school of political economists, who could see no alternative to private property, put forward in proof of the powerlessness of benevolent action to arrest the deadly automatic production of poverty by the increase of population, the very analysis I have just presented. Their conclusions exactly fitted in with the new ideas. It was Nature at it again--the struggle for existence--the remorseless extirpation of the weak--the survival of the fittest--in short, natural selection at work. Socialism seemed too good to be true: it was passed by as merely the old optimism foolishly running its head against the stone wall of modern science. But Socialism now challenges individualism, scepticism, pessimism, worship of Nature personified as a devil, on their own ground of science. The science of the production and distribution of wealth is Political Economy. Socialism appeals to that science, and, turning on Individualism its own guns, routs it in incurable disaster. Henceforth the bitter cynic who still finds the world an eternal and unimprovable doghole, with the placid person of means who repeats the familiar misquotation, “The poor ye shall have always with you,” lose their usurped place among the cultured, and pass over to the ranks of the ignorant, the shallow, and the superstitious. As for the rest of us, since we were taught to revere proprietary respectability in our unfortunate childhood, and since we found our childish hearts so hard and unregenerate that they secretly hated and rebelled against respectability in spite of that teaching, it is impossible to express the relief with which we discover that our hearts were all along right, and that the current respectability of to-day is nothing but a huge inversion of righteous and scientific social order weltering in dishonesty, uselessness, selfishness, wanton misery, and idiotic waste of magnificent opportunities for noble and happy living. It was terrible to feel this, and yet to fear that it could not be helped--that the poor must starve and make you ashamed of your dinner--that they must shiver and make you ashamed of your warm overcoat. It is to economic science--once the Dismal, now the Hopeful--that we are indebted for the discovery that though the evil is enormously worse than we knew, yet it is not eternal--not even very long lived, if we only bestir ourselves to make an end of it. FOOTNOTES: [2] “Principles of Political Economy,” Vol. I, Index to chap. xvi (1865). [3] “Manual of Political Economy,” Book II, chap. iii, p. 116 (1876). [4] “Economics of Industry,” Book II, chap. iii, sec. 3, p. 84 (1879). [5] “Principles of Political Economy,” Book II, chap. vii, p. 301 (1883). [6] “Brief Text-book of Political Economy,” chap. ii, sec. 216, p. 173 (1885). [7] “Principles of Political Economy and Taxation,” chap. ii. p. 34 (1817). [8] Profit is here used colloquially to denote the excess of the value of an article over its cost.