Under such a system the workers will have full control of their economic interests. They will have the sobering and steadying discipline of responsibility. They will no doubt make mistakes, as all bodies of men have done since the beginning of the world; but as they will suffer by them, so they will have the power of correcting them. It will be a self-reforming and self-developing system of industry. And it is hardly necessary to state that these associations will subsist in organic relation to one another. The State is, in idea or principle, such an association on the wide scale, just as the municipality or commune is the local form of association; and their relations to each other may in various degrees and forms represent the principle of federalism or centralisation. In the history and condition of the working people it is a pathetic fact that their sons, who have been gifted with exceptional capacity, generally go over to the richer classes. Their services are thus lost to the class from which they sprang. It must be the aim of the socialist movement also to terminate this incessant divorce between labour and intelligence, by providing within the groups of associated workers due scope for the best talent. Socialism claims to be the normal and prevalent type of organisation in the future. The methods of production, distribution, and exchange will be under social control. This being so, it may surely be regarded as a special instance of the arbitrariness and absoluteness of the current socialism, when it maintains that all capital must pass out of individual ownership. It may safely be maintained that such a condition of things is not possible, and that, if it were possible, it is entirely undesirable, because most likely to repress individual freedom, and affording indefinite scope for social tyranny. Under any conceivable system of society the free development of man is likely to be promoted by the possession of reasonable private means. The only objection that can be rationally alleged against private property is when it involves injustice to others—a possibility which, under socialism, is amply provided against by the prevalence of social control over economic processes. The views just stated are not unwarranted by the historic socialism. Amidst much that is most extravagant, Fourier has the merit at least of offering the strongest safeguards for individual and local freedom. Fourier provided that every worker should have the opportunity of gaining and maintaining a capital of his own, but under such social regulation that it would no longer involve wrong to others; and further, he arranged that the owner should have perfect freedom to transfer his services and his capital from one association to another. These are features of Fourier’s system which have been too much neglected by scientific socialists so called; and in these respects he is much less utopian than his critics.