It is the essence of "social legislation" that it stands for the public welfare and not for any special interest. Piece by piece, since 1802, in England, it has been built up. It has tried to "regulate" the more lawless forces of competing private interests, as well as the health, housing, hours and conditions of labor, the child in industry, occupational diseases, industrial insurance, and then, with more specific intent, the direct curbing of corporate powers in banks, railways, insurance, and the whole extending network of big business as it becomes national in its affiliations. It is generally believed that these forces have been restrained to the common good; that they cannot, as of old, show contempt for public opinion, even if they feel it. Large sections of English, German and French Socialists agree in this, that legislative reforms have already produced immense benefits and that the way, even for Socialists, is along this same pathway of enlarged and more coherent amelioration.
True or false this issue cuts to the marrow of our question. It presents the case about which the main struggle of the future is to turn. Is the present society to be "reformed" into some tolerable measure of justice and "equal hope for all"? Are the main lines of this regeneration already traced, with such clearness that we have only to continue as we have begun? Or, are we to confess their futility and fall to, in good I. W. W. fashion, to ridicule charities, philanthropies, social settlements, welfare work, sliding scales, arbitration and the full score of other attempts to unite and organize the entire good will of society and not merely a "class conscious" part of it?
