ably large
share of it. But he is right in his impelling motive; right, also, I am
convinced, in insisting that humanity makes a part, by far the most
important part, of political economy; and in thinking man to be of more
concern and more convincing than the longest columns of figures in the
world. For unless you include human nature in your addition, your total
is sure to be wrong and your deductions from it fallacious. Communism
means barbarism, but Socialism means, or wishes to mean, cooeperation and
community of interests, sympathy, the giving to the hands not so large a
share as to the brains, but a larger share than hitherto in the wealth
they must combine to produce--means, in short, the practical application
of Christianity to life, and has in it the secret of an orderly and
benign reconstruction. State Socialism would cut off the very roots in
personal character--self-help, forethought, and frugality--which nourish
and sustain the trunk and branches of every vigorous Commonwealth.

I do not believe in violent changes, nor do I expect them. Things in
possession have a very firm grip. One of the strongest cements of
society is the conviction of mankind that the state of things into which
they are born is a part of the order of the universe, as natural, let us
say, as that the sun should go round the earth. It is a conviction that
they will not surrender except on compulsion, and a wise society should
look to it that this compulsion be not put upon them. For the individual
man there is no radical cure, outside of human nature itself, for the
evils to which human nature is heir. The rule will always hold good that
you must

"Be your own palace or the world's your gaol."

But for artificial evils, for evils that spring from want of thought,
thought must find a remedy somewhere. There has been no period of time
in which wealth has been more sensible of its duties than now. It builds
hospitals, it establishes missions among the poor, it endows schools. It
is one of the advantages of accumulated wealth, and of the leisure it
renders possible, that people have time to think of the wants and sorrows
of their fellows. But all these remedies are partial and palliative
merely. It is as if we should apply plasters to a single pustule of the
small-pox with a view of driving out the disease. The true way is to
discover and to extirpate the germs. As society is now constituted these
are in the air it breath