Few could long endure the absurdities of a made-up theology and a make-believe religion: and the Utopia designed by Comte was as impracticable and unattractive as Utopias generally are. But the critical and destructive part of the case was sound enough. Here was a man who challenged the existing order of society and pronounced it wrong. It was in his view based on conventions, on superstitions, on regulations which were all out of date; society should be reorganised in the light of pure reason; the anarchy of competition must be brought to an end; mankind should recognise that order, good sense, science, and, he added, religion freed from superstition, could turn the world into a place where all might live together in comfort and happiness. Positivism proposed to attain its Utopia by moralising the capitalists, and herein it showed no advance on Christianity, which for nineteen centuries had in vain preached social obligation to the rich. The new creed could not succeed where the old, with all its tremendous sanctions, had completely failed. We wanted something fresh, some new method of dealing with the inequalities of wealth. Emile de Lavelaye was quite correct in attributing significance to the publication of "Progress and Poverty," though the seed sown by Henry George took root, not in the slums and alleys of our cities--no intellectual seed of any sort can germinate in the sickly, sunless atmosphere of slums--but in the minds of people who had sufficient leisure and education to think of other things than breadwinning. Henry George proposed to abolish poverty by political action: that was the new gospel which came from San Francisco in the early eighties. "Progress and Poverty" was published in America in 1879, and its author visited England at the end of 1881. Socialism hardly existed at that time in English-speaking countries, but the early advocates of land taxation were not then, as they usually are now, uncompromising individualists. "Progress and Poverty" gave an extraordinary impetus to the political thought of the time. It proposed to redress the wrongs suffered by the working classes as a whole: the poverty it considered was the poverty of the wage workers as a class, not the destitution of the unfortunate and downtrodden individuals. It did not merely propose, like philanthropy and the Poor Law, to relieve the acute suffering of the outcasts of civilisation, those condemned to wretchedness by the incapacity, the vice, the folly, or the sheer misfortune of themselves or their relations. It suggested a method by which wealth would correspond approximately with worth; by which the reward of labour would go to those that laboured; the idleness alike of rich and poor would cease; the abundant wealth created by modern industry would be distributed with something like fairness and even equality, amongst those who contributed to its production. Above all, this tremendous revolution was to be