This criticism of society is valuable, but its effect is mainly negative. We may go on to claim, however, that socialism, when purified from materialism, from the too revolutionary, absolute, and abstract elements with which it has been associated in history, can render a positive and substantial service to human improvement that would be vastly more valuable than any criticism. It may be maintained that in its main aim and tendency socialism is perfectly sound and right. For amidst much error and exaggeration it has brought out the type of social economic organisation which in the future should and will prevail. In previous chapters it has been made abundantly clear that the characteristic feature of the present economic order lies in the fact that industry is carried on by private competing capitalists served by wage-labour. According to socialism the industry of the future should be carried on by free associated workers rationally utilising a united capital with a view to an equitable system of distribution. As we have already had occasion to say, no formal statement can rightly give expression to the meaning of a great historical movement. But in such language we believe the contrast between the old order and the new can be most simply and at the same time with due adequacy expressed. The same type of industrial organisation has been well set forth by J. S. Mill in these words: “The form of association, however, which, if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief and workpeople without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.”[1] Mill’s view of the subject, it may be remarked in passing, was derived from the study of French and English socialists. His good sense saved him from the utopian extravagance of these writers, and as he had little sympathy with the peculiarly German ways of thought, he shows no tendency to the abstractness of the specialists of the Fatherland. The result is a conception of socialism which is at once intrinsically more reasonable, more adapted to the English mind and to universality, than any other offered by prominent economists. And in this connection we need hardly add that by the English mind we mean the mind of the English-speaking people; also, notwithstanding all that may be said to the contrary, that the English type of society has the best claim to universality, because it has best succeeded in reconciling and realising the fundamental requirements of order and freedom.