The essential aim of the Liberal party all over Europe in those days was to secure a political system in which the functions of the Government should be restricted within the narrowest possible limits. Every interest of life was to be submitted to the operation of the principle of free competition. Goethe could have no sympathy with a movement of which this was the ultimate object, for it was one of his deepest convictions that strong government is an enduring necessity of society, and that the path of free competition is a path that leads to ruin. And have events proved that in this opinion he was utterly mistaken? So far as industry and trade are concerned, the Western world has had ample experience of free competition, and can we take much pride in such of its results as are seen in the foul and pestilent dens in which, in every great city, multitudes of men, women, and children are compelled to lead degraded and unhappy lives? Goethe did not mean by strong government a system which should crush thought and true individuality. On the contrary, to him thought and true individuality seemed the vital conditions of human progress. But he wished, too, that the weak should be protected against the tyranny of the strong; that the State should be the supreme organ of practical reason for the establishment and maintenance of wholesome relations between man and man, and for the execution of measures designed to promote the free development, not of this class or of that only, but of the community as a whole. Many Liberal politicians were never tired of talking of Goethe as one who cared nothing for the practical interests of the world. They mistook indifference to their party for indifference to humanity. The truth is, he was in one sense far ahead of those who virulently assailed him as a reactionary. As we know from many passages in “Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre,” he saw that the real problems of the future were not merely political but social; that communities could never hope to solve these problems by simply giving free scope to the forces contending for mastery; and that for the new conditions of the world new forms of co-operative industrial organization would become inevitable. He devoted much earnest attention to the principles expounded during this period by St. Simon, and his ideas about social progress have a close affinity to some of those with which the English-speaking world has been made familiar by the most illustrious of its modern spiritual teachers, Carlyle and Ruskin.