t
masses can be regularly kept alive at the lowest stage of existence
without being periodically swept away by a "black death" or a horde of
brutal invaders. If we choose to turn our advantages to account in this
way, no nostrums will put an end to poverty; and the evil can only be
met--as I venture to assume--by an elevation of the moral level,
involving all that is implied in spreading civilisation downward.

The difficulty shows itself in discussions of the proper sphere of
government. Upon that vast and most puzzling topic I will only permit
myself one remark. In former times the great aim of reformers was the
limitation of the powers of government. They came to regard it as a
kind of bogy or extra-natural force, which acted to oppress the poor in
order to maintain certain personal privileges. Some, like Godwin of the
"Political Justice," held that the millennium implied the abolition of
government and the institution of anarchy. The early utilitarians held
that government might be reformed by placing power in the hands of the
subjects, who would use it only for their own interests, but still
retained the prejudices engendered in their long struggle against
authority, and held that its functions should still be gradually
restricted on pain of developing a worse tyranny than the old. The
government has been handed over to the people as they desired, but with
the natural result that the new authorities not only use it to support
their interests, but retain the conviction of its extra-natural, or
perhaps supernatural, efficacy. It is regarded as an omnipotent body
which can not only say (as it can) that whatever it pleases shall be
legal, but that whatever is made a law in the juridical sense shall at
once become a law of nature. Even their individualist opponents, who
profess to follow Mr. Herbert Spencer, seem often to regard the power
of government, not as one result of evolution, but as something
external which can constrain and limit evolution. It corresponds to a
kind of outside pressure which interferes arbitrarily with the
so-called natural course of development, and should therefore be
abolished. To me, on the contrary, it seems that government is simply
one of the social organs, with powers strictly limited by its relation
to others and by the nature of the sentiment upon which it rests. There
are obvious reasons, in the centralisation of vast industrial
interests, the "integration," as Mr. Spencer calls it,