378 TH? ?.CONOMIC JOURN?. order to raise the quality of the fittest who survive. ? This service can be performed only by the government. No individual competitor can lay down the rules of the combat. No individual can safely choose the higher plane so long as his opponent is at liberty to fight on the lower. In the face of this experience, the Individualist proposal to rely on 'complete personal liberty' and free competition is not calculated to gain much acceptance. A social system devised to encourage ' the art of establishing the maximum inequality over our neighbouts '--as Ruskin puts it appears destined to be replaced, wherever this is possible, by one based on salaried public service, with the stimulus o! duty . and esteem, inste?l of that of fortune-making. But perhaps the most serious difficulty presented by the present concentration of energy upon personal gain is its effect upon the position of the community in the race struggle. The lesson of evolution seems to be that interracial competition is really more momentous in its consequences than the struggle between indiv/&?als. It is of comparatively little importance that individuals should develop to the utmost possible extent, if the life of the commun/ty in which they live is not thereby served. Two generations ago it would have been assumed, as matter of course, that the most efficient life for each com- munity was to be secured by each individual in it being left that 'complete personal freedom' aimed at by Mr. Courtney. But that crude vision has long since been demolished. Fifty years' s5cial experience have convinced every statesman of the old truth that, although there is no common sensorium, a society is something more than the sum of its members; that a social organism has a life and health distinguishable from those o! its individual atoms. Hence it is that we have had Lord Shaftesbury warning us that without Factory Acts we should lose our t?xtile trade; Mr. Forster, that without national education we were steering straight into national decay; and lately even Professor Huxley, taking up the parable that, unless we see to the training of our residuum, France and Germany and the United States would take our place in the world's workshop. This ' diffic?y' of Individualism can be met, indeed, like the rest, only by the application of what are essentially Socialist principles. ? See The Limit? of Individual liberty, by F. C. Montague; and The of State Interf?rmwe, by D. G. Ritchie.
- Three instances o! this progress are noteworthy
- (1) the modern co-operative
movement; (2) the extension o! municipal industry; and (3) the growth o! joint stock and other large nndertakings owned chiefly by sleeping partners, a form which lacks, bowever, the moral basis o! the others.
