What political economy has thus lost in precision it has gained in general interest. So long as it merely analysed processes of production and distribution which it was assumed would always continue without substantial modification, political economy was mainly a science for specialists, and was little calculated to arouse any keen interest in the public. But now that it has been merged in that general science of evolution, which offers to an unquiet age what seems a scientific licence to regard as practically producible some indeterminate transformation in these processes, political economy has come to occupy a new position. Instead of being ignored or ridiculed by the more ardent school of reformers, and even neglected by conservatives as a not very powerful auxiliary, it has now been brought down into the dust of the general struggle, and is invoked by one side as the prophetess of new possibilities, and by the other as an exorcist of mischievous and mad illusions. And what is true in this respect with regard to political economy is {8} also true with regard to evolutionary social science as a whole. Social science as a whole, just like this special branch of it, is being brought into vital contact with the lives and hopes of man, and is exciting a popular interest strictly analogous to that which had been excited by physical and biological science previously. It is doing this in two ways, which, though closely connected, are distinct. In the first place, it is directing our attention to the human race as a whole, and is showing us how society and the individual have developed in an orderly manner, growing upwards from the lowest and the most miserable beginnings to the heights of civilisation, intellectual, moral, and material, and how they contain in themselves the potency of yet further development. It thus offers to the mind a vast variety of suggestion with regard to the significance of man’s presence upon the earth, and is held by many to be supplying us with the materials of a religion calculated to replace that which physical science has discredited. The second way in which it excites popular interest is the way which has been just illustrated by a reference to political economy. For besides offering to our philosophic and religious faculties the vision of man’s corporate movement from a condition of helpless bestiality towards some “far-off divine event,” which glitters on us in the remote future, social science is suggesting to us changes which are of a very much nearer kind, and which appeal not to our speculative desire to discover some {9} meaning in the universe, but to the personal interest which we each of us take in our own welfare—such, for instance, as a general redistribution of wealth, the abolition or complete reorganisation of private property, the emancipation of labour, and the realisation of social equality.