sitate_ at least the
material form of Socialism--that is to say, the replacement of
individual action by public organization, in spite of a hundred vested
interests. The age that regarded Herbert Spencer as its greatest
philosopher, for example, was urged nevertheless, unwillingly and
protestingly but effectually, through phase after phase of more and
more co-ordinated voluntary effort, until at last it had to undertake
a complete system of organized free public primary education. There
the moving finger of change halts not a moment; already it is going on
to secondary education, to schemes for a complete public educational
organization from reformatory school up to professorial chair. The
practical logic of the case is invincible.

So, too, the public organization of scientific research goes on
steadily against all prejudices and social theories, and, in a very
different field, the plain inconveniences of a private control of
traffic in America and England alike, force the affected property
owners whose businesses are hampered and damaged towards the
realization that freedom of private property, in these services at
least, is evil and must end. As the proofs of these pages pass through
my hands comes the news of Mr. Lloyd George's settlement of the
dispute between railway directors and _employes_ by the establishment
of a method of compulsory arbitration. Then, again, the movement for
public sanitation and hygiene spreads and broadens, and the natural
alarm of even the most conservative at the falling birth-rate and the
stationary infantile death-rate is evidently ripening for an advance
towards public control and care even in the relation of child to
parent, the most intimate of all personal affairs.

Inevitably all such movements must coalesce--their spirit is one, the
spirit of construction--and inevitably their coalescence will take the
form of a wide and generous restatement of Socialism. Nothing but a
broader understanding of the broadening propositions of Socialism is
needed for that recognition now.

Socialism, indeed, does not simply look, it appeals to the
constructive professions at the present time, to the medical man, the
engineer, the architect, the scientific agriculturist.

Each of these sorts of men, in just so far as he is concerned with the
reality of his profession, in just so far as he is worthy of his
profession, must resent the considerations of private profit, of base
economies, that consta