begin as soon as he is ready to pay the price. They can live as simply as the equal rights of their fellows require: they can justify their lives by work in the noblest of all causes. For their reward, if they desire any, they, like the rest, must wait. FOOTNOTES: [70] Lectures on Jurisprudence. Lecture XLVIII. [71] Happily, the ordinary anxieties as to the fate of children left without property, especially weaklings or women unlikely to attract husbands, may be left out of account in speculations concerning socialised communities. [72] “Principles of Political Economy,” p. 435. INDUSTRY UNDER SOCIALISM. BY ANNIE BESANT. There are two ways in which a scheme for a future organisation of industry may be constructed. Of these, by far the easier and less useful is the sketching of Utopia, an intellectual gymnastic in which a power of coherent and vivid imagination is the one desideratum. The Utopist needs no knowledge of facts; indeed such a knowledge is a hindrance: for him the laws of social evolution do not exist. He is a law unto himself; and his men and women are not the wayward, spasmodic, irregular organisms of daily life, but automata, obeying the strings he pulls. In a word, he creates, he does not construct: he makes alike his materials and the laws within which they work, adapting them all to an ideal end. In describing a new Jerusalem, the only limits to its perfection are the limits of the writer’s imagination. The second way is less attractive, less easy, but more useful. Starting from the present state of society, it seeks to discover the tendencies underlying it; to trace those tendencies to their natural outworking in institutions; and so to forecast, not the far-off future, but the next social stage. It fixes its gaze on the vast changes wrought by evolution, not the petty variations made by catastrophes; on the Revolutions which transform society, not the transient riots which merely upset thrones and behead kings. This second way I elect to follow; and this paper on industry under Socialism therefore starts from William Clarke’s exposition of the industrial evolution which has been in progress during the last hundred and fifty years. In thus building forward--in thus forecasting the transitions through which society will probably pass, I shall scarcely touch on the ideal Social State that will one day exist; and my sketch must lay itself open to all the criticisms which may be levelled against a society not ideally perfect. It is therefore necessary to bear in mind that I am only trying to work out changes practicable among men and women as we know them; always seeking to lay down, not what is ideally best, but what is possible; always choosing among the possible changes that which is on the line towards the ideal, and will render further approach easier. In fact this paper is an attempt to answer the “How?” so often heard when Socialism is discussed. Large numbers of people accept, wholly or in