the world now, that it can only produce confusion to give the name of socialist to persons who hold this note in abhorrence, and virtually desire no more than the gradual triumph of co-operation. It may be answered that the latter, like the former, aim not at a mere reform of the present industrial system, but at an essential change in its fundamental principles--at an eventual suppression of exclusive property and unrestricted competition--and that it is therefore only proper to classify them with those who seek the like important end, however they may differ from the latter as to the means and seasons of action. This might be right, perhaps, if our only consideration were to furnish a philosophical classification of opinions; but we have to deal with a living and agitating party whose name and work are much canvassed, and there is at any rate great practical inconvenience in extending the current designation of that party so as to include persons who object strongly to its whole immediate work. The inconvenience has doubled since Mill's time, because socialism has now become a much more definite programme of a much more definite party. Even in the old romantic schools the ruling characteristic of socialism was always its effort to realize some wrong view of distributive justice. It was more than merely an impracticable plan for the extinction of poverty, or the more equable diffusion of wealth, or the correction of excessive inequalities, although that seems to be so prevailing an impression that persons who have what they conceive more feasible proposals to offer for these purposes put them forward under the name of Practicable Socialism. But so far as these purposes go, they are common to almost all schools of social reformers, even the most individualist. If socialism meant only feeling earnestly about those inequalities, or desiring earnestly their redress, or even strongly resenting their inconsistency with an ideal of justice, then Mr. Herbert Spencer is as much a socialist as either Marx or Lassalle. "The fates of the great majority," says he, "have ever been, and doubtless still are, so sad that it is painful to think of them. Unquestionably the existing type of social organization is one which none who care for their kind can contemplate with satisfaction; and unquestionably men's activities accompanying this type are far from being admirable. The strong divisions of rank and the immense inequalities of means are at variance with that ideal of human relations on which the sympathetic imagination likes to dwell; and the average conduct, under the pressure and excitement of social life as at present carried on, is in sundry respects repulsive." ("A Plea for Liberty," p. 4.) Socialists are far from being the only persons whose sense of justice is offended by much in the existing _régime_, and many very moderate politicians have held that the policy of the law should always favour the diffusion of wealth