Now, this conception of Socialism as being ultimately a moral and intellectual synthesis of mankind from which fresh growth may come, sets a fresh test of value upon all the activities of the Socialist--and opens up altogether new departments for research. Let us face the peculiar difficulty of the Socialist position. We propose to destroy the competitive capitalistic system that owns and sustains our present newspapers, gives and leaves money to universities, endows fresh pulpits, publishes, advertises, and buys books; we have to ask, as reasonable creatures, what new media we propose to give in the place of these accidental and unsatisfactory methods of distributing and exchanging thought. It would almost seem as though current Socialism breathes public opinion as the Middle Ages breathed air, without realizing that it existed, that it might be vitiated or withheld. And so we are beyond the range of prepared and digested Socialist proposals here altogether. It is still open to the Anti-Socialist to allege that Socialism may incidentally destroy itself by choking the channels of its own thinking, and the Socialist has still to reply in vague general terms. _We must insure the continuity of the collective mind_; that is manifestly a primary necessity for Socialism. The attempt to realize the Marxist idea of a democratic Socialism without that, might easily fail into the abortive birth of an acephalous monster, the secular development of administrative Socialism give the world over to a bureaucratic mandarinate, self-satisfied, interfering and unteachable, with whom wisdom would die. And yet we Socialists can produce in our plans no absolute bar to these possibilities. Here I can suggest only in the most general terms methods and certain principles. They need to be laid down as vitally necessary to Socialism, and so far they have not been so laid down. They have still to be incorporated in the Socialist creed. They are essentially principles of that Liberalism out of whose generous aspirations Socialism sprang, but they are principles that even to-day, unhappily, do not figure in the fundamental professions of any Socialist body.