problem of the age, according to Lassalle, is this, whether this unmade property of the future should not become genuine labour property, and its value remain greatly more than at present in the hands that actually produced it. This, he holds, can only be done by a fundamental reconstruction of the present industrial system, and by new methods of determining the remuneration of the labouring class. For there is a profound contradiction in the present system. It is unprecedentedly communistic in production, and unprecedentedly individualistic in distribution. Now there ought to be as real a joint participation in the product, as there is already a joint participation in the work. Capital must become the servant of labour instead of its master, profits must disappear, industry must be conducted more on the mutual instead of the proprietary principle, and the instruments of production be taken out of private hands and turned into collective or even, it may be, national property. In the old epoch, before 1789, industrial society was governed by the principle of solidarity without freedom; in the period since 1789, by freedom without solidarity, which has been even worse; in the epoch now opening, the principle must be solidarity in freedom. Partisans of the present system object to any social interference with the distribution of wealth, but they forget how much--how entirely--that distribution is even now effected by social methods. The present arrangement of property, says Lassalle, is, in fact, nothing but an anarchic and unjust socialism. How do you define socialism? he asks. Socialism is a distribution of property by social channels. Now this is the condition of things that exists to-day. There exists, under the guise of individual production, a distribution of property by means of purely objective movements of society. For there is a certain natural solidarity in things as they are, only being under no rational control, it operates as a wild natural force, as a kind of fate destroying all rational freedom and all rational responsibility in economic affairs. In a sense, there never was more solidarity than there is now; there never was so much interdependence. Under the large system of production, masses of workmen are simply so many component parts of a single great machine driven by the judgment or recklessness of an individual capitalist. With modern facilities of inter-communication, too, the trade of the world is one and indivisible. A deficient cotton harvest in America carries distress into thousands of households in Lyons, in Elberfeld, in Manchester. A discovery of gold in Australia raises all prices in Europe. A simple telegram stating that rape prospects are good in Holland instantly deprives the oilworkers of Prussia of half their wages. So far from there being any truth in the contention of Schultze-Delitzsch, that the existing system is the only sound one, because it is founded on the principle of making every man responsible