between classes, who are at present in needless antagonism, that sane
and sober understanding with regard to their respective positions which
alone can form the basis of any sound social policy in the future.

Of the individual demands or proposals now put forward by socialists,
many point to objects which are individually desirable and are within
limits practicable; but what hinders, more than anything else, any
successful attempt to realise them is the fact that they are at present
placed in a false setting. They resemble a demand for candles on the
part of visitors at an hotel, who would have, if they did not get them,
to go to bed in the dark--a demand which would be contested by nobody if
it were not that those who made it demanded the candles only as a means
of setting fire to the bed-curtains. The demands for old-age pensions,
and for government action on behalf of the unemployed, for example, as
now put forward in Great Britain, by labour Members who identify the
interests of labour with socialism, are demands of this precise kind.
The care of the aged, the care of the unwillingly and the discipline of
the willingly idle, are among the most important objects to which social
statesmanship can address itself; but the doctrines of socialism hinder
instead of facilitate the accomplishment of them, because they identify
the cure of certain diseased parts of the social organism with a
treatment that would be ruinous to the health and ultimately to the life
of the whole.

We may, however, look forward to a time, and may do our best to hasten
it, when, the fallacies of socialism being discredited and the mischief
which they produce having exhausted itself, we may be able to recognise
that they have done permanent good as well as temporary evil--partly
because their very perverseness and their varying and accumulating
absurdities will have compelled men to recognise, and accept as
self-evident, the countervailing truths which to many of the sanest
thinkers have hitherto remained obscure; and partly because socialism,
no matter how false as a theory of society, and no matter how
impracticable as a social programme, will have called attention to evils
which might otherwise have escaped attention, or been relegated to the
class of evils for which no alleviation is possible.

Even to suggest the manner in which these evils would be treated by a
sound and scientific statesmanship would be wholly beyond the scope of a
volume