in so many words,
he said he would have nothing to do with it, its subject being, in his
opinion, unlikely to interest, or its argument to benefit, anyone. It
is, I think, not merely an author's vanity which inclines me to regard
his decision not so much as a mistaken literary judgment, but as the
expression of a temperamental apathy with which many Conservatives are
inflicted with regard to social problems. An entire edition of the work
was bought soon after its publication by the Central Conservative Office
as a textbook for the use of speakers. With a similar object in view,
another association, six or seven years later, offered to purchase an
entire edition likewise; but I was obliged to decline the proposal,
because I had come to recognize that the statistical portions of the
work had, in part, become obsolete, and were in part not sufficiently
complete. Meanwhile successive editions of it had been sold to the
English public. It had many readers in America, and a very large sum was
offered me by a Melbourne newspaper for a series of short articles in
which its main arguments should be condensed.

My personal concern, however, in these matters was diminished by the
fact that the argument of this work, as a whole, soon seemed to me
susceptible of a more comprehensive statement. I had already, as I have
said before, attempted in my novel, _The Old Order Changes_, to unite
the problems of industrial and social politics with those relating to
religion and the higher forms of affection, whereas in _Labor and the
Popular Welfare_ I had confined my attention to pure economics only. I
had, indeed, thus confined it in _Social Equality_ also. But it now
began to dawn on me that, quite apart from the sphere of religion, the
philosophy of modern economics could be, and required to be, extended in
what for me was a new direction.

A year or two after the publication of _Labor and the Popular Welfare_ a
work made its appearance which, although it was couched in the driest
terms of philosophy, sold as rapidly as any popular novel, and raised
its author at once from absolute obscurity to fame. This was _Social
Evolution_, by Mr. Benjamin Kidd. Mr. Kidd's style, apart from certain
tricks or mannerisms, was, for philosophic purposes, admirable. But no
mere merits of style would account for the popularity of a work which
consisted, in form at all events, of recondite discussions of evolution
as conceived by the Darwinians on the one