Liberalism is a failure from like causes. It seeks to realize happiness by freedom; it realizes neither. For it mistakes the nature of freedom, as the Communists mistake the nature of equality. It takes freedom to be the power of doing what one likes, instead of being the power of doing what is right. Its whole bent is to exempt as much as possible of life from authoritative restraint, and to give as much scope as exigencies will allow to the play of individuality. It is based on no positive conception of right whatever, and looks on the State as an alien whose interference is something exceptional, only justified on occasional grounds of public necessity or general utility. It fails to see that there are really no affairs in a community which are out of relation to the general wellbeing, and destitute of political significance. Nothing demonstrates the error of this better than the effects of the Liberal _régime_ itself. For half a century the industrial concerns of the people have been treated as matters of purely private interest, and this policy has resulted in a political as well as economical revolution. Industrial freedom, which has produced capitalism in the economic field, has resulted in political life in the ascendancy of a new class, a plutocracy, "the worst masters," said De Tocqueville, "the world has yet seen, though their reign will be short." The change which was effected by the legislation of the Revolution was not a development of a fourth estate, as is sometimes said; it was really nothing more than the creation of a money aristocracy, and the putting of them in the place of the old hereditary nobility. The system of industrial right that happens to prevail, therefore, so far from being, as Liberals fancy, outside the sphere of political interest, is in truth the very element on which the distribution of political power, in the last analysis, depends. Nothing is more political than the social question. Liberals think slight of that question, but it is, says Marlo, the real question of the day, and it is neither more nor less than the question of the existence or abolition of Liberalism, the question of the maintenance or subversion of the principle of industrial freedom, the question of the ascendancy or overthrow of a money aristocracy. The fight of our age is a fight against a plutocracy bred of Liberalism. It is not, as some represent it, a struggle of labourers against employers; it is a joint struggle of labourers and lower _bourgeoisie_ against the higher _bourgeoisie_, a struggle of those who work and produce against those who luxuriate idly on the fruits of others' labour. As compared with this question, constitutional questions are of very minor importance, for no matter whether the State be monarchy or republic, if the system of industrial right that prevails in it be the system of industrial freedom, the real power of the country will be in the hands of the capitalist class. He