You say he could not spend more money if he got it; this is not intelligible, unless you propose to prevent people spending money according to their own desires and ideas, which I suppose you do, and which I must say is absurd and monstrous and impracticable.

You say he would have no necessity to think of the future, that his wife and children would be sure of the care of the State:-quite so; all incentive taken away; for what incentive acts with a man so powerfully as providing for his wife and children?

You think we require a new reading of the proverbs to harmonise with the system of competition. The suggestion is ingenious, and you work it out prettily. But the effort is a failure when rightly looked into. Truly, union is strength; but a society in which every man is at liberty to do the best he can for himself, blended with the precautions and regulations which would prevent the liberty from working harm, would be a stronger society than one in which no man would be allowed to get more power into his hands than his neighbour, from a theoretical fear of his abusing it. In the one case, individual benevolences would be fountains of blessing; in the other, all the fountains would be stopped, and good men, as well as bad, reduced to the condition of dry wells.

Union is strength, but it must be union reasonably applied, otherwise union may be weakness itself. If you tied twelve men together with ropes, this would be union, but I fancy there would not come much strength out of it. There are other ways of tying men together to their hurt. If a community is too much taken care of, it will become debilitated. The eagles push their young out of the nests. Men have often to be pushed away from home, and thrown upon their own resources, to be fully brought out. If they are looked after all the while, they remain undeveloped. It is well for people to be compelled to look after themselves. This is not a house divided against itself, but a house building itself on the principles of a true masonry, that will stand the breeze.

Then you propose to make the proverb read, "It is better to make one enemy than a hundred friends." Well, even this might have its application. All friends and no enemies might suffocate.

It is better to have an enemy who will tone you up and put you on your mettle.

Then you would have the new reading, "The greatest good for the smallest number"; nobody will own to this, of course. The good of all is the true motto, but how is this to be achieved? This is the question. Not by coddling everybody, but by giving everybody an opportunity of developing good for themselves, which involves a degree of rivalry. Rivalry is wholesome when it is not carried too far.

Your aims are excellent, Mr. Blatchford, but your proposals are not all suited to their accomplishment. The management of human society is a delicate problem requiring the adjustment of many apparently conflicting principles, like the counter-working parts of a highly-finished engine. Some of these principles you see clearly; others you see only dimly. Under the ardour of philanthropic impulses, you would make the mistake of leaving out some, to the destruction of the whole machine. I fervently pray that you and your Socialistic brethren may never have the opportunity of making the disastrous experiment.

Your anxious and "slow," yet hopeful friend,

JOHN SMITH.

Where lies the Wrong?

My Dear Mr. Blatchford,

Τ

HIS is the pith of the question which you discuss in your 17th letter. It is really the kernel of the whole controversy; and it pains me to see how embarrassed you are in its treatment by the acceptance of a wrong principle at the hands of your adversaries. You believe in "the survival of the fittest"; that is--in the action of a law that preserves and improves the strongest by killing off the weakest. You believe that man is what he is as the result of the operation of this law, through a long line of inferior creatures in ages past; and yet you complain of its action, or at least object to its application, to the development of human society. This is inconsistent as well as unfortunate on your part.

If it really be the truth that man with his superior capacities is the product of a blind and merciless mechanical law that preserves only those who are fit to live, you cannot by any amount of protest avert its application from the further evolution of the noble species in society, and you cannot maintain a show of reason in making such a protest. Your opponents have undoubtedly the best of the argument in maintaining that the dreadful state of the poor and the overblown opulence of the rich are but branches or subdivisions of a natural law with which it is folly to interfere, if such a law exists.

In your chapter on “The Incentive of Gain," you avow your belief in "The Scientist's view-that man is a being risen from lower forms of life." Therefore you have given yourself away on this point. You need not have done so. You need not have been afraid to challenge your opponents here. Recollect Darwinism is an unproved hypothesis. Perhaps you noticed the symptoms of a

turn in the tide of Scientific opinion at the last meeting of the British Association. Lord Salisbury, in the opening address, said that the Darwinian theory "had not effected the conquest of Scientific opinion, and that there was no unanimity (among Scientific men) in the acceptance of natural selection as the sole, or even the main, agent of whatever modifications may have led up to the existing forms of life." He pointed out that the Darwinian theory was beginning more and more to appear in the position of a mere dogma for which no other authority was forthcoming than the inability of Scientific men to conceive of the participation of design in the development of the universe. As the most signal proof of this, he quoted the statement of Professor Weissman (a Darwinist) that Darwinists accepted the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, not because they were able to demonstrate it, nor because they were even able to imagine it, but because it was the only possible explanation of the development of living forms which they could conceive, apart from the help of a principle of design.

Look at this, Mr. Blatchford: Darwinists cannot conceive of the action of natural selection in the development of species, yet they accept it; they cannot conceive of the co-operation of design, therefore they reject it. Here is a pretty position! I should say sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If the inability to conceive of the co-operation of design is to be a ground for the rejection of design, which explains all difficulties, a similar inability confessed in the case of natural selection should be fatal to natural selection. But no! They can swallow the one inability because it is agreeable they cannot swallow the other because-because-ha, ha, Mr. Blatchford-" the natural mind is enmity against God." I pray you to remember your own excellent advice on page 131: "Don't let us mistake the hasty deductions of erring men for the unchanging and triumphant laws of nature."

You need not have got down on your knees to the survival of the fittest. You would have found it easier work to deal with your opponents if you had not done so; though I do not promise you could have got the better of them even then, because on this particular question of Socialism, they are as much in the right as you.

You put the case well when you say "the noblest is really the most proper to survive"; but see how you in this contradict your own profession of faith in "the survival of the fittest." The noblest

does not survive. As you pithily express it, "Brigham Young was wealthy and honoured; while Christ lived a mendicant preacher, and died the death of a felon." The question is constantly coming back on you. Why? Why? As you plaintively say: “The question, are the poor unworthy, or is it the arrangement of society that is unworthy, has still to be answered." Where are you to look for the answer, Mr. Blatchford? You admire Christ; do you think He can contribute nothing to the answer? The issue of matters will show, in the long run, that the answer is with Him, and with no one else. I, for one, accept His answer, and see no other.

Man is all you claim for him in his unmeasurable superiority to the beasts; and because he is higher than they, a higher explanation of his misfortune must be sought for. How is it that the noblest species upon earth should be the greatest failure? This is the question to which no naturalist systems of philosophy can give a philosophic answer. Christ's answer meets the case in every way. It is this-that man, for the time being, has broken away from God, for whom he was made in the first instance, and that he is in a banished state for the time being, with however the prospect, and the purpose, and the effort (in due progress) of being brought back by God's own hand. This may seem strange language to you, Mr. Blatchford, but time will show it is the language of truth.

Your Socialism does not propose to bring man back to God, but to the study of microbes. It would not accomplish a great reform if it accomplished this, and it is not in the power of Socialism to accomplish even this. Socialism is the multitude at work in the endeavour to make the world what it ought to be; but the multitude does not know what the world ought to be, and in the clash of discordant wills, it has not the power to bring it to what it ought to be even if it knew.

You demonstrate that the present conditions of society are unfavourable to the survival of the fittest. You show that practically they give "the race to the swift, the battle to the strong, the weak to the wall, the vanquished to the sword." In the absence of law, "the man with most strength and ferocity would take by force of arms the goods of the weak and timid, and their lives." In the presence of bad law, you describe commercialism as a war of arts-a gambling or fighting with weapons of parchment and the like, and really plunder by force of cunning, instead of by force of arms.