Mr. Cairnes's objection is just; for a reformer's position ought to be determined, not by the distant ideal he may think best, if the conditions were ripe for its realization, but by the policy which he counts to be of present importance under the conditions that exist. He may cherish, as many orthodox economists do, the socialist hope. He may look for a time when comfort and civilization shall be more universally and securely diffused; when heads and hands in the world of labour shall work together in amity; when competition and exclusive private property and self-interest shall be swallowed up in love and common labour. But he knows that the transformation must be gradual, and that the material conditions of it must never be pushed on in advance of the intellectual and moral. And this cuts him off by a whole diameter, from those who are now known as socialists. In every question of the day he will be found in an opposite camp from them. For he makes the ideal what it is and ought to be--the goal of his action; they make it their starting-point, and the peculiarity of the case is that with their view of the situation they cannot make it anything else. For to their mind the struggle they are engaged in is not a struggle for amelioration, but for plain and elementary right. It is not a question of providing greater happiness for the greatest number; it is a question of doing them bare justice, of giving them their own, of protecting them against a disguised but very real expropriation. They declare that, under the present industrial arrangements, the labouring classes are in effect robbed of most of the value of the work of their hands, and of course the suppression of systematic robbery is an immediate obligation of the present. Justice is a basis to start from now, if possible, and not a dream to await hereafter. First let the labouring man have his rights, they cry, and then, and then only, shall you have the way clear for any further parley about his future. It is true that he is not the victim of individual rapacity so much as of the system, and that he cannot get his rights till the system is completely changed; but the system, they argue, can never be completely changed except by the power of the State, and why then not change it at once? Now, it is obvious how, to people who take this view of the matter, there should seem no other alternative but an instant reconstruction of industrial society at the hands of the State. For if it is justice that has to be done, then it appears only natural to conclude that it falls upon the State, as the organ of justice, to do it, and that it cannot do it too soon. The demand for the immediate accomplishment of their scheme by public authority is thus no accidental accessory of it merely, but is really inseparable from the ideas on which the scheme is founded. It is, in fact, so much, if I may use the word, the _note_ of socialism wherever socialism makes itself heard in