of society; but the poor idler, who shirks and dawdles and malingers, because an indulgent community relieves him of the necessity of harder exertion, is equally unideal, and he is much more hurtful in the reality. But the socialists, in their mistaken ideas of justice, do not stop at the rich idler. The rich idler is, in their view, a robber; but the rich worker is a greater robber still. It is characteristic of socialist thought to hold the accumulations of the rich to be in some sort of way unjustly acquired by spoiling the poor. The poor are always represented as the disinherited; their property is declared to have been taken from them perforce by bad laws and bad economic arrangements and delivered without lien into the hands of the capitalists. This view lived and moved in the old socialism, but it has been worked into a reasoned and professedly scientific argument as a basis and justification for the new. The old socialism usually exclaimed against the justice of interest, rent, property, and all forms of labourless income; but the new socialism pretends to prove the charge by economic principles. It alleges that all these forms of income are so many different forms of plundering the working classes, who are the real producers of wealth, and it sets up a claim on behalf of those classes to the whole value of the things they produce without any deductions for rent, interest, or profit--the right, as they call it, of the labourer to the whole produce of his labour. Now this is a very distinct and definite claim of right and justice, and the whole final object of the socialist organizations of the present day is to get it realized, and realized at once, as claims of right and justice ought, and must, by the powers of the State. I shall have better opportunities at a later part of this work of proving how absolutely unfounded and unjust is this claim; but I mention it here merely to show that the essence of modern socialism is more and more unmistakably revealing itself as an effort to realize some false ideal of social or distributive justice. This is the deepest and most ruling feature of socialism, and it really necessitated the advance of the movement from the philanthropic to the political stage. The Owenites were content with the idea of a voluntary equality of wealth; but that is now dismissed as the mere children's dream, for popular rights are things to be enforced by law, and questions of justice are for the State. The political character of the movement has only brought forward into stronger relief the distorted ideal of justice which gave it being; and it has therefore become much more confusing than it formerly was for one to call himself a socialist merely because he dreams of better things to come, or because he would like to extinguish poverty, or to diffuse property, or to extend the principle of progressive taxation, or promote co-operation or profit-sharing, or any other just or useful measures of practical social reform.