and
finally with the prospect for a sane, orderly and continuous social
reform.

_V.--The Land of Dreams: The Utopia of the Socialist_

WHO is there that has not turned at times from the fever and fret of the
world we live in, from the spectacle of its wasted energy, its wild
frenzy of work and its bitter inequality, to the land of dreams, to the
pictured vision of the world as it might be?

Such a vision has haunted in all ages the brooding mind of mankind; and
every age has fashioned for itself the image of a "somewhere" or
"nowhere"--a Utopia in which there should be equality and justice for
all. The vision itself is an outcome of that divine discontent which
raises man above his environment.

Every age has had its socialism, its communism, its dream of bread and
work for all. But the dream has varied always in the likeness of the
thought of the time. In earlier days the dream was not one of social
wealth. It was rather a vision of the abnegation of riches, of humble
possessions shared in common after the manner of the unrealized ideal of
the Christian faith. It remained for the age of machinery and power to
bring forth another and a vastly more potent socialism. This was no
longer a plan whereby all might be poor together, but a proposal that
all should be rich together. The collectivist state advocated by the
socialist of to-day has scarcely anything in common with the communism
of the middle ages.

Modern socialism is the direct outcome of the age of machine production.
It takes its first inspiration from glaring contrasts between riches and
poverty presented by the modern era, from the strange paradox that has
been described above between human power and its failure to satisfy
human want. The nineteenth century brought with it the factory and the
factory slavery of the Lancashire children, the modern city and city
slum, the plutocracy and the proletariat, and all the strange
discrepancy between wealth and want that has disfigured the material
progress of the last hundred years. The rising splendor of capitalism
concealed from the dazzled eye the melancholy spectacle of the new
industrial poverty that lay in the shadow behind it.

The years that followed the close of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 were in
many senses years of unexampled misery. The accumulated burden of the
war lay heavy upon Europe. The rise of the new machine power had
dislocated the older system. A multitude of landless men clamore