status of freedom upon working men merely to leave them overwhelmed in an unequal struggle with capital is to make their freedom a dead letter. Personal and civil independence require, as their indispensable accompaniment, a certain measure of economic independence likewise, and consequently to bestow the former as an inalienable right, and yet take no concern to make the latter a possibility, is only to discharge one-half of an obligation voluntarily undertaken, and to deceive expectations reasonably entertained. No doubt this independence is a thing which working men must in the main win for themselves, and day after day, by labour, by providence, by association; but it is nevertheless an important point to remember, with Brentano, that it forms an essential part of an ideal which society has already acknowledged to be legitimate, and which it is therefore bound to second every effort to realize. The Social Question, conceived in the light of these considerations, may accordingly be said to arise from the fact that a certain material or economic independence has become more necessary for the working man, and less possible. It is more necessary, because, with the sanction of modern opinion, he has awoke to a new sense of personal dignity, and it is less possible, in consequence of circumstances already mentioned, attendant upon the development of modern industry. It is not, as Lord Macaulay maintained, that the evils of man's life are the same now as formerly, and that nothing has changed but the intelligence which has become conscious of them. The new time has brought new evils and less right or disposition to submit to them. It is the conflict of these two tendencies which, in the thinking of the Socialists of the Chair, constitutes the social crisis of the present day. Some of them, indeed, describe it in somewhat too abstract formulæ, which exercise an embarrassing influence on their speculations. For example, Von Scheel says the Social Question is the effect of the felt contradiction between the ideal of personal freedom and equality which hangs before the present age, and the increasing inequality of wealth which results from existing economic arrangements; and he proposes as the general principle of solution, that men should now abandon the exclusive devotion which modern Liberalism has paid to the principle of freedom, and substitute in its room an adhesion to freedom _plus_ equality. But then equality may mean a great many different things, and Von Scheel leaves us with no precise clue to the particular scope he would give his principle in its application. He certainly seems to desire more than a mere equality of right, and to aim at some sort or degree of equality of fact, but what or how he informs us not; just as Schmoller, while propounding the dogma of distributive justice, condemns the communistic principle of distribution of wealth as being a purely animal principle, and offers us no other incorporation of his dogma. In