Part 13 (1/2)

After this long, and I fear tedious, account of the opinions of McCulloch, it would be needless to call more witnesses to refute those who so commonly accuse English economists of teaching an extreme individualism. For McCulloch may be said to be their own witness; they hold him up as the hardest and narrowest of a hard and narrow school; one of the ablest of them, Mr. J. K. Ingram, who writes McCulloch's memoir in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, going so far as to accuse him of exhibiting ”a habitual deadness in the study of social questions to all but material considerations.” We have adduced enough to disprove that statement. The reader of McCulloch's writings is constantly struck to observe how habitually his judgment of a social question is governed by ethical rather than economic considerations, and how his supreme concern always seems to be to guard the labouring poor from falling into any sort of permanent decadence, and to place them securely on the lines of progressive elevation. But perhaps a word may be required about the Manchester school. Mr. Ingram states--and again his statement probably agrees with current prepossessions--that McCulloch occupied ”substantially the same theoretic position as was occupied at a somewhat later period by the Manchester school” (_Encyc. Brit._, art. ”Political Economy”). We have seen what McCulloch's theoretic position really was, and it is certainly not the Manchester doctrine of popular anathema; it is not the _Manchesterismus_ of the German schools. But the Manchester men can scarcely be said to have properly had anything in the nature of a general theoretic position. They were not a school of political philosophy--they were a band of practical politicians leagued to promote particular reforms, especially two reforms in international policy which involved large curtailments of the _role_ of Government--viz., free trade with other countries, and nonintervention in their internal affairs; but they were far from thinking that, because it would be well for the State to abstain from certain specific interferences, it would be well for it to abstain from all; or that if the State had no civilizing mission towards the people of other countries, it had therefore no civilizing mission towards its own. Cobden, for example--to go no farther--was a lifelong advocate of a national system of education; he was a friend of factory legislation for women and children, and, with respect to the poor, he taught in one of his speeches the semi-socialistic doctrine that the poor had the first right to maintenance from the land--that they are, as it were, the first mortgagees. The Manchester school is really nothing but a stage convention, a convenient polemical device for marking off a particular theoretical extreme regarding the task of the State; but the persons in actual life who were presumed to compose the school were no more, all of them, adherents of that theory than Scotchmen, off the stage, have all short kilts and red hair. And as for that theory itself, the theory of _laissez-faire_, it has never in England been really anything more than it is now, the plea of alarmed vested interests stealing an unwarranted, and I believe an unwelcome, shelter under the aegis of economic science. English economists, from Smith to McCulloch, from McCulloch to Mr. Sidgwick, have adhered with a truly remarkable steadiness to a social doctrine of a precisely contrary character--a social doctrine which, instead of exhibiting any unreasonable aversion to Government interference, expressly a.s.signs to Government a just and proper place in promoting the social and industrial development of the community. In the first place, in the department of production, they freely allow that just as there are many industrial enterprises in the conduct of which individual initiative must, for want of resources or other reasons, yield to joint-stock companies, so there are others for which individuals and companies alike must give place to the State, because the State is by nature or circ.u.mstances better fitted than either to conduct them satisfactorily; and in the next place, in the department of distribution, while rating the moral or personal independence of the individual as a supreme blessing and claim, they have no scruple in calling on the State to interfere with the natural liberty of contract between man and man, wherever such interference seems requisite to secure just and equitable dealing, to guard that personal independence itself from being sapped, or to establish the people better in any of the other elementary conditions of all humane living. We sometimes take pride at the present day in professing a distrust for doctrinaire or metaphysical politics, and we are no doubt right; but that reproach cannot justly be levelled against the English economists. They were not Dutch gardeners trying to dress the world after an artificial scheme; that is more distinctive of the social systems they opposed. Their own system indeed was to study Nature, to discover the principles of sound natural social growth, and to follow them; but they had no idea on that account of leaving things to grow merely as they would, or of renouncing the help of good husbandry. They had, as we have seen, a positive doctrine of social politics, which required from the State much more than the protection of liberty and the repression of crime; they asked the State to undertake such industrial work as it was naturally better fitted to perform than individuals or a.s.sociations of individuals, and they asked the State to secure to the body of the citizens the essential conditions of a normal and progressive manhood.

Now this doctrine--which may be called the English doctrine of social politics--seems to furnish a basis of considerable practical value for discriminating between a wholesome and effective partic.i.p.ation by Government in the work of social reform, on the one hand, and those pernicious and dangerous forms of intervention on the other, which may be correctly known by the name of State socialism.

II. _The Nature and Principle of State Socialism._

Few words are at present more wantonly abused than the words socialism and State socialism. They are tossed about at random, as if their meaning, as was said of the spelling of former generations, was a mere affair of private judgment. There is, in truth, a great deal of socialism in the employment of the word; little respect is paid to the previous appropriation of it; and especially since it has become, as has been said, _hoffahig_, men press forward from the most unlikely quarters, claim kindred with the socialists, and strive for the honour of being called by their name. Many excellent persons, for example, have no better pretext to advance for their claim than that they also feel a warm sentiment of interest in the cause of the poor. Churchmen whose duties bring them among the poor are very naturally touched with a sense of the miseries they observe, and certain of them, who may perhaps without offence be said to love the cause well more than wisely, come to public platforms and declare themselves socialists--socialists, they will sometimes explain, of an older and purer confession than the Social Democratic Federation, but still good and genuine socialists--merely because the religion they preach is a gospel of moral equality before G.o.d, and of fraternal responsibility among men, whose very test in the end is the test of human kindness--”Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these My brethren, ye did it not to Me.” But socialism is not a feeling for the poor, nor yet for the responsibilities of society in connection with their poverty; it is neither what is called humanitarianism, nor what is called altruism; it is not an affair of feeling at all, but of organization, and the feeling it breathes may not be altruistic. The revolutionary socialists of the Continent, for instance, are animated by as vigorous a spirit of self-interest and an even more bitter cla.s.s antagonism than a trade union or a land league.

They fight for a particular claim of right--the utterly unjustifiable claim to the whole product of labour--and they propose to turn the world upside down by a vast scheme of social reconstruction in order to get their unjust, delusive, and mischievous idea realized. The gauge of their socialism, therefore, must, after all, be looked for in their claim and their remedy, and not in the vague sympathies of a benevolent spectator who, without scrutinizing either the one or the other, thinks he will call himself a socialist because he feels that there is much in the lot of the poor man that might be mended, and that the rich might be very properly and reasonably asked to make some sacrifices for their brethren's sake out of their abundance. The philanthropic spectator suffers from no scarcity of words to express his particular att.i.tude if he desires to do so; why then should he not leave socialists the enjoyment of their vocable?

There is often at the bottom of this sentimental patronage of socialism the not unchivalrous but mistaken idea that the ordinary self-interest of the world has been glorified by economists into a sacred and all-sufficing principle which it would be interfering with the designs of Providence to restrict, and that therefore it is only right to side with socialism as a protest against the position taken by the apologists of the present system of things, without being understood to commit one's self thereby to the particular system which socialism may propose to put in its place. But while the economists think very rightly that self-interest must always be regarded as the ordinary guide of life, and that the world cannot be reasonably expected to become either better, or better off, if everybody were to look after other people's interests (which he knows nothing about) instead of looking after his own (of which he at least knows something), they are far from showing any indifference to the danger of self-interest running into selfishness. On the contrary, they have constantly insisted--as the evidence I have already produced abundantly proves--that where the self-interest of the strongly placed failed to subject itself spontaneously to the restraints of social justice and the responsibilities of our common humanity, it was for society to step in and impose the restraints that were just and requisite, and to do so either by public opinion or by public authority in the way most likely to be practicable and effectual. Another thing our sentimental friends forget is that the socialists of the present day have no thought of subst.i.tuting any other general economic motive in the room of self-interest. If they had their schemes realized to-morrow, men would still be paid according to the amount of their individual work, and each would work so far for his own hand. His daily motive would be his individual interest, though his scope of achievement would be severely limited by law with the view of securing a better general level of happiness in the community. The question between economists and socialists is not whether the claims of social justice are ent.i.tled to be respected, but whether the claims which one or other of them make really are claims of social justice or no. Still, so firm is the hold taken by the notion that the socialists are the special champions of social justice, that one of our most respected prelates has actually defined socialism in that sense. The Bishop of Rochester (now of Winchester), in his Pastoral Letter to his Clergy at the new year of 1888, takes occasion, while warning the younger brethren against the too headlong philanthropy which ”scouts what is known as the science of political economy,” to describe socialism as ”the science of maintaining the right proportion of equity and kindness while adjudicating the various claims which individuals and society mutually make upon each other.” In reality, socialism would be better defined as a system that outsteps the right proportion of equity and kindness, and sets up for the ma.s.ses claims that are devoid of proportion and measure of any kind, and whose injustice and peril often arise from that very circ.u.mstance.

If bishops carry the term off to one quarter, philosophers carry it to another. Some identify socialism with the a.s.sociative principle generally, and see it manifested in the growth of one form of organization as much as in the growth of another, or at most they may limit it to the intervention of the a.s.sociative principle in things industrial, and in that event they would consider a joint-stock company, or a co-operative store, or perhaps a building like Queen Anne's Mansions, or the common-stair system of Scotland, to be as genuine exhibitions of socialism as the collectivism or anarchism of the Continental factions or the State monopolies of Prince Bismarck. But a joint-stock company is no departure from--it is rather an extension of--the present _regime_ of private property, free compet.i.tion, and self-interest; and why should it be described by the same name as a system whose chief pretension is to supersede that _regime_ by a better?

Another very common definition of socialism--perhaps the most common of all, and the last to which I shall refer here--is that socialism is the general principle of giving society the greatest possible control over the life of the individual, in contradistinction to the opposite principle of individualism, which is taken to be the principle of giving the individual the greatest possible immunity from the control of society. Any extension of the authority of the State, any fresh regulation of the transactions of individual citizens, is often p.r.o.nounced to be socialistic without asking what the object or nature of the regulations may be. Socialism is identified with any enlargement, and individualism with any contraction, of the functions of government.

But the world has not been made on this socialist principle alone, nor on this individualist principle alone, and it can neither be explained nor amended by means of the one without the other. Abstractions of that order afford us little practical guidance. The socialists of real life are not men who are bent on increasing Government control for the mere sake of increasing Government control. There are broad tracts of the individual's life they would leave free from social control; they would give him, for example, full property in his house and furniture during his lifetime, and the right to spend his income, once he had earned it, in his own way. Their scheme, if carried out, might be found to compel them to restrict this latter right, but their own desire and belief undoubtedly is that the individual would have more freedom of the kind then than he has now. They seek to extend Government control only because, and only so far as, they believe Government control to be necessary and fitted to realize certain theories of right and well-being which they think it inc.u.mbent on organized society to realize; and consequently the thing that properly characterizes their position is not so much the degree of their confidence in the powers of the State as the nature of the theories of right for which they invoke its intervention.

And just as socialists do not enlarge the bounds of authority from the mere love of authority, so their opponents do not resist the enlargement from the mere hatred of authority. They raise no controversy about the abstract legitimacy of Government encroachments on the sphere of private capital or of legal enlargements of the rights or privileges of labour.

There is no socialism in that; the socialism only comes in when the encroachments are made on a field where Government administration is unlikely to answer, and where the rights conferred are rights to which labour can present no just and reasonable claim.

It will be objected that this is to reduce socialism to a mere matter of more or less. The English economists, it will be said, practised a little socialism, because they allowed the use of State means to elevate the condition of the working cla.s.ses, or to provide for the wants of the general community; and the Continental Social Democrats only practise a little more socialism when they cry for a working-cla.s.s State or for the progressive nationalization of all industries. But in practical life the measure is everything. So many grains of opium will cure; so many more will kill. The important thing for adjusting claims must always be to get the right measure, and the objection to socialistic schemes is precisely this, that they take up a theory of distributive justice which is an absolutely wrong measure, or else some vague theory of disinheritance which contains no measure at all. They would nationalize industries without paying any respect to their suitability for Government management, simply because they want to see all industries nationalized; and they would grant all manner of compensating advantages to the working cla.s.s as instalments of some vague claim, either of economic right from which they are alleged to have been ousted by the system of capitalism, or of aboriginal natural right from which they are said to have been disinherited by the general arrangements of society itself. What distinguishes their position and makes it socialism is therefore precisely this absence of measure or of the right measure, and one great advantage of the English doctrine of social politics which I have expounded, is that it is able to supply this indispensable criterion. That doctrine would limit the industrial undertakings of the State to such as it possessed natural advantages for conducting successfully, and the State's part in social reform to securing for the people the essential conditions of all humane living, of all normal and progressive manhood. It would interfere, indeed, as little as possible with liberty of speculation, because it recognises that the best way of promoting social progress and prosperity is to multiply the opportunities, and with the opportunities the incentives, of talent and capital; but, while giving the strong their head, in the belief that they will carry on the world so far after them, it would insist on the public authority taking sharp heed that no large section of the common people be suffered to fall permanently behind in the race, to lose the very conditions of further progress, and to lapse into ways of living which the opinion of the time thinks unworthy of our common humanity.

Now State socialism disregards these limits, straying generally far beyond them, and it may not improperly be defined as the system which requires the State to do work it is unfit to do in order to invest the working cla.s.ses with privileges they have no right to get.

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

All that is at least very frankly acknowledged by Rodbertus, the remarkable but overrated thinker whom the State socialists of Germany have chosen for their father. Rodbertus was always regarded as a great oracle by La.s.salle, the originator of the present socialist agitation, and his authority is constantly quoted by the most eminent luminary among the State socialists of those latter days, Professor Adolph Wagner, who says it was Rodbertus that first shed on him ”the Damascus light that tore from his eyes the scales of economic individualism.”

Rodbertus had lived for a quarter of a century in a political sulk against the Hohenzollerns. Though he had served as a Minister of State, he threw up his political career rather than accept a const.i.tution as a mere royal favour; he refused to work under it or recognise it by so much as a vote at the polls. But when the power of the Hohenzollerns became established by the victories of Koniggratz and Sedan, and when they embarked on their new policy of State socialism, Rodbertus developed into one of their most ardent wors.h.i.+ppers. Their new social policy, it is true, was avowedly adopted as a corrective of socialism, as a kind of inoculation with a milder type of the disease in order to procure immunity from a more malignant; but Bismarck contended at the same time that it was nothing but the old traditional policy of the House of Prussia, who had long before placed the right of existence and the right of labour in the statute-book of the country, and whose most ill.u.s.trious member, Frederick the Great, used to be fond of calling himself ”the beggars' king.” Under these circ.u.mstances Rodbertus came to place the whole hope of the future in the ”Social Monarchy of the Hohenzollerns,” and ventured to prophesy that a socialist emperor would yet be born to that House who would rule possibly with a rod of iron, but would always rule for the greatest good of the labouring cla.s.s.

Still, even under a dynasty of socialist emperors Rodbertus gave five hundred years for the completion of the economic revolution he contemplated, because he acknowledged it would take all that time for society to acquire the moral principle and habitual firmness of will which would alone enable it to dispense with the inst.i.tutions of private property and inheritance without suffering serious injury.

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

For this purpose the first requisite was the systematic management of all industries by the State. The final goal was to be State property as well as State management, but for the greater part of five centuries the system would be private property and State management. Sir Rowland Hill and the English railway nationalizers proposed that the State should own the lines, but that the companies should continue to work them; Rodbertus's idea, on the contrary, is that the State should work, but not own. But then the State should manage everything and everywhere.

Co-operation and joint-stock management were as objectionable to him as individual management. He thought it a mere delusion to suppose, as some socialists did, that the growth of joint-stock companies and co-operative societies is a step in historical evolution towards a socialist _regime_. It was just the opposite; it was individual property in a worse form, and he always told his friend La.s.salle that it was a hopeless dream to expect to bring in the reign of justice and brotherhood by his plan of founding productive a.s.sociations on State credit, because productive societies really led the other way, and created batches of joint-stock property, which he said would make itself a thousand times more bitterly hated than the individual property of to-day. One a.s.sociation would compete with another, and the group on a rich mine would use their advantage over the group on a poor one as mercilessly as private capitalists do now. Nothing would answer the end but State property, and nothing would conduce to State property but State management.

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

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

It may be that not many State socialists are so thoroughgoing as Rodbertus. Few of them possibly accept his theory of the labourer's right--which is virtually that the labourer has a right to everything, all existing wealth being considered merely an acc.u.mulation of unpaid labour--and few of them may throw so heavy a burden on the State as the whole production and the whole distribution of the country. But they all start from some theory of right that is just as false, and they all impose work on the State which the State cannot creditably perform. They all think of the ma.s.s of mankind as being disinherited in one way or another by the present social system, perhaps through the permission of private property at all, perhaps through permission of its inequalities.

M. de Laveleye, indeed, goes a step further back still. In an article he has contributed on this subject to the _Contemporary Review_, he uses as his motto the saying of M. Renan that Nature is injustice itself, and he would have society to correct not merely the inequalities which society may have itself had a share in establis.h.i.+ng, but also the inequalities of talent or opportunity which are Nature's own work. Accordingly, M. de Laveleye describes himself as a State socialist, because he thinks ”the State ought to make use of its legitimate powers for the establishment of the equality of conditions among men in proportion to their personal merit.” Equality of conditions and personal merit are inconsistent standards, but if they were harmonious, it would be beyond the power of the State to realize them for want of an effective calculus of either.

Few State socialists, however, profess the purpose of correcting the differences of native endowment; for the most part, when they found their policy on any theoretic idea at all, they found it on some idea of historical reparation. In this country, socialist notions always crop up out of the land. German socialists direct their attack mainly on capital, but English socialism fastens very naturally on property in land, which in England is concentrated into unnaturally few hands: and a claim is very commonly advanced for more or less indefinite compensation to the labouring cla.s.s on account of their alleged disinheritance, through the inst.i.tution of private property, from their aboriginal or natural rights to the use of the earth, the common possession of the race. That is the ground, for example, which Mr. Spencer takes for advocating land nationalization, and Mr. Chamberlain for his various claims for ”ransom.” The last-comer is held to have as good a right to the free use of the earth as the first occupant; and if society deprives him of that right for purposes of its own, he is maintained to be ent.i.tled to receive some equivalent, as if society does not already give the new-comer vastly more than it took away. His chances of obtaining a decent living in the world, instead of being reduced, have been immensely multiplied through the social system that has resulted from the private appropriation of land. The primitive economic rights whose loss socialists make the subject of so much lamentation are generally considered to be these four: (1) the right to hunt; (2) the right to fish; (3) the right to gather nuts and berries; and (4) the right to feed a cow or sheep on the waste land. Fourier added a fifth--which was certainly a right much utilized in early times--the right of theft from people over the border of the territory of one's own tribe. Let that right be thrown in with the rest; then the claim with which every English child is alleged to be born, and for which compensation is asked, is the claim to a thirty-millionth part of the value of these five aboriginal uses of the soil of England; and what is that worth?

Why, if the ”prairie value” of the soil is estimated at the high figure of a s.h.i.+lling the acre per annum, it would only give every inhabitant something under half a crown, and when compensation is demanded for the loss of this ridiculous pittance, one calls to mind what immensely greater compensations the modern child is born to. Civilization is itself a social property, a common fund, a people's heritage, acc.u.mulating from one generation to another, and opening to the new-comer economic opportunities and careers incomparably better and more numerous than the ancient liberties of fis.h.i.+ng in the stream or nutting in the forest. The things actually demanded for the poor in liquidation of this alleged claim may often be admissible on other grounds altogether, but to ask them in the name of compensation for the loss of those primitive economic rights--even though it was done by Spencer or Cobden--is certainly State socialism.

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