stem of unchecked competition
is an outgrowth of conditions which are changing, and which ought to
change. The idealist longs for a society which shall effectually seek
the highest good of every member, and supplement the hunger for personal
advantage with satisfaction in the good of all. The toiler and the
idealist unite to seek a more generous and serviceable order in the
community, and the tendency is vaguely called Socialism. One conspicuous
exponent is Karl Marx, who, with his followers, would make the highly
centralized German state the starting-point for a still more
authoritative and minute regulation of the community, directed to the
equal material benefit of all its members. By a different road a degree
of fraternal organization is being attained, through voluntary
associations of workingmen, for mutual support as toward their employers,
or for independent production or distribution. All definite and dogmatic
schemes of social reform prove upon challenge to need adjustment and
modification, to fit the actual workings of a society already infinitely
complex. It is as the sentiment which for want of a better word we call
socialistic works along with that broad and candid study of fact which we
call scientific, and toward an ideal in which the material is but an
instrument of the spiritual,--that there is solid promise of advance.

With these sentiments of Liberty and Social Order may be named what is
sometimes called Philanthropy, or in a broader way of speaking may be
named Humanity,--the unselfish passion for the good of others, the ardor
of service, to which early Christianity gave outlet in missions, and
which now throws itself into reform, education, amelioration in every
direction of human need.

More central to man than any social ideal is the personal ideal. For
society is but an aggregation of units; state, church, community, family,
have their aim and outcome in the individual man; they are serviceable
only as through them he becomes good and happy. What new interpretations
has this century seen of the personal ideal? They may partly be read in
a group of poets of the English-speaking people. Wordsworth, loyal to
the forms of the old Christianity, shows life as really sustained and
gladdened by simple duty and by the sacramental beauty of nature--one
giving the rule of conduct, the other disclosing the divinity of the
world. Tennyson gives in "In Memoriam" that interpretation of human life