ted by so organizing promotion that the higher posts really
went to the officials distinguished by the quantity and the quality of
their work. Pensions should also be affected by the same consideration.
In any case, the evil is serious, and is becoming more so since the
number of public officials is constantly increasing. The Council of the
Law Society found some years ago that the cost of civil administration
in England had increased between the years 1894 and 1904 from 19
millions to 25 millions, and, excluding the Revenue Departments, it is
now said to have gone up to 42 millions. It is an evil that will have to
be dealt with sooner or later.

[254] Max Stirner wrote his work, _Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum_ (_The
Ego and His Own_, in the English translation of Byington), in 1845. His
life has been written by John Henry Mackay (_Max Stirner: Sein Leben und
Sein Werk_), and an interesting study of Max Stirner (whose real name
was Schmidt) will be found in James Huneker's _Egoists_.

[255] In the introduction to my earliest book, _The New Spirit_ (1889), I
set forth this position, from which I have never departed: "While we are
socializing all those things of which all have equal common need, we are
more and more tending to leave to the individual the control of those
things which in our complex civilization constitute individuality. We
socialize what we call our physical life in order that we may attain
greater freedom for what we call our spiritual life." No doubt such a
point of view was implicit in Ruskin and other previous writers, just as
it has subsequently been set forth by Ellen Key and others, while from
the economic side it has been well formulated by Mr. J.A. Hobson in his
_Evolution of Capital_: "The _very raison d'etre_ of increased social
cohesiveness is to economize and enrich the individual life, and to
enable the play of individual energy to assume higher forms out of which
more individual satisfaction may accrue." "Socialism will be of value,"
thought Oscar Wilde in his _Soul of Man_, "simply because it will lead
to Individualism." "Socialism denies economic Individualism for any,"
says Karl Noetzel ("Zur Ethischen Begrundung des Sozialismus,"
_Sozialistische Monatshefte_, 1910, Heft 23), "in order to make moral
intellectual Individualism possible for all." And as it has been seen
that Socialism leads to Individualism, so it has also been seen that
Individualism, even on the ethical plane, leads to