felt to be appreciated. Well, this golden age of which
we are speaking will be the golden age of officials. In all our concerns
it will be their beloved duty to meddle, with what tact, with what
obliging words, analogy will aid us to imagine. It is likely these
gentlemen will be periodically elected; they will therefore have their
turn of being underneath, which does not always sweeten men's
conditions. The laws they will have to administer will be no clearer
than those we know to-day, and the body which is to regulate their
administration no wiser than the British Parliament. So that upon all
hands we may look for a form of servitude most galling to the
blood--servitude to many and changing masters, and for all the slights
that accompany the rule of jack-in-office. And if the Socialistic
programme be carried out with the least fulness, we shall have lost a
thing, in most respects not much to be regretted, but as a moderator of
oppression, a thing nearly invaluable--the newspaper. For the
independent journal is a creature of capital and competition; it stands
and falls with millionaires and railway bonds and all the abuses and
glories of to-day; and as soon as the State has fairly taken its bent
to authority and philanthropy, and laid the least touch on private
property, the days of the independent journal are numbered. State
railways may be good things and so may State bakeries; but a State
newspaper will never be a very trenchant critic of the State officials.

But again, these officials would have no sinecure. Crime would perhaps
be less, for some of the motives of crime we may suppose would pass
away. But if Socialism were carried out with any fulness, there would be
more contraventions. We see already new sins springing up like
mustard--School Board sins, factory sins, Merchant Shipping Act
sins--none of which I would be thought to except against in particular,
but all of which, taken together, show us that Socialism can be a hard
master even in the beginning. If it go on to such heights as we hear
proposed and lauded, if it come actually to its ideal of the ant-heap,
ruled with iron justice, the number of new contraventions will be out of
all proportion multiplied. Take the case of work alone. Man is an idle
animal. He is at least as intelligent as the ant; but generations of
advisers have in vain recommended him the ant's example. Of those who
are found truly indefatigable in business, some are misers; some are th