Socialism rests on the great ideals of freedom and justice, of brotherhood and mutual service. It may well claim to be the heir of the great ideals of the greatest races. The Hebrew ideal of truth, righteousness, and mercy, which on its ethical side was widened and deepened into the Christian ideals of love, brotherhood, and mutual service, and the Greek ideal of the true, the good, and the beautiful, all may and should be accepted by socialism, and they should be supplemented by the Roman conceptions of law, order, and continuity, but with far wider aims and meanings. In its law of mutual service, by which it at once asserted the interdependence of the members of the social organism and a profound conception of social duty, Christianity went deeper, both in philosophy and practice, than the French Revolution with its watchwords of liberty, equality, and fraternity. All these ideals, though not seldom abused and discredited in the rough school of human experience, are in their essence profoundly true and real, and they all meet and are summed up in a worthy conception of the great socialistic ideal. These ideals, it will be seen, go together; and it should be specially observed that freedom for the mass of mankind can be won and maintained only by association. In the competitive struggle the victors are few; the many are defeated and become subject. It is a delusion to suppose that freedom and competition are really compatible. This truth has received striking exemplification in the recent history of America. In the course of a single generation the country has passed under a system of competition from industrial freedom to what looks very like industrial oligarchy. The men who could best adapt themselves to the conditions of competition have won; and the trusts which they have organised are the natural results. The oligarchy appears to be the very unwelcome but very natural result of the free struggle for success which has been the accepted system and the ideal of the American people. Rightly understood, socialism will thus be seen to embody the highest conceptions of life, ancient and modern, and the highest aspirations of Christian ethics interpreted and applied by the experience of centuries. The failures which we have experienced in realising our ideals are no excuse for lowering them. They are far-reaching; they are limited by obvious natural facts, and cannot be realised in a day. But we should remember that every step forward brings us nearer to the goal.