Socialism, then, simply means that the normal social organisation of the future will and should be an associated or co-operative one. It means that industry should be carried on by free associated workers. The development of socialism will follow the development of the large industry; and it will rationally, scientifically, and systematically use the mechanical appliances evolved during the industrial revolution for the promotion of a higher life among the masses of the people. It is a new type of industry and economic organisation the practicability of which must be decided by the test of experience. It cannot be introduced mechanically. We cannot force or improvise such a change in the constitution of society. No revolutionary violence can avail to carry through a transformation which runs counter to the fundamental laws of human nature or the great prevailing tendencies of social evolution. This will be especially manifest when we consider that its realisation will above all things depend on the ethical advance of the mass of the people. Character cannot be improved by magic; it can be substantially ameliorated only by an organic change, external circumstances co-operating with an inward moral spirit. The present competitive system must therefore be regarded as holding the field until socialism has given adequate proof of the practicability of the theory which it offers. ----- [1] Mill’s _Political Economy_, People’s Edition, p. 465. CHAPTER XII SOCIALISM AND THE EVOLUTION THEORY The idea of evolution has had a great influence in the history of socialistic speculation. Beginning with Saint-Simon most socialists have recognised three stages in the economic development of mankind—slavery, serfdom, and wage-labour—which last they believe will be displaced by an era of associated labour with a collective capital. The idea of development may indeed be regarded as essential to socialism, inasmuch as it must contemplate a succession of social-economic changes in history. Marx and Lassalle were both trained in the school of Hegel, and naturally applied to the problems of society the Hegelian theory of development. The principle that economic categories are historical categories, so much emphasised by Lassalle, was by him, as it was by his fellow-labourers, merged in the wider and more fundamental conception of evolution, historical economics thus becoming evolutionary economics.