owners, and to deliver the poor from exorbitant rents, amounting frequently to a quarter of their wages, for a bad house. The ground landlord, the builder, and the house-owner between them divide a very large revenue, levied on every one in the form of rents, but which press especially on the poor, the rent of whose houses is raised to a scarcity price in many places, because they must live, or find it convenient to live, near their place of work, and because there are many applicants. The demand for houses and house accommodation exceeding the supply, forces up the rent, though the house be bad and unhealthy; and here is one case where the municipalities might counteract the selfishness, and stay the hand of the house-owner, by partly supplying houses for the lower classes at rents which would allow them only current interest.

II.

THERE is a large province of industry in which co-operative labour cannot be applied with any very decided advantage, and in which for other reasons it is not desirable to attempt it on a large scale. I mean agriculture, because in it the advantages of the large system of production so conspicuous in manufactures is disputed, and in any case is not great, while the application of it on a large scale in Europe generally, would amount not only to a universal agrarian revolution, but to a revolution in social habits. and in daily private life. Here, therefore, there is no room for State enterprise, any more than for the extreme thing desired by the collectivist-socialists,

C C

For hundreds of years the cultivators of the land. have been living in France, Germany, and most countries in isolated farmhouses, or in villages, cultivating the soil with the help of the grown members of their families, and sometimes of hired labourers. This has been the case too in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and (though to a much less extent) in England also. The cultivators of the land are attached to their way of life, and everywhere are peculiarly conservative in habits and sentiments.

Now co-operative farming, as conceived by the Socialists, would require them to change their way of life, to live in a common residence, or at least in close proximity to each other, to abandon their traditional homesteads, to give up their sense of private proprietary rights, their sense of independence, the things, the most cherished and consecrated in their feelings, and that make the very essence of their life, and all for what? That by their united labour thrown into a common stock they might finally, after re-division, have perhaps a little more than they would have had working on their own farm for themselves. For this doubtful gain added to the inseparable company of their fellow-co-operators, of which they might easily have too much, they are to submit to be officered and brigaded by the State. For a possible trifle extra per annum, they are to bring themselves, or let themselves be put into community enforced and distasteful, (for all this is gravely proposed by the Collectivist leaders, though for prudential reasons but slightly referred to in working-men's programmes). But however tempting the prospect is made, and however

the authority of the State is kept in the background, I do not think many peasant proprietors in France would be tempted to voluntarily enter the Co-operative and Collectivist Commonwealth so far as it embraces agriculture.

And now let the Authoritarian Socialist observe that the extra amount per annum would certainly not be forthcoming; since it is precisely in the case of peasant properties or good land tenures that the individual owner or tenant is stimulated to the maximum of industry and careful cultivation, because the results directly accrue to himself, while under co-operative farming it would not be his obvious interest to labour with such energy. On the contrary, it would be each one's interest to do least, provided the others did not act on the same rule, and there would be the fatal temptation to each to do less than his utmost, which not even the presence of the overseer (however necessary under the system) could overcome wholly ; from which it follows that even aided by the best machines and the largest holdings, the quota of the co-operative farmer would be less than that of the individual farmer.

Let us add, to come near home, that in Ireland, or the Highlands, or in Wales, as it would be wholly impossible to get the present occupiers into the agricultural brigades, so even if it were tried with agricultural labourers it is much to be feared that they would disagree amongst themselves. And they certainly would do so, as well as take their work easy, unless the discipline of the brigades was of the strictest kind.

For these reasons, I should recommend the Socialist to give up the idea of including, merely for the sake of symmetry and universality, the farmers in the Co-operative Commonwealth. The older agrarian Socialism will suit them better-that which aimed at equality in the main and liberty, and which secured it by planting each one under his own vine, at a convenient distance from his fellows, but not too far for neighbourly help and voluntary co-operation. This has succeeded in France, in the United States, and other countries, and it is a further development of this that we want in Ireland and parts of Great Britain, and not Co-operative Farming, which for political, social, and historical reasons, is out of the question.

Here, then, is one very large industrial province not suitable for State management, and a very large population that for a very long time must be exempted from citizenship in the Co-operative Commonwealth. The farming class of Europe and the United States are not indeed opposed to Socialism, but they will only be Socialists in their own fashion, and in the old sense. They are not, as a rule, opposed to the different Socialism of the town artisan, which aims at the control and possession of capital, only they think it does not concern them, provided it does not bring prolonged anarchy.

III.

AND here I find myself between the "points of mighty opposites," between Adam Smith and all the classical economists reinforced by Herbert Spencer

on the one side, and on the other, St. Simon, Karl Marx, Lassalle, Louis Blanc, and all the radical and systematic Socialists. The reasons for rejecting

Socialism and the Socialist solution of our social difficulties I have already given at length; it remains to justify the middle position held by showing the insuperable objections to the opposite system of noninterference in the economic sphere, of which Mr. Spencer is perhaps the most eminent living advocate. It must indeed be allowed that any doctrine proceeding from the philosopher of Evolution deserves weighty consideration, and he is wholly opposed to State intervention in the sphere of industry, whether in the way of regulation or management. He furnishes new arguments to the laissez-faire school, drawn from the general principles of his philosophy. The functions of the State, he thinks, should be minimized both in its legislative and administrative capacity; it is not its business to undertake industry at all. In the ideal Society of the far future, the functions of the State will have ceased in its legislative capacity. There will be no need of coercive law when our nature has been completely broken in or adapted to its environment: right conduct will then be done as a matter of course, and will even be pleasurable, so that laws with penalties may be dispensed with. Its administrative sphere also will be reduced to zero when industrialism shall have completely extruded militarism. There will be no army, no navy, and the Civil Service will be reduced to the smallest compass. In fact the State, if evolution only goes in the lines it should and would go,