? " The intricate 
 and mysterious labyrinth of theological dogmas, which 
 are too often called religion, has, by some simple but 
 daring minds, been reduced to one idea long hid from 
 the wise and prudent, dazed by their creeds and 
 formularies, "Love and worship God, in love and 
 reverence for your fellow-men." 
 
A PISGAH-TOP VIEW OF THE PROMISED LAND. 
 
 A PISGAH-TOP VIEW OF THE PROMISED 
 LAND. 
 
 Do we mean to suggest that in the maturity of human 
 society, every one shall personally plough, and sow, and 
 reap, and gather into barns ? Very probably, every able- 
 bodied man shall do so for a year or two of his earlier 
 life ; just as every young German at present serves his 
 period of military duty. But life-long sameness and 
 monotony of labour will not be carried into the new era ; 
 all will have wholesome change of occupation ; and 
 diversity in aptitude and inclination will, when all kinds 
 of labour are held to be equally honourable, always 
 ensure the needful diversities in the leading occupations 
 of life. There will ever be men whose natural leanings 
 will be to make shoes, or watches, or steam-engines, to 
 build houses, to write books, or to be instructors of the 
 young; even, under proper arrangements, to be coal- 
 miners, iron-smelters, or furnace-men. 
 
 But every man will, as a rule, live in touch and close 
 companionship with the soil. Like as on Esau's 
 garments, the scent of the fields will be over his life : 
 like Isaac, he will be able to meditate therein in the 
 quiet eventide. The breeze from gardens and woodlands 
 will be on his cheeks ; he will be able to name trees, 
 and plants, and flowers, to tell their times and seasons, 
 and their special characteristics. 
 
 What will be the plan of a township in this new era, 
 what the type of its architecture ? There will doubtless 
 be great diversity in details, but certain leading features 
 
122 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 may obtain pretty generally. The sites will be chosen 
 for salubrity of soil and air, for partial shelter from bleak 
 winds, or for fine or extensive prospects. The buildings 
 will be laid out to the best ideas of sanitation, of 
 comfort and convenience. They will not be thatched 
 cottages, nor painfully prosaic rows of street-houses, nor 
 a series of semi-detached villas. They will be palatial 
 (that is "palace-like") piles, imposing and ornate, but 
 in varied styles of architecture. Whilst no two may be 
 exactly alike, many will, probably, be quadrangular in 
 plan ; with schools and other common buildings in the 
 inner garden square. For a typical structure, our 
 thoughts suggest an enlarged Chatsworth, Somerset 
 House, Magdalen College, Greenwich Hospital, or 
 Balmoral. But the pavilion style of adjoining, corridor- 
 connected blocks, may also obtain ; whilst Windsor 
 Castle, the Alhambra, and the Escurial may also furnish 
 suggestions in design. 
 
 These buildings will be the later triumphs of 
 architecture ; and the highest skill will be bestowed 
 on the arrangement of halls and chambers, and on 
 proper ventilation, lighting, drainage, and facility 
 of communication. Smoke would probably, as at 
 Chatsworth, be taken by a tunnel to a distant chimney ; 
 and workshops and farm buildings would be somewhat 
 removed. 
 
 It will be said, " Have we not heard something like 
 this before, it seems a resuscitation of the Phalanstery 
 of the French social philosopher Fourier, or of the 
 Community system of Robert Owen of New Lanark?" 
 Probably, but even then it may not be wasted time to 
 
A PISGAH-TOP VIEW OF THE PROMISED LAND. 123 
 
 take it into avizandum^ as the Scotch judges say.* Owen 
 advocated detached townships^ with from two to three 
 thousand inhabitants ; with federative unions in circles 
 of tens, hundreds, and thousands, till they should 
 embrace the whole world in one common interest. 
 These townships were to be what Fourier's phalansteries 
 were only partially designed to be thoroughly Com- 
 munistic. His expositions were at first favourably 
 received ; many persons of position, including, amongst 
 others, the Queen's father, the Duke of Kent, giving 
 him countenance and encouragement. But, after a 
 time, he lost popular favour by his avowed antagonism 
 to religion, and by advocating what were considered lax 
 views of marriage. His experiments at Orbiston, near 
 Glasgow, New Harmony, in America, and Tytherly, in 
 Hampshire, were failures ; they were like to be so on 
 his own principles of a high development of character 
 and favourable environments being the basis of Com- 
 munistic life. The Encyclopedia Britannica thus 
 sums up his character : " It would be unjust to measure 
 his work and influence by these crude efforts. He was 
 the founder of infant schools in England ; he was the 
 first to introduce reasonably short hours in factory 
 
 * The present writer, anxious to know if, at his birth, as at that 
 of Owen Glendower, there were any special signs in the heavens or 
 on the earth, looked through the Monthly Magazine of 1st October, 
 1819. He found the leading topic in the previous month to be the 
 then recent Peterloo massacre. Then there were protests against the 
 alleged bad treatment of Napoleon at St. Helena, by the governor, 
 Sir Hudson Lowe. Also a eulogistic memoir of James Watt, who 
 died in the preceding August ; and correspondence in reference to 
 lectures being then delivered in London by Robert Owen, in 
 exposition of his socialistic theories. 
 
124 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 labour ; and he was the father of co-operative trading 
 movements. In general education, in sanitary reform, 
 and in his sound and humanitarian views of common 
 life, he was far in advance of his times. In his personal 
 character, he was without reproach ; frank, benevolent, 
 and straightforward to a fault ; and he pursued the 
 altruistic schemes, in which he spent all his means, with 
 more earnestness than most men devote to the accumula- 
 tion of wealth." 
 
 The maximum population in a cluster will probably 
 be about four thousand persons, that is, about eight 
 hundred families. With men and women, adapted by 
 education and training for such conditions of social life, 
 this would be a sufficient number for municipal govern- 
 ment, for furnishing pupils for first-class tuition, for the 
 fellowship of a church, for audiences in the theatre, the 
 concert-room, and the lecture-hall. Sufficient also for 
 besides the necessary field and garden-work carrying 
 on, economically, one or more special trades, and to 
 warrant the employment of machinery with motor-power 
 in the farm-work, and for laundry and other domestic 
 purposes. Sufficient also for all to form congenial 
 friendships, for there will ever be inner circles of spirits 
 more akin to each other; the heart is ripened to wider 
 sympathies when its finer cords of love are strongly 
 drawn around the hearts which beat in nearest affinity. 
 But not too numerous for intimate knowledge of each 
 other, thus avoiding driftings-orT into separate sets and 
 parties. 
 
 The domestic economy of the cluster, its commissariat, 
 
A PISGAH-TOP VIEW OF THE PROMISED LAND. 125 
 
 culinary and dining-hall arrangements, its hours of work, 
 of study, and of play, the conduct of its most precious 
 possession, the children, its trading specialities and 
 exchange arrangements with other clusters, all such things 
 it will itself be far better able to devise and to do, than 
 we, in our lesser experience, our more restricted views, 
 and our meaner conditions of life, can possibly surmise 
 or suggest. But there will be abundance of all whole- 
 some, and what are then, desirable things, with 
 moderation and economy in their use ; there will be 
 personal freedom, but with due thoughtfulness and 
 attention to the general ideals and the general welfare ; 
 there will be privacy when the wish is for retirement, 
 and also unrestrained social intercourse, without 
 prudishness, but under recognised canons of courtesy 
 and decorum ; and the inner autonimous state, the 
 family, husband, wife, and children, will be an 
 abiding institution. 
 
 And woman ? She has ever been a poet's theme and 
 an inspiration : 
 
 " The best half of creation's best, 
 
 Its heart to feel, its eye to see, 
 The crown and complex of the rest, 
 Its aim and its epitome." 
 
 The old knighthood made a demi-goddess of her; 
 the courtesies of modern life give her the first place in 
 the formulas of society. But all this savours very much 
 of lip-service and a petting condescension. There is 
 neither a legal nor a heartfelt recognition of her rightful 
 equality, in her individual or in her social phase of life, 
 with man. The dominating brute forces of the past 
 
126 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 have been gradually yielding up to intellect the 
 governance of the world ; and when this intellect shall 
 have taken as its equal partner on the throne and in the 
 life, high sentiment, " thought prompted by feeling and 
 by conscience," then shall woman, with her keener 
 sense of purity and decorum, of the graces and the 
 small sweet courtesies of life, which make its pathways 
 pleasant, with her heart of love ever yearning for fullest 
 reciprocation, with her richer sympathies, her more 
 patient persistence in duty, her self-sacrifice and self- 
 abnegation, assume for the first time in the long history 
 of the race, her natural position as the true yoke-fellow, 
 help-mate, life-comrade of man. There will then be no 
 conventional Salic law against feminine pre-eminence in 
 ability for direction, holding a foremost place in the 
 design and conduct of the world's affairs. And yet 
 her distinctiveness of womanhood will be deepened and 
 broadened, her vital dissimilarities more accentuated, 
 rather than tend towards submergence in the masculine. 
 Under a true civilisation, for all marriageable persons, 
 marriage will be the rule ; and the very apotheosis of 
 womanhood is maternity, with its sweet rills of love, its 
 duties and responsibilities. In heart and soul, and 
 mind and will, in form of beauty, step of grace, and 
 sweetness of mien, she will ever be more lady-like, 
 ever more of a true woman, 
 
 " nobly planned 
 To warm, to comfort, and command." 
 
 The land area of the United Kingdom is equal to 
 about two acres for each of the present population. But 
 
A P1SGAH-TOP VIEW OF THE PROMISED LAND. I2J 
 
 considerable portions of the land are not at present 
 capable of remunerative cultivation ; and a good deal 
 of it is taken up with roads, railways, and buildings ; say 
 there are one-and-a-half acres of available land for each 
 one of the inhabitants. Under the suggested new arrange- 
 ments, for a cluster of 4,000 persons, about 6,000 acres 
 would be allotted, or nearly ten square miles. The 
 home buildings, if geometrically arranged at equal 
 distances, would thus be about five miles apart ; but to 
 better suit special industries, and for convenience of 
 railway and canal communications, it would often be 
 found advisable to have two or more of these townships 
 within nearer distances of each other. Doubtless, by the 
 efficient cultivation of its own special domain, each 
 cluster could grow its own food requirements ; authorities 
 say that under an increased expenditure of labour wisely 
 directed, the arable land of England could easily be made 
 to produce fifty per cent, above its present yield. But 
 self-support is not a necessity, is not perhaps desirable. 
 There is no true socialism in isolation ; isolation and 
 sectional self-dependence would be detrimental elements 
 in the new society. 
 
 There will be a free interchange of commodities with 
 neighbouring and national clusters, and with distant 
 lands. England would still export goods of its special 
 manufacture, as engines and machinery, hard ware and 
 woollen cloths ; and in exchange it would import cotton, 
 olive-oil, sugar, rice, fruits, etc., and tea and coffee (if 
 still in dietetic use). The ocean steamship, or its then 
 representative, would traverse all waters, a mighty 
 shuttle weaving into one interest and one great brother- 
 
128 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 hood all the nations of the earth. And whilst the 
 country township would be the type of social life, 
 there would still be sea-ports, with their warehouses 
 and building-yards, still railway junctions and termini, 
 still special seats of learning and science, and many 
 specialities of arrangement, to suit the neighbourhood 
 of mines, fisheries, and particular manufactures. And 
 probably one capital of the world, in which the " parlia- 
 ment of man," with representatives from " every nation, 
 and kindred, and tribe, and tongue," would hold its 
 sessions. 
 
 Not a life of dull and listless uniformity, in which 
 "it is always afternoon," do we forecast for the far 
 future, but a brisk and busy life, a social system well 
 knitted together, and yet freely elastic in all its parts, 
 full of energetic movement, effecting healthful and 
 invigorating change. In the individual man's brief 
 occupation of the earth, he ought to see as much of 
 it as he conveniently can ; and the many wonders of the 
 world shall then be opened out by rapid but pleasurable 
 travel, to all who choose to see them. An African may 
 thus hear the roar of the mighty Niagara ; a Finlander 
 see the sun set from the apex of the great pyramid ; a 
 Hindoo look down into the Yosemite gorge of Colorado. 
 The great mysteries of the universe will, as of old, 
 shape varied thought in variedly constituted minds ; 
 and there may still be different religious faiths and 
 schools of opinion on matters which cannot be tested 
 by observation or experiment ; but there will be 
 mutual forbearance, even mutual reverence, under such 
 differences. 
 
A PISGAH-TOP VIEW OF THE PROMISED LAND. 129 
 
 In the every-day life of the world there will always 
 be found many subjects of common interest. Scientific 
 research is exhaustless, and will ever result in fresh 
 discoveries, in newly found harmonies and corres- 
 pondences in nature, and in bringing in from natural 
 forces and agencies new aids in the business of life. 
 Mechanical invention will continue active ; the architect, 
 the painter, the sculptor, and the musician, will still, 
 with unabated avidity, pursue their various arts. There 
 will still be new history and philosophy, poetry and 
 romance. And a host of practical questions affecting 
 the well-being of society will be continually cropping 
 up : as medical remedies for various forms of disease ; 
 the best regimen and government of life ; food, clothing, 
 exercise, recreation ; the utilization of sewage, and the 
 purity of streams and rivers ; new route-shortening 
 canals ; railway tunnelling through mountain ranges ; 
 the procuration or production of a sufficiency of fuel, and 
 its most economic use ; the maintenance, or disuse, or 
 amalgamation of certain languages ; the migrations from 
 countries or districts which were approaching conges- 
 tion ; storm warnings and meteorological forecasts flashed 
 over the earth; all the news of the world will ever be 
 of interest to the children of the world. 
 
 It may be said, " This sounds so very strange, and 
 is so beyond all historical experience, that although 
 it does not appear so intricate or profound as from 
 the floods of writing and of talking about socialism, 
 we might have expected its denouement to be, we must 
 yet ask: Is it not Utopian, is it really practicable?" 
 
IJO STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 Yes, it is simple ; and yet it is Utopian ! Oscar Wilde 
 says, "A map of the world which does not include 
 Utopia, is not even worth glancing at." It leaves out 
 the one country for which the great ship of Humanity 
 is always chartered ; the better country which men will 
 continue to seek until they find it. And under conditions 
 which are entirely within the grasp of the human will, 
 it is practicable ; it is within the range of that human 
 capability which has organised armies, mail services, 
 and cotton factories ; which has tunnelled the Alps, 
 and sent human speech in electric flashes across the 
 ocean ; which has weighed the sun, and can name the 
 material composition of the nebulae in Orion. Know- 
 ledge, and intellect, and will can accomplish anything 
 that is within the wide range of man's relationship 
 with his fellows. The problem is, how to set the 
 knowledge, intellect, and will in the right direction ! 
 
 We quote a few pregnant words from Edward Car- 
 penter, "No mere scientific adjustments will bring 
 about the millennium. Granted that the problem is 
 Happiness, there must be certain moral elements in the 
 mass of mankind before they will even desire that kind 
 of happiness which is attainable, let alone their capacity 
 of reaching it, when these moral elements are present, 
 the intellectual or scientific solution of the problem will 
 be soon found, without them there will not really be 
 any serious attempt made to find it." If, as we have 
 said, the only real basis of socialism is in men coming 
 to know and to understand that their only true good 
 is indissolubly bound up with the good of others, then 
 every deviation from this one straight pathway means so 
 
A PISGAH-TOP VIEW OF THE PROMISED LAND. 131 
 
 much more of hopes deferred, so much more of energies 
 wasted. When this principle is rooted and grounded 
 in the mind ; when it speaks in every word and 
 modulates every tone; when it is the mainspring of 
 every action, and even reaches to the thoughts an 
 intents of the heart, then will come its incarnation in 
 practice, and after long travail, the greatest birth in 
 human time will be accomplished. 
 
 And when the goal has been fully reached, and the 
 world has struck its new era, shall there be an end 
 to all care and endeavour in social life, and the very 
 institution of a matured system of society, be as a 
 self-propulsive, self-regulating mechanism, carrying on 
 itself in perfect order and efficiency of movement, 
 throughout all future times ? Alas, no ! or rather, well 
 it is not so. The old strains of sensualism, of rivalry, 
 and ambition will long abide in the blood ; the old 
 weeds of envy, of suspicion, and distrust will long have 
 their germs in the heart. The history of the past will 
 ever sound a warning: Take ye heed of yourselves, 
 that ye swerve not a hair-breath out of the narrow 
 way of life ! 
 
 And every new human life born into the world will 
 be a new problem, How can this life, with all its 
 own specialties of capability of temper and tendency, 
 be best nurtured so as its possessor shall get the 
 highest value out of it for himself, and become a good 
 and valuable citizen of the world? The foundations 
 of nobility of character have to be laid in the very 
 cradle. A child ought never to see a sour or angry 
 face ; ought never to hear an impure., a malicious, or 
 
132 STEPPING-STONES TO SOCIALISM. 
 
 an untruthful word ; its wilful ways and little tempers 
 should be drawn by the cords of love into sweeter 
 moods. In its play with its fellows, the spirit of 
 emulation, so natural in youth, should not be allowed 
 to degenerate into over-bearing or vanity, into envy or 
 ill-will. And the same when it comes to its school- 
 lessons and essays at useful work. As certainly as 
 that water is formed by the explosive combination 
 of oxygen and hydrogen is it that the character of 
 each individual man and woman is formed by the 
 fusion into their original organization of all the agencies 
 in education, companionship, discipline, and environ- 
 ment, which from their first breaths of life have been 
 acting upon them. In the more matured social life 
 of the future, the highest, the never-ending task, not 
 merely of the institutions, but also and more directly 
 of the men and women who are as the vital breath 
 of these institutions, will be the continuous maintenance 
 and ever fuller development of this life in their succeeding 
 generations. 
 
 Not through the gloom of pessimistic forebodings do 
 we see the future. Relative to humanity, this old 
 Mother Earth is yet in richest exuberance of life ; time 
 has written no wrinkles on its verdant brow. So with 
 a hearty "God speed," we bid the great world man's 
 play-ground, his hearth-place, his workshop, his temple, 
 and his monument still spins its courses "down the 
 ringing grooves of change." 
 
 WILLIAM ANDREWS &. 
 
14 DAY USE 
 
 RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED 
 
 LOAN DEPT. 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or 
 
 on the date to which renewed. 
 Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 
 
 4=O- 
 
 -dftN- 
 
 ^h 
 
 Berkeley 
 
VB 07759 
 

 %