societies, and so begin once more one of the phases through which human society has already passed.

But if, on the other hand, the increase of population is to be restricted, a difficulty no less important presents itself. A considerable number of persons have contemplated the action of a new restrictive influence (although it operated widely in the ancient civilisations) in public opinion and the conditions of life under the new order, anticipating, with a lady writer who has given attention to the subject in England, the growth of a feeling of intellectual superiority to "this absurd sacrifice to their children, of generation after generation of grown people.' But in whatever way restriction which would limit the population to the actual conditions of life might be effected, it is not necessary, after what has been said in previous chapters as to the physiological conditions of the process which has been working itself out throughout life-and nowhere more effectively and thoroughly than in human history-to deal at length with the fate of any people amongst whom the restriction was practised. The conditions of selection being suspended, such a people could not in any case avoid progressive degeneration even if we could imagine them escaping more direct consequences. In ordinary circumstances they would indubitably receive short shrift when confronted with the vigorous and aggressive life of societies where, other things being equal, selection and the stress and rivalry of existence were still continued.

Again, a class of objections, now being temperately discussed in England and Germany, according to which a state organised on a socialist basis would find more immediate difficulties, hindrances, and drawbacks, which would place it at a manifest disadvantage with other 1 Mrs. Mona Caird, Nineteenth Century, May 1892.

communities, have never been seriously dealt with by socialist writers. The enormous pressure, capable of being exercised by the competitive system at its best, operating continually to ensure the most economic and efficient system of production; the accompanying tendency of the best men to find the places for which they are best fitted; the tendency towards the free utilisation of the powers of such men to the fullest degree in the direction of invention, discovery, and improvement, coupled with the difficulty of finding (human nature being what it is) any thoroughly efficient stimulus for the whole of the population to exert itself to the highest degree when the main wants of life were secure, these are all considerations which would, in an earlier stage, tell enormously against a socialist community when matched in the general competition of life against other communities where the stress of life was greater.

It will not help us even if there are to be no competing societies, and if, in the contemplated era of socialism, the whole human family without distinction of race or colour is to be included in a federation within which the competitive forces are to be suspended. We may draw such a draft on our imagination, but our common-sense, which has to deal with materials as they exist, refuses to honour it. We are concerned, not with an imaginary being, but with man as he exists, a creature standing with countless æons of this competition behind him; every quality of his mind and body (even including, it must always be remembered, that very habit of generous thought for others which gives heart to the modern socialistic movement) the product of this rivalry, with its meaning and allotted place therein, and capable of finding its fullest and fittest employment only in its natural conditions.

But these are the mere commonplaces which only bring us to the crux of the subject. Impressive as such considerations may be to those who have caught the import of the evolutionary science of the time, no greater mistake can be made than to think that they form any practical answer to the arguments of those who would lead us on to socialism. Why? For the simple reason that, as we have throughout insisted, men are not now, and never have been, in the least concerned with, or influenced by, the estimates which scientists or any other class of persons may form of the probable effects of their present conduct on unborn generations. The motives which inspire their present acts are of quite a different kind. But it is these motives which are shaping the course of events, and it is consequently with these, and these only, that we have to deal if we would gauge the character and dimensions of the modern socialist movement. Let us see, therefore, in what way the conception, of what is called scientific socialism-of modern society developing towards socialism as the result of forces now actually at work amongst us-is justified or the contrary.

According to Marx the dominant factor in the evolution through which we are passing is the economic one. The era in which we are living began in the mediæval period with the rise of capitalism. To understand what capitalism is and few writers have grasped more thoroughly than Marx some of the ultimate facts which underlie the institution in the form in which he attacked it-we have to get behind the superficial phrases, and some of the errors of the political economists of the old school. When we reach the heart of the matter we find it to be, according to Marx, a system by which the capitalist is enabled to appropriate the surplus value of

the work of the labourers, these being able to retain as wages only what represents the average subsistence necessary for themselves and their children in keeping up this supply of labour. There is thus an inherent antagonism between the two classes.

As the conflict takes shape it begins to develop remarkable features. At the one pole we have the continued appropriation and accumulation of surplus value, with the ever-increasing wealth and power of those in whose hands it is concentrated. At the other end we have the progressive enslavement and degradation of the exploited classes. As the development continues, the workers, on the one hand, gradually come to recognise their position as a class and become possessed of a sense of their common interests. On the other hand, the competition amongst the capitalist class is great and continually growing; the larger capitalists gradually extinguish the smaller ones, and wealth becomes accumulated in fewer and fewer hands. To quote Marx's words:" Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grow the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this, too, grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour, at last, reach a point when they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder.

The knell of capitalist private property

sounds." That is to say, the state of things becomes at length intolerable; there is anarchy in production, accompanied by constantly-recurring commercial crises; and the incapacity of the capitalist classes to manage the productive forces being manifest, public opinion at last comes to a head. The organised workers seize possession of the means of production, transforming them into public property, and socialistic production becomes henceforward possible.

The transformation supposed to be effected in the latter stage of the movement is thus described by Frederick Engels: "With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then, for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions. which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who now, for the first time, becomes the real conscious lord of Nature, because he has now become master of his own social organisation... It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom." 2

This is the Marx-Engels theory of our modern civilisation, and of the denouement to which it is hasten

Capital, by Karl Marx, English translation (Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1887), vol. ii. pp. 788, 789.

2 Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, by Frederick Engels, translated by Edward Aveling, 1892.