(4) Socialism is usually regarded as a phase of the struggle for the emancipation of labour, for the complete participation of the working classes in the material, intellectual, and spiritual inheritance of the human race. This is certainly the most substantial and most prominent part of the socialist programme, the working classes being the most numerous and the worst sufferers from the present _régime_. This view, however, is rather one-sided, for socialism claims not less to be in the interest of the small capitalist gradually crushed by the competition of the larger, and in the interest also of the large capitalist, whose position is endangered by the vastness and unwieldiness of his success, and by the world-wide economic anarchy from which even the greatest are not secure. Still, it is the deliverance of the working class that stands in the front of every socialistic theory; and, though the initiative in socialist speculation and action has usually come from men belonging to the middle and upper classes, yet it is to the workmen that they generally appeal. While recognising the great confusion in the use of the word ‘socialism,’ we have treated it as properly a phenomenon of the nineteenth century, beginning in France with Saint-Simon and Fourier, in England with Robert Owen, and most powerfully represented at the present day by the school of Karl Marx. As we have seen, however, there are definitions of the word which would give it a wider range of meaning and a more ancient beginning, compared with which capitalism is but of yesterday; which would, in fact, make it as old as human society itself. In the early stages of human development, when the tribe or the village community was the social unit, the subordination of the individual to the society in which he dwelt was the rule, and common property was the prevalent form. In the development of the idea of property, especially as regards land, three successive historical stages are broadly recognised—common property and common enjoyment of it, common property and private enjoyment, private property and private enjoyment. The last form did not attain to full expression till the end of the eighteenth century, when the principle of individual freedom, which was really a reaction against privileged restriction, was proclaimed as a positive axiom of government and of economics. The free individual struggle for wealth, and for the social advantages dependent on wealth, is a comparatively recent thing.