But in the prevailing use of the word, there is generally the idea that the intervention of authority to which it is applied is undertaken to promote the well-being of the less fortunate classes of society. Since socialism seeks to construct what may be called a working class State, where the material welfare of each shall be the great object of the organization of all, it is common to represent as socialistic any proposal that asks the State to do something for the material well-being of the working class, and to describe any group of such proposals, or any theory that favours them, by the name of socialism. The so-called State-socialism of Prince Bismarck, for example, is only, as he has himself declared, a following-out of the traditions of the House of Hohenzollern, the princes of that dynasty having always counted it one of their first duties as rulers to exercise a special protection and solicitude over the poorer classes of their subjects. The old ideas of feudal protection and paternal government have charms for many minds that deplore the democratic spirit of modern society. In Germany they have been maintained by the feudal classes, the court, and the clergy; their presence in the general intellectual atmosphere there has probably facilitated the diffusion of socialistic views; and they have certainly led to the curious phenomenon of a Conservative socialism, in which the most obstinately Conservative interests in the country go to meet the Social Democrats half way, and promise to do everything to get them better wages if they will but come to church again and pray for the Kaiser. The days of feudal protection and paternal government are gone; as idealized by Carlyle, they perhaps never existed; at any rate, in an age of equality they are no longer possible, but their modern counterparts are precisely the ideas of social protection and fraternal government which find their home among socialists. On the strength of this analogy, Prince Bismarck and the German Emperor are sometimes spoken of as socialists, because they believe, like the latter, that the State should exercise a general or even a particular providence over the industrial classes. But socialism is more than such a belief. It is not only a theory of the State's action, but a theory of the State's action founded on a theory of the labourer's right. It is at bottom, as I have said, a mistaken demand for social justice. It tells us that an enlargement of social justice was made when it was declared that every man shall be free--or, in other words, that every man shall possess completely his own powers of labour; and it claims that a new enlargement of social justice shall be made now, to declare that every man shall possess the whole produce of his labour. Now those who are known as Conservative Socialists, in patronizing the working people, do not dream of countenancing any such claim, or even of admitting in the