workmen themselves, and an effective system of enforcement of the same; (7) regulation of prison labor.

The Fabian Society in England, a socialist organization, maintains that the solution of the problem of poverty is government ownership of the means of production, but it does not believe with Marx that it involves a bitter struggle between workingmen and capitalists. The Fabians contend rather that the whole nation should be educated into socialistic doctrines, and two of their prominent leaders, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, advocate as the basis for all other reforms the adoption of a policy of a "national minimum," which they explain as follows:

programme

of wages

The policy of the "national minimum " translates itself into 396. A four main branches of legislative and executive activity. There Fabian will have to be a national minimum of wages. The trusts, or of reform the other employers, will be under no legal obligation to employ any person whatsoever. But if they do employ him or her, Minimum it will be a condition of every contract, not to be waived or ignored, that its terms shall not be such as will impair the efficiency of the citizen or diminish the vitality of the race. To engage labor at wages insufficient to repair the waste of tissue caused by the employment is demonstrably to injure the community as a whole, and will be prosecuted as such in the criminal courts. Those whose labor is not worth the national minimum the aged, the crippled, and the blind; the mentally or morally deficient; the epileptic; and the chronically feckless and feeble-minded — will be maintained by the community, as indeed they are now. But of all the ways of maintaining those unable to earn a full livelihood, by far the most costly and injurious is to allow them to compete in the labor market, and thus to drag down by their infirmity those who are whole. There are still people, of course, who simply cannot imagine how a legal minimum wage could possibly be enforced, just as there were, sixty years ago, economists who demonstrated the impossibility of factory laws. As a matter of

and

on

to

tizen

eserva

fact, the legal minimum wage can be seen in force to-day in
Victoria and New Zealand, South Australia, and New South
Wales.

There will be a national minimum of leisure and recreation
secured by law to every citizen. It will be an implied condi-
tion of every contract of employment, rigidly enforced by law,
that it shall leave untouched sixteen hours out of each twenty-
four for needful sleep, recreation, exercise of mind or body,
and the duties of citizenship and family life. Any attempt by
man or woman to sell for wages any part of the sixteen sacred
hours will be blamed as virtual embezzlement, since this part
of the twenty-four-hours day must be regarded as necessarily
reserved for the purpose of maintaining unimpaired the effi-
ciency of the race. Any employer purchasing them, or allow-
ing them to be spent in his mill or mine, will be prosecuted
and punished, as if he had incited to embezzlement or had
received stolen goods.

There will be a national minimum of sanitation, enforced public not merely on land or house owners or occupiers, but also on

te

onal

5

local governing authorities. The nation will find it preposter-
ous that any city, merely out of stupidity or incapacity or par-
simony, should foster disease, or bring up its quota of citizens
in a condition of impaired vitality. The power of the com-
munity as a whole will, somehow or other, be brought to bear
upon every backward district, compelling it to introduce pure
water, to improve its drainage, and to take such action, even
by municipal building if need be, that no family in the land
shall have less than "three rooms and a scullery," as the mini-
mum required for health and decency. Along with this must
go the adequate provision of medical attendance, skilled nurs-
ing, and hospital accommodation for the sick. Within a gen-
eration of the adoption of such a policy the death rate and
sickness experience would show a reduction of one third of what
is at present endured as if it were the decree of Providence.

There will be a national minimum of education - not
merely in the provision of schools, but in genuinely compul-
sory attendance at them. Besides schools and colleges of
every grade, there will have to be an adequate "scholarship

ladder," securing maintenance as well as free tuition, right up to the post-graduate course, for every scholar proving himself or herself fitted for anything beyond common schooling. And this provision will be enforced by the national power upon local school authorities as well as upon parents and employers. What right has any part of the community to allow any part of its quota of citizens to be reared in ignorance or to suffer even one potential genius to be lost to the community? The next few years will see not only a great improvement in common schooling but also the doubling or trebling of our expenditure on higher education.

Only by the enforcement of some such national minimum Reform to of subsistence, leisure, sanitation, and education will modern prevent decay industrial communities escape degeneration and decay. Where life is abandoned to unfettered competition, what is known as Gresham's law applies, the bad drives out the good. To prevent this evil result is, as both Europe and America are discovering in the twentieth century, the main function of government.

There are a great number of earnest and thoughtful men, who recognize fully the many evils which accompany our present industrial system, but at the same time hold that socialism, instead of remedying things, would only make them worse. Professor John B. Clark, one of the most distinguished economists in America, in an address recently delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society in New York, fairly reviewed the excellent features of socialist theories, and then advanced the following important arguments against the socialist position.

arguments

The pursuit of wealth now furnishes the outlet for the over- 397. Promastering ambition of many persons. In the new socialistic state fessor Clark's the desire to rise in the world would have only one main out- against let, namely politics. The work of governing the country, and socialism that of managing its industries, would be merged in one great (condensed) official body. The contrast between rulers and ruled would be enormously heightened by this concentration of power in the

ef

would

under

listic

hands of the rulers, and by the further fact that the ruled would
never be able, by means of wealth, to acquire an offset for the
advantages of officeholding. The desire for public position
would therefore be intensified in a socialistic state.

There would, it is true, be some prizes to be gained, in a worthy way, by other kinds of service, such as authorship, invention, and discovery; but the prizes which would appeal to most men would be those of office holding. Is it in reason to suppose that the method of securing the offices would then be better than it is at present? Would a man, under the new régime, work quietly at his task in the shoe shop, the bakery, or the mine, waiting for the office to which he aspired to seek him out, or would he try to make terms with other men for mutual assistance in the quest of office? Would "rings" be less general than they are now? Could there fail to be bosses and political machines? Would the Tammanys of the new order, then, be an improvement on the Tammanys of the old order? Without making any dogmatic assertions, we may say that there would certainly have to be machines of some sort for pushing men into public offices, and that these would have very sinister possibilities. They would be opposed by counter machines, made up of men out of office and anxious to get in. Furthermore, very nice adjustments would have to be made ioning between agriculture, on the one hand, and manufactures and commerce on the other; and further adjustments would have to be made between the different branches of each form of business. All this would be done, not automatically as at present, by the action of demand and supply in a market, but by the voluntary acts of officials. Here is the field in which the wisdom of officials would be overtaxed. They might manage the mills of the steel trust, but it would trouble them to say how many men should be employed in that business and how many in every other, and, of the men in that particular branch, how many should work in Pittsburg and how many in the mines of Michigan and Minnesota.

lties of

S

en

the

ations

Another grave objection to socialism is the check that it might impose on technical progress. At present we see a bewildering succession of inventions transforming the industries

progress in

of the world. Machine after machine appears in rapid succes- Socialism sion, each displacing its predecessor, working for a time and would check giving way to still better devices. The power of man over inventions nature increases with amazing rapidity. Even in the relatively simple operations of agriculture, the reaper, the thresher, the seeder, and the gang plow enable a man to-day to do as much work as could a score of men in the colonial period of American history. In manufacturing the gain is greater; and in transportation it is indefinitely greater. The progress goes on without cessation, since the thing which guarantees it is the impulse of self-preservation. An employer must improve his mechanism if his rivals do so. He must now and then get ahead of his rivals if he is to make any profit. Conservatism which adheres to the old is self-destruction, and a certain audacity affords the nearest approach to safety. From this it comes about, first, that forward movements are made daily and hourly in some part of the field; and, secondly, that with every forward movement the whole procession must move on to catch up with its new leader.

Now, it is possible to suppose that under socialism an Officials slow altruistic motive may lead men to make inventions and dis- to adopt improvements coveries. They may work for the good of humanity. The desire for distinction may also impel them to such labors, and nonpecuniary rewards offered by the State may second this desire. The inventive impulse may act even where no reward is in view. Men will differ greatly in their estimates of the amount of progress that can be gained in this way; but the thing that may be affirmed without danger of denial is, that the competitive race absolutely compels progress at a rate that is inspiringly rapid, and that there is much uncertainty as to the amount of progress that would be secured where other motives are relied on. Officialdom is generally unfavorable to the adoption of improved devices, even when they are presented; its boards have frequently been the graveyards of inventions, and there is no blinking the uncertainty as to whether a satisfactory rate of improvement could be obtained where the methods of production should be at the mercy of such boards.