ill care for and conserve the powers of
the human industrial tool as the lord of the manor looked after the
human agricultural implement...." Here is the essential point: the
efficiency of the human industrial tool is to be improved with or
without his consent.

"Unrestrained Capitalism," says the same writer in explanation of
his prediction, "has hitherto invariably meant the physical
deterioration of the working class and the marginal disintegration
of society--the loosening of social ties and the pushing of
marginal members of society over the brink into poverty, pauperism,
vagrancy, drunkenness, prostitution, wife desertion and crime, _but
this deterioration is not the main indictment against capitalism_,
and will be remedied by the wiser capitalists themselves. The main
indictment of capitalism is that it selfishly and stupidly blocks
the road of orderly and continuous progress for the race."

The proposal of the social reformers, as far as the workers are
concerned aims to put an end to this deterioration, to standardize
industry or to establish a minimum of wages, leisure, health, and
industrial efficiency. The writer says that the Socialists aim at
something more than this.

"The criterion of social justice in every civilized community," he
writes, "is, and always has been, not how large or how intense is
the misery of the social debtor class, but what is done with the
social surplus of industry? It was formerly used to build pyramids,
to create a landed or ecclesiastical or literary aristocracy, to
conduct wars, or to provide the means of a sensuous life for the
majority of a privileged class, and the means of dilettantism for
the minority of it. _The difference between the near Socialist and
the true Socialist is principally that the main attention of the
former is given to the negative side of the social problem--the
condition of the submerged classes, while that of the latter is
given to the positive side of the problem--the wonderful
development, power, and life that would come to that race and the
individual if a wise and social use were to be made of the surplus
of industry._"

FOOTNOTES:

[46] "Fabianism and Empire," p. 62.

[47] Articles by Hyman Strunsky on Welfare Work, _The Coming Nation_,
1910.

[48] do, do.

[49] Lloyd George, _op. cit._, p. 93.

[50] Llo