classes who grew rich on sweated labor covered an abyss of horror; and it was by raising the lid from that abyss that Karl Marx, in his terrible and epoch-making book called Capital, became the prophet of that great revolt of outraged humanity against Capitalism which is the emotional force of the Socialist movement. However, your subject and mine just now is not Emotional Socialism but Intelligent Socialism; so let us keep calm. Anger is a bad counsellor. Long before Marx published his book the Government had been forced to interfere. A succession of laws called the Factory Acts, which include regulation of mines and other industries, were passed to forbid the employment of children below a certain age; to regulate the employment of women and young persons; to limit the hours during which a factory employing such persons could be kept open; to force employers to fence in machines which crushed and tore to pieces the employees who brushed against them in moments of haste or carelessness; to pay wages in money instead of in credit at employers’ shops where bad food and bad clothes were sold at exorbitant prices; to provide sanitary conveniences; to limewash factory walls at frequent intervals; to forbid the practice of taking meals at work in the factory instead of during an interval and in another place; to frustrate the dodges by which these laws were at first evaded by the employers; and to appoint factory inspectors to see that the laws were carried out. These laws were the fruit of an agitation headed, not by Socialists, but by a pious Conservative nobleman, Lord Shaftesbury, who did not find in his Bible any authority for the Capitalist theory that you could and should produce universal well-being by breaking all the laws of God and Man whenever you could make a commercial profit by doing so. This amazing theory was not only put into practice by greedy people, but openly laid down and explicitly advocated in books by quite sincere and serious professors of political economy and jurisprudence (calling themselves The Manchester School) and in speeches made in opposition to the Factory Acts by moral and highminded orator-manufacturers like John Bright. It is still taught as authentic political science at our universities. It has broken the moral authority of university bred Churchmen, and reduced university bred Statesmen to intellectually self-satisfied impotence. It is perhaps the worst of the many rationalist dogmas that have in the course of human history led naturally amiable logicians to countenance and commit villainies that would revolt professed criminals.