mands of social stability. Some things
are possible and some are not; some are impossible to-day, and possible
or easy to-morrow. Others are forever out of the question.

But this much at least ought to appear clear if the line of argument
indicated above is accepted, namely, that there is no great hope for
universal betterment of society by the mere advance of technical
industrial progress and by the unaided play of the motive of every man
for himself.

The enormous increase in the productivity of industrial effort would
never of itself have elevated by one inch the lot of the working class.
The rise of wages in the nineteenth century and the shortening of hours
that went with it was due neither to the advance in mechanical power
nor to the advance in diligence and industriousness, nor to the advance,
if there was any, in general kindliness. It was due to the organization
of labor. Mechanical progress makes higher wages possible. It does not,
of itself, advance them by a single farthing. Labor saving machinery
does not of itself save the working world a single hour of toil: it only
shifts it from one task to another.

Against a system of unrestrained individualism, energy, industriousness
and honesty might shatter itself in vain. The thing is merely a race in
which only one can be first no matter how great the speed of all; a
struggle in which one, and not all, can stand upon the shoulders of the
others. It is the restriction of individualism by the force of
organization and by legislation that has brought to the world whatever
social advance has been achieved by the great mass of the people.

The present moment is in a sense the wrong time to say this. We no
longer live in an age when down-trodden laborers meet by candlelight
with the ban of the law upon their meeting. These are the days when
"labor" is triumphant, and when it ever threatens in the overweening
strength of its own power to break industrial society in pieces in the
fierce attempt to do in a day what can only be done in a generation. But
truth is truth. And any one who writes of the history of the progress of
industrial society owes it to the truth to acknowledge the vast social
achievement of organized labor in the past.

And what of the future?

By what means and in what stages can social progress be further
accelerated? This I propose to treat in the succeeding chapters, dealing
first with the proposals of the socialists and the revolutionaries,