[57] “Encyclopædia Britannica”: Art., “Political Economy.” [58] Mulhall: “Dictionary of Statistics.” [59] “Lords of Industry.” _North American Review_, June, 1884. [60] Quarterly Journal of Economics, July, 1889. [61] Report of Senate Committee, p. 419. [62] Report of Senate Committee, p. 233, _et seq._ [63] Report, p. 244. [64] Report of Senate Committee, p. 305. [65] Report of Senate Committee, p. 497. MORAL. BY SYDNEY OLIVIER. The argument of this fourth instalment of Socialist criticism may be provisionally described as an attempt to justify Socialist ideals by the appeals to canons of moral judgment accepted generally and supported by the results of positive ethical science. The previous essays have made it clear that we are dealing with Socialism in that restricted sense in which it is defined by Schaeffle,[66] as having for its aim “the replacement of private capital by collective capital: that is, by a method of production which, upon the basis of the collective property of the sum of all the members of the society in the instruments of production, seeks to carry on a co-operative organization of national work.” We are not dealing with Socialism as a religion, nor as concerned with questions of sex or family: we treat it throughout as primarily a property-form, as the scheme of an industrial system for the supply of the material requisites of human social existence. If it were admitted that the establishment of such a system would guarantee just this much--that abject poverty should be done away, and that every man and woman should be ensured the opportunity of obtaining sufficient food and covering in return for a moderate day’s work, we might still be far from convincing some people that the realization of that ideal will be a good thing for the world. There are still a great many who, though they may not join in the common prophecy that the chief results of such a system would be an increase in beer-drinking and other stupid self-indulgence,[67] yet regard starvation and misery as part of the inevitable order of nature, and as necessary conditions of progress, conducive to the survival of what they are pleased to call the “fittest” types of life. Such critics see danger to progress in any attempt to enrol intelligence and adaptiveness into conscious combination against starvation and misery, to extinguish by concerted effort survivals of the accidents of primitive barbarism against which as individuals we are always struggling. This aim of Socialism, accordingly, does not wholly commend itself to their moral judgment, to their opinion of what is _good_ in the widest sense, although they may willingly admit that the aim possesses a certain element of shortsighted good intention. Other persons, influenced by religious conceptions older than that of progress, and regarding morality less as determined by reference to that end than as a concern of the individual, a certain state of the soul of each man, are inclined to