rather than its concentration; that it should always favour the active business interest rather than the idle interest; that it should always favour the weaker and more unprotected interest rather than the more powerful and the more contumelious. The socialism comes in not with the condemnation of the existing order of things, but with the policy recommended for its correction. There is no socialism in recognising the plain fact that the gifts of fortune, whether riches or talents, are not distributed in the world according to merit. There is no socialism in declaring that the rich, by reason of their riches, have responsibilities towards the poor; or that the poor, by reason of their poverty, have claims upon the rich. Nor is there any socialism in holding that the State has responsibilities towards the poor, and that the law ought, when necessary, to assert the reasonable claims of poverty, or enforce the reasonable duties and obligations of wealth. All that merely says that justice and humanity ought to govern in economic affairs, as they ought to govern in all other affairs of life; and this is an axiomatic position which nobody in the world denies. Only, axiomatic though it is, it seems to dawn on many minds like a revelation late in life, and they feel they are no longer as other men, and that they must henceforth call themselves socialists. This awakening to the injustice or inhumanity of things is not socialism, though socialism may often proceed out of it. Socialism is always some scheme for the removal of one injustice by the infliction of a greater--some scheme which, by mistaking the rights and wrongs of the actual situation, or the natural operation of its own provisions, or any other cause, would leave things more inequitable and more offensive to a sound sense of justice than it found them. The rich idler, for example, is always a great offence to the socialist, because, according to the socialist sense of justice, no man ought to be rich without working for his riches; and many other people will possibly agree with the socialist in that. But then the socialist proposes to abolish the rich idler by a scheme which would breed the poor idler in overwhelming abundance, and for the sake of equalizing poverty and wealth, would really equalize indolence and industry--at once a more fatal and a more offensive form of injustice than that which it was designed to redress. Socialists find fault with the present order of things because the many workers support the few idlers; but most of the old socialist communities of France and America failed because of the opposite and greater injustice, that the few workers found themselves supporting the many idlers, and the consequence was a more harrowing sense of unfairness and a more universal impoverishment than prevailed under the old system. The rich idler who merely lives on what he has inherited may not belong to an ideal state