The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Critical Examination of Socialism, by
William Hurrell Mallock

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Title: A Critical Examination of Socialism

Author: William Hurrell Mallock

Release Date: December 30, 2005 [eBook #17416]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF
SOCIALISM***

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A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF SOCIALISM

by

W.H. MALLOCK

London
John Murray, Albemarle Street, W.
1908
Printed by
Hazell, Watson and Viney, Ld.,
London and Aylesbury.

PREFACE

The Civic Federation of New York, an influential body which aims, in
various ways, at harmonising apparently divergent industrial interests
in America, having decided on supplementing its other activities by a
campaign of political and economic education, invited me, at the
beginning of the year 1907, to initiate a scientific discussion of
socialism in a series of lectures or speeches, to be delivered under the
auspices of certain of the great Universities in the United States. This
invitation I accepted, but, the project being a new one, some difficulty
arose as to the manner in which it might best be carried out--whether
the speeches or lectures should in each case be new, dealing with some
fresh aspect of the subject, or whether they should be arranged in a
single series to be repeated without substantial alteration in each of
the cities visited by me. The latter plan was ultimately adopted, as
tending to render the discussion of the subject more generally
comprehensible to each local audience. A series of five lectures,
substantially the same, was accordingly delivered by me in New York,
Cambridge, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. But whilst this plan
secured continuity of treatment, it secured it at the expense of
comprehensiveness. Certain important points had to be passed over. In
the present volume the substance of the original lectures has been
entirely rearranged and rewritten, and more than half the matter is new.
Even in the presen