The Socialists of the Chair have done themselves injustice and sown their course with embarrassing misconceptions by adopting too hastily an infelicitous name. It is more descriptive than most political nicknames, and therefore more liable to mislead. It was first used in 1872 in a pamphlet by Oppenheim, then one of the leaders of the National Liberals, to ridicule a group of young professors of political economy who had begun to show a certain undefined sympathy with the socialist agitations of Lassalle and Von Schweitzer, and to write of the wrongs of the labouring classes and the evils of the existing industrial system with a flow of emotion which was thought to befit their years better than their position. A few months later these young professors called together at Eisenach a Congress of all who shared their general attitude towards that class of questions. In opening this Congress--which was attended by almost every economist of note in Germany, and by a number of the weightiest and most distinguished Liberal politicians--Professor Schmoller employed the name "Socialists of the Chair" to describe himself and those present, without adding a single qualifying remark, just as if it had been their natural and chosen designation. The nickname was no doubt accepted so readily, partly from a desire to take the edge off the sneer it was meant to convey, but partly also from the nobler feeling which makes men stand by a truth that is out of favour. Not that they approved of the contentions of social democracy out and out, but they believed there was more basis of truth in them than persons in authority were inclined to allow, and besides that the truth they contained was of special and even pressing importance. They held, as Schmoller said, that "Social Democracy was itself a consequence of the sins of modern Liberalism." They went entirely with the Social Democrats in maintaining both that a grave social crisis had arisen, and that it had been largely brought about by an irrational devotion on the part of the Liberals to the economic doctrine of _laissez-faire_. But they went further with them. They believed that the salvation of modern society was to come, not indeed from the particular scheme of reconstruction advocated by the Social Democrats, but still from applications in one form or another of their fundamental principle, the principle of association. And it was for that reason--it was for the purpose of marking the value they set upon the associative principle as the chief source of healing for the existing ills of the nations--that they chose to risk misunderstanding and obloquy by accepting the nickname put upon them by their adversaries. The late Professor Held, who claims as a merit that he was the first to do so, explains very clearly what he meant by calling himself a socialist. Socialism may signify many different things, but, as he uses the word, it denotes not