school, in their ignorance of foreign writers, regarded him as a socialist,[431] but the younger representatives of that school have done full justice to his memory, and recognise him as one of their earliest representatives. By his appeal to sentiment and his sympathy for the working classes, by his criticism of the industrial _régime_ of machines and competition, by his refusal to recognise personal interest as the only economic motive, he foreshadows the violent reaction of humanitarianism against the stern implacability of economic orthodoxy. We can almost hear the eloquence of Ruskin and Carlyle, and the pleading of the Christian Socialists, who in the name of Christian charity and human solidarity protest against the social consequences of production on a large scale. Like Sismondi, social Christianity will direct its attack, not against the science itself, but against the easy _bourgeois_ complacency of its advocates. A charge of selfishness will be brought, not against economic science as such, but against its representatives and the particular form of society which it upholds. Finally, by his plea for State intervention Sismondi inaugurated a reaction against Liberal absolutism, a reaction that deepened in intensity and covered a wider area as the century wore on, and which found its final expression in State socialism, or “the socialism of the chair.” He was the first to advocate the adoption of factory legislation in France and to seek to give the Government a place in directing economic affairs. The impossibility of complete abdication on the part of the State would, he thought, become clearer every day. But it was little more than an aspiration with him; it never reached the stage of a practical suggestion. Thus in three different ways Sismondi’s proposals were destined to give rise to three powerful currents of thought, and it is not surprising that interest in his work should have grown with the development of the new tendencies which he had anticipated.