likely as either wealth or privilege to have virtue conjoined with it. The officials, therefore, might not reduce all the rest to slavery; even if they did they would have a better right to do so than any other powers. They could not, at any rate, hand us over to the rule of their sons, as there would be no hereditary succession to power. If there must be a governing class, this would be the fairest sort, as well as the most natural, and the most beneficent for

all.

Thus it would still be a question of the comparison of evils, even if we were obliged to go on to the end. But, as already stated, there would be no necessity for so doing, simply because we started on the road in order to get some of the foreseen advantages or to escape from some present evils. We want the principle introduced of giving chances to capacity as a counterpoise to the great power of capital and inherited wealth or privilege, a third power to supple. ment and to qualify these, but not to supersede them. We want this because of its justice, its advantages from an economic point of view, and finally because of its necessity. And the only way in which the third power that is without capital can be evoked is by the State searching for and educating. destitute capacity, as also by extending the functions of the State in the industrial sphere, in order to provide additional places for this educated ability. The first half of this can indeed be done by the voluntary effort of rich men by gifts and bequests; the second can only be done by the State itself.

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CHAPTER XIII.

ON THE SUPPOSED SPONTANEOUS TENDENCIES TO SOCIALISM.

THERE are others besides Herbert Spencer who discern Socialism as the end or logical outcome of certain tendencies which now prevail or which are thought to prevail, and as all prophecies in modern times must be based on what we know of existing tendencies, supplemented by what history tells us of the course of similar tendencies in the past, it is a matter of importance to know how far such tendencies do really exist, and if they do, to gauge, if possible, their probable momentum, and to judge whether they are likely to be permanent or passing, because confident prophecies have been hazarded on the strength of certain tendencies, while at the very moment of the prophecy a counter-tendency was setting in.'

The alleged tendencies to Socialism are chiefly two: the tendency of the State to widen its functions, especially in the economic sphere; and the tendency

1 As in the case of De Tocqueville's celebrated prophecy that nothing could stop the tide setting towards democracy and the equality of conditions: although a counter-tide towards a new inequality had already set in, with as a consequence of it the rise of a new aristocracy or plutocracy in all Western Europe.

D d

As to the to increased concentration of wealth. former there is no doubt that the modern State has a tendency to widen the range of its activity in the economic sphere, as also in the interests of culture, and this tendency is to a certain extent Socialistic. The tendency exists; it has increased in England during the present century, especially since the passing of the first Factory Acts in 1844. It has increased especially in the legislative sphere, and as far as the regulation of industry is concerned; it will increase further in the interests of the health, the happiness, and the morals of the working class; so in like manner the tendency to assume industrial functions on the part of the central or the Nevertheless this local government will increase.

tendency will not increase fast nor go íar, unless a second tendency which we have now particularly to consider should develop and show itself socially mischievous.

The second tendency is that towards the increased massing together or concentration of capital which has been going on all through this century, at first as a consequence of the industrial revolution and the needs of the large scale of production, then by the undertaking of ever larger enterprises requiring vast sums of capital, as in the making and working of railways: a tendency which first showed itself in the instance of the great individual capitalist, then in the company or union of capitalists, and lastly, within the past few years, in the syndicate or union of companies. This second tendency does exist; it is likewise an increasing tendency, and under certain circumstances of abuse

into which it would be tempted to fall, it might lead to Socialism, not because of its affinities, since it is the very opposite of Socialism, but by way of repulsion; it might lead to excessive government regulation, or to the superseding of the syndicates by government management in the interest of the public.

But before considering the circumstances which might lead to such State Socialism, it is necessary to clear away a mistake as to the concentration of capital, to point out a mistaken tendency, which, if it really did exist, would probably lead to Socialism by a far shorter road: the mistake that the increasing concentration of capital, which is an undoubted fact, is an increasing concentration or accumulation in ever fewer individual hands; a mistake made conspicuously by Karl Marx, which was endorsed by Cairnes and Fawcett, and which lies at the bottom of all their desires to change the present industrial organization by substituting for it universal Collectivism, as Marx would wish, or co-operative production, as the other two prefer.

According to Karl Marx, Socialism will come when the process of evolution has resulted in a few colossal capitalists face to face with millions of exploited and expropriated proletarians, including many smaller capitalists who have been undersold and driven into the ranks of the proletariate. "When the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital has resulted in a few gigantic ones with a growing mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, and exploitation ;" and when, in addition, "the working class, increased in numbers, organized, disciplined,

and united by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself, is animated with a spirit of revolt," then, he declares, "the knell of capitalist property will sound, the expropriators will be expropriated." But we can now see that Marx mistook the course of the industrial evolution, and that he prophesied without due allowance for other facts and forces that might check, or cross, or turn the tendency he thought he had divined.

According to Cairnes also, as we have seen, the tendency is to "an increased inequality in distribution. The rich will grow richer, the poor, at least relatively, poorer." And he recommends to the latter cooperative production as their sole hope. Now Cairnes' mistake was the less excusable, as he wrote at a time (1874) when the tendency to great individual accumulation had received a check, and there were statistics available that might have tested his deduction. And in fact all that his argument really proves is that the class receiving interest (and occasionally wages of management, in addition to interest) tends to get a larger part of the produce than the class that lives by hired wages, or, as he puts it, that the wages fund tends to lag behind the other parts into which capital is divided. This last, if true, would still be a sufficiently serious thing, though Mr. Giffen, the eminent statistician, denies its truth; but true or not, it is a quite different thing from the increasing concentration of wealth in individual hands, which Cairnes appears, in the above quotations, to think implied in it: that one class, and a large class, tends to get a somewhat larger share than another, and a much larger