It is as a question of economics, of human rights and of the spirit, that the social question is discussed in this book. The author thinks that he perceives, how the true form of the social question emerges as an outcome of the requirements of the economic life, the life of "rights" and the spiritual life. Through such a perception alone can the impulses come, which shall make it possible to give these three branches of social life a shape that permits of healthy life within the social order. In the earlier ages of mankind's evolution, the social instincts secured these three branches being woven together in the whole life of society in a manner adapted to human nature at that period. At the present stage of his evolution, man is faced with the necessity of working out this combination of function by conscious, determinate social will and purpose. Between those earlier ages and the present, in the countries where the question of a social purpose is most immediate, we find the old instincts and the new consciousness overlapping and playing through one another in a fashion quite inadequate to the needs of modern mankind. In a great deal of social thinking, which people believe to be clear-sighted and conscious, the old instincts are still at work and enfeeble men's thought for dealing with urgent facts. It requires a much more radical effort than is usually supposed, for the man of the present day to work his way out of the husks of what is dead and done with. One must first be willing to recognise this fully, before, in the author's opinion, it is possible to see the forms that industrial economy, human rights, and spiritual life must take, in order to be in keeping with a healthy social life such as the new age demands. What the author feels called on to say as to the lines that these new forms must inevitably follow, is submitted to the judgment of the day in the following pages. The author's desire, is to give the first impetus along a path, that shall lead to social ends in keeping with the actual realities and exigencies of life at the present time; for he believes, that it is only through effort thus directed that our social will and purpose can get beyond mere utopianism and wordy sentiment. And if anyone still thinks that this book has somewhat of a utopian character, the author would ask him to consider the pictures which people draw in their own minds of the kind of society that they look to see arise,--how very wide of life such pictures are, and how apt to degenerate into mere moonshine. That is the very reason, why, when these people do meet with something that is drawn from actual reality and experience,--as attempted here,--they regard it as a utopia. To many persons, nothing is "concrete" outside their own customary line of thought; and so the concrete itself is to them an abstraction, when they are unaccustomed to think it. [1]--Hence they will think this book abstract.