platitudinous, so uniform, so
unprofitable--so fatally oblivious of what even the word _education_
means[257]--that some day, perhaps, the revolted Individualist spirit will
arise in irresistible might to sweep away the whole worthless structure
from top to bottom, with even such possibilities of good as it may
conceal. The educationalists of to-day may do well to remember that it
is wise to be generous to your enemies even in the interests of your own
preservation.

In every age the question of Individualism and Socialism takes on a
different form. In our own age it has become acute under the form of a
conflict between the advocates of good heredity and the advocates of
good environment. On the one hand there is the desire to breed the
individual to a high degree of efficiency by eugenic selection,
favouring good stocks and making the procreation of bad stocks more
difficult. On the other hand there is the effort so to organize the
environment by collectivist methods that life for all may become easy
and wholesome. As usual, those who insist on the importance of good
environment are inclined to consider that the question of heredity may
be left to itself, and those who insist on the importance of good
heredity are indifferent to environment. As usual, also, there is a real
underlying harmony of those two demands. There is, however, here more
than this. In this most modern of their embodiments, Socialism and
Individualism are not merely harmonious, each is the key to the other,
which remains unattainable without it. However carefully we improve our
breed, however anxiously we guard the entrance to life, our labour will
be in vain if we neglect to adapt the environment to the fine race we
are breeding. The best individuals are not the toughest, any more than
the highest species are the toughest, but rather, indeed, the reverse,
and no creature needs so much and so prolonged an environing care as
man, to ensure his survival. On the other hand, an elaborate attention
to the environment, combined with a reckless inattention to the quality
of the individuals born to live in that environment can only lead to an
overburdened social organization which will speedily fall by its own
weight.

During the past century the Socialists of the school for bettering the
environment have for the most part had the game in their own hands. They
founded themselves on the very reasonable basis of sympathy, a basis
which the eighteenth-centu