that while the course which industrial development is taking seems to be banishing hope and security more and more from the labourer's life, the progress of general civilization is making these benefits more and more imperatively demanded. The working classes have been growing steadily in the scale of moral being. They have acquired complete personal freedom, legal equality, political rights, general education, a class consciousness; and they have come to cherish a very natural and legitimate aspiration that they shall go on progressively sharing in the increasing blessings of civilization. Brentano says that modern public opinion concedes this claim of the working man as a right to which he is entitled, but that modern industrial conditions have been unable as yet to secure him in the possession of it; hence the Social Question. Now some persons may be ready enough to admit this claim as a thing which it is eminently desirable to see realized, who will yet demur to the representation of it as a right, which puts society under a corresponding obligation. But this idea is a peculiarity belonging to the whole way of thinking of the Socialists of the Chair upon these subjects. Some of them indeed take even higher ground. Schmoller, for example, declares that the working classes suffer positive wrong in the present distribution of national wealth, considered from the standpoint of distributive justice; but his associates as a rule do not agree with him in applying this abstract standard to the case. Wagner also stands somewhat out of the ranks of his fellows by throwing the responsibility of the existing evils directly and definitely upon the State. According to his view, there can never be anything which may be legitimately called a Social Question, unless the evils complained of are clearly the consequences of existing legislation, but he holds that that is so in the present case. He considers that a mischievous turn has been given to the distribution of wealth by legalizing industrial freedom without at the same time imposing certain restrictions upon private property, the rate of interest, and the speculations of the Stock Exchange. The State has, therefore, caused the Social Question; and the State is bound to settle it. The other Socialists of the Chair, however, do not bring the obligation so dead home to the civil authority alone. The duty rests on society, and, of course, so far on the State also, which is the chief organ of society; but it is not to State-help alone, nor to self-help alone, that the Socialists of the Chair ask working men to look; but it is to what they term the self-help of society. Society has granted to the labouring classes the rights of freedom and equality, and has, therefore, come bound to give them, as far as it legitimately can, the amplest facilities for practically enjoying these rights. To give a man an estate mortgaged above its rental is only to mock him; to confer the