kin writes without
bitterness, if without much logic. It is not for me to say whether
modern Socialists are well advised in admitting that these crude
suggestions were anticipations of their own ideas. The most natural
inference would be that vague guesses about the wickedness of the rich
have been in all ages current among the poor, and now and then take
more pretentious form. Most men want very naturally to get as much and
to work as little as they can, and call their desire a first principle
of justice.

Perhaps, however, it is fairer to notice in how many points there was
unconscious agreement; and how by converting very excellent maxims
into absolute dogmas, from which a whole system was deducible, the
theories appeared to be mutually contradictory, and, taken separately,
became absurd. The palpable and admitted evil was the growth of
pauperism and demoralisation of the labourer. The remedy, according to
the Utilitarians, is to raise the sense of individual responsibility,
to make a man dependent upon his own exertions, and to give him
security that he will enjoy their fruit. Let government give education
on one hand and security on the other, and equality will follow in due
time. The sentimental Radical naturally replies that leaving a man to
starve does not necessarily make him industrious; that, in point of
fact, great and growing inequality of wealth has resulted; and that
the rights of man should be applied not only to political privilege,
but to the possession of property. The Utilitarians have left out
justice by putting equality in the background. Justice, as Bentham
replied, has no meaning till you have settled by experience what laws
will produce happiness; and your absolute equality would destroy the
very mainspring of social improvement. Meanwhile the Conservative
thinks that both parties are really fostering the evils by making
individualism supreme, and that organisation is necessary to
improvement; while one set of Radicals would perpetuate a mere blind
struggle for existence, and the other enable the lowest class to
enforce a dead level of ignorance and stupidity. They therefore call
upon government to become paternal and active, and to teach not only
morality but religion; and upon the aristocracy to discharge its
functions worthily, in order to stamp out social evils and prevent a
servile insurrection. But how was the actual government of George IV.
and Sidmouth and Eldon to be converted to a sen