We believe also that Marx made a serious mistake in holding that the further development of capitalism will be marked by the growing ‘wretchedness, oppression, slavery, degeneracy, and exploitation’[4] of the working class. Facts and reasonable expectations combine clearly to indicate that the democracy, on which the social evolution of the future depends, is marked by a growing intellectual, moral, and political capacity, and by an increasing freedom and prosperity; and all these things make it only more ardent and capable for further progress and for the great tasks that lie before it. Social progress must in the last resort depend on the character and capacity of the human beings concerned in it. The democracy, the representative and promoter of the new order, shows a growing fitness for its world-historic mission. The claim of socialism to be the dominant form of social organisation in the future must ultimately be its efficiency to fulfil the great ends of social union, and the decisive element in this efficiency must be the fitness of the agents who are to realise it. This is a point of supreme and far-reaching importance which it will be well for us to ponder. All social problems in the long run resolve themselves into the question of human character. The moral forces control the world and the course of history. It has been the special function of socialism to show that a real and durable freedom can be established only on an economic basis. We should also not forget that such freedom can be attained and secured only by loyalty to reason and especially to moral law. Freedom and social progress, reason and morality, are correlated and organic conceptions which go together and can thrive only in harmony. Government of State and municipality is only a mechanism, of which the action for good or evil will depend on the spirit by which it is moved. The nationalisation of railways may merely open up a new field of corruption, if there is not integrity to manage them for the public good. Noble ideals are of no avail, if they remain outside of our spiritual framework: they must be assimilated and become part of us. Fine sentiments, unless they are consolidated into character and translated into habitual action, may become an insidious and harmful form of self-indulgence. Let it be understood that in the great struggle for a really free commonwealth against organised wealth, called plutocracy, on which men are now entering, we shall achieve victory only by deserving it. The sacred cause of freedom will not be maintained by mammon-worshippers, parasites, and pedants. No nation or class whose women are slaves of self-indulgence and of fashion can expect to be free. We cannot hope that freedom will thrive among the base and mean, or the hysterical, irresponsible, frivolous, and apathetic.