y intertangled with that of his fellow citizens. In fine, there
is little left but his own conscience into which he can withdraw.

Such a man is well aware that times have changed since his
great-grandfather's day. But he is not aware of the profound extent to
which his own opinions have been affected by the changing times. He is
no longer an individualist. He has become by brute force of
circumstances a sort of collectivist, puzzled only as to how much of a
collectivist to be.

Individualism of the extreme type is, therefore, long since out of date.
To attack it is merely to kick a dead dog. But the essential problem of
to-day is to know how far we are to depart from its principles. There
are those who tell us--and they number many millions--that we must
abandon them entirely. Industrial society, they say, must be reorganized
from top to bottom; private industry must cease. All must work for the
state; only in a socialist commonwealth can social justice be found.
There are others, of whom the present writer is one, who see in such a
programme nothing but disaster: yet who consider that the individualist
principle of "every man for himself" while it makes for national wealth
and accumulated power, favors overmuch the few at the expense of the
many, puts an over-great premium upon capacity, assigns too harsh a
punishment for easy indolence, and, what is worse, exposes the
individual human being too cruelly to the mere accidents of birth and
fortune. Under such a system, in short, to those who have is given and
from those who have not is taken away even that which they have. There
are others again who still view individualism just as the vast majority
of our great-grandfathers viewed it, as a system hard but just: as
awarding to every man the fruit of his own labor and the punishment of
his own idleness, and as visiting, in accordance with the stern but
necessary ordination of our existence, the sins of the father upon the
child.

The proper starting point, then, for all discussion of the social
problem is the consideration of the individualist theory of industrial
society. This grew up, as all the world knows, along with the era of
machinery itself. It had its counterpart on the political side in the
rise of representative democratic government. Machinery, industrial
liberty, political democracy--these three things represent the basis of
the progress of the nineteenth century.

The chief exposition of the system is f