taken {378} place, yet this particular change which has refused to take place in the past is perfectly certain to take place in the future. The historical evolution of society, however, and the social changes that have taken place, do indeed convey to us a very important moral; but this moral which the changes convey to us is curiously different from that which the socialists draw from them. They draw from them the moral that because social arrangements have been greatly changed, therefore they can be fundamentally changed. The true moral is that, although they may be changed greatly, they can never be changed fundamentally; and from this there follows another as its yet more important corollary—that although social arrangements can never be changed fundamentally, they can, nevertheless, be progressively and indefinitely improved, but that real reforms can be accomplished only by those who abandon altogether every dream of fundamental revolution. Many reforms which socialists eagerly recommend, and many wishes which socialists entertain, may meet with the approval and sympathy of the most determined conservatives; but the error of the socialists is sufficiently indicated by the fact, already remarked upon in the course of this work, that the changes which they advocate, and whose advent they delight to prophesy, leave the possible and approach the absolutely impossible, in precise proportion as these visionaries set value upon them. Nowhere is the impossibility of such changes more clearly indicated than in the phrases now most {379} frequently used to indicate their specific nature—such phrases as “_the emancipation_” and “_the economic freedom_” of the labourer. These phrases, if they have any meaning at all, can mean one thing only—the emancipation of the average man, endowed with average capacities, from the control, from the guidance, or, in other words, from the help, of any man or men whose capacities are above the average—whose speculative abilities are exceptionally keen, whose inventive abilities are exceptionally great, whose judgments are exceptionally sound, and whose powers of will, enterprise, and initiative are exceptionally strong. That is to say, these phrases, if they have any meaning at all, mean the deliberate loss and rejection, by the less efficient majority of mankind, of any advantage that might come to it from the powers of the more efficient minority. “_Economic freedom_,” in fact, would mean economic poverty; and the “_emancipation_” of the average man would merely be the emancipation which a blind man achieves when he breaks away from his guide. The human race progresses because and when the strongest human powers and the highest human faculties lead it; such powers and faculties are embodied in and monopolised by a minority of exceptional men; these men enable the majority to progress, only on condition that the majority submit themselves to their control; and if all the ruling classes of to-day could be