If we are in this way to stretch the word socialism first to the one side, till it takes in J. S. Mill and Maurice and the co-operators, who repudiate authority and State help, and then on the other side, till it takes in Prince Bismarck, and our own aristocratic Conservative Young England Party, and all social reformers who want the State to do its ordinary duty of supplying the working classes with better securities for the essentials of all humane living, how can there be any rational and intelligible use of the word at all? Mill holds a more or less socialistic idea of what a just society would be; Bismarck holds a more or less socialistic view of the functions of the State; but neither of these ideas separately make up the minimum of socialism; and it would therefore be misleading to call either of them by that name, while to call both by it would be hopeless confusion, since the one politician holds exactly what the other rejects, and no more. But, after all, it is of less importance to define socialism in the abstract than to describe the actual concrete socialism that has organization and life, especially as the name is only transferred in common speech to all these varying shades of opinion, because they are thought to resemble that concrete socialism in one feature or another. Having now ascertained the general nature of the contemporary socialistic movement, we shall be in a better position to judge of its bearings and importance. We have seen that the only form of socialism which has come to life again since 1848 is the political and revolutionary phase of Social Democracy. Now, this was also the original form in which socialism first appeared in modern Europe at the time of the earlier Revolution of 1789. The tradition it represents is consequently one of apparently vigorous vitality. It has kept its place in European opinion for a hundred years, it seems to have grown with the growth of the democratic spirit, and it has in our own day broken out simultaneously in most of the countries of the Continent, and in some of them with remarkable energy. A movement like this, which seems to have taken a continuous and extensive hold of the popular mind, and which moreover has a consciousness of right, a passion for social justice, however mistaken, at the heart of it, cannot be treated lightly as a political force; but at the same time its consequence is apt to be greatly overrated both by the hopes of sanguine adherents and by the apprehensions of opponents. Socialists are incessantly telling us that their system is the last word of the Revolution, that the current which broke loose over Europe in 1789 is setting, as it could not help setting, in their direction, and that it can only find its final level of repose in a democratic communism. Conservative Cassandras tell us the same thing, for the Extreme Right takes the same view as the Extreme Left does of the logical tendency of measures. They feel things about