On the other, the slower,
but no less inevitable disaster that would attend the continuation in
its present form of the system under which we have lived. Either way
lies destruction; the one swift and immediate as a fall from a great
height; the other gradual, but equally dreadful, as the slow
strangulation in a morass. Somewhere between the two lies such narrow
safety as may be found.

The Ancients were fond of the metaphor, taken from the vexed Sicilian
Seas, of Scylla and Charybdis. The twin whirlpools threatened the
affrightened mariner on either side. To avoid one he too hastily cast
the ship to destruction in the other. Such is precisely the position
that has been reached at the present crisis in the course of human
progress. When we view the shortcomings of the present individualism,
its waste of energy, its fretful overwork, its cruel inequality and the
bitter lot that it brings to the uncounted millions of the submerged, we
are inclined to cry out against it, and to listen with a ready ear to
the easy promises of the idealist. But when we turn to the contrasted
fallacies of socialism, its obvious impracticality and the dark gulf of
social chaos that yawns behind it, we are driven back shuddering to
cherish rather the ills we have than fly to others we know not of.

Yet out of the whole discussion of the matter some few things begin to
merge into the clearness of certain day. It is clear enough on the one
hand that we can expect no sudden and complete transformation of the
world in which we live. Such a process is impossible. The industrial
system is too complex, its roots are too deeply struck and its whole
organism of too delicate a growth to permit us to tear it from the soil.
Nor is humanity itself fitted for the kind of transformation which fills
the dreams of the perfectionist. The principle of selfishness that has
been the survival instinct of existence since life first crawled from
the slime of a world in evolution, is as yet but little mitigated. In
the long process of time some higher cosmic sense may take its place. It
has not done so yet. If the kingdom of socialism were opened to-morrow,
there are but few fitted to enter.

But on the other hand it is equally clear that the doctrine of "every
man for himself," as it used to be applied, is done with forever. The
time has gone by when a man shall starve asking in vain for work; when
the listless outcast shall draw his rags shivering about him unheede