Now while the Conservators are continually talking of the “eternal facts” of human life and human nature and falling back upon a conception of permanence that is continually less true as our perspectives extend, these others are full of the conception of adaptation, of deliberate change in relationship and institution to meet changing needs.  I would suggest for them, therefore, as opposed to the Conservators and contrasted with the Planless Progressives, the name of Constructors.  They are the extreme right, as it were, while the Planless Progressives are the extreme left of Anti-Conservator thought.

I believe that these distinctions I have made cover practically every clear form of contemporary thinking, and are a better and more helpful classification than any now current.  But, of course, nearly every individual nowadays is at least a little confused, and will be found to wobble in the course even of a brief discussion between one attitude and the other.  This is a separation of opinions rather than of persons.  And particularly that word Socialism has become so vague and incoherent that for a man to call himself a socialist nowadays is to give no indication whatever whether he is a Conservator like William Morris, a non-Constructor like Karl Marx, or a Constructor of any of half a dozen different schools.  On the whole, however, modern socialism tends to fall towards the Constructor wing.  So, too, do those various movements in England and Germany and France called variously nationalist and imperialist, and so do the American civic and social reformers.  Under the same heading must come such attempts to give the vague impulses of Syndicalism a concrete definition as the “Guild Socialism” of Mr. Orage.  All these movements are agreed that the world is progressive towards a novel and unprecedented social order, not necessarily and fatally better, and that it needs organised and even institutional guidance thither, however much they differ as to the form that order should assume.

For the greater portion of a century socialism has been before the world, and it is not perhaps premature to attempt a word or so of analysis of that great movement in the new terms we are here employing.  The origins of the socialist idea were complex and multifarious never at any time has it succeeded in separating out a statement of itself that was at once simple, complete and acceptable to any large proportion of those who call themselves socialists.  But always it has pointed to two or three definite things.  The first of these is that unlimited freedoms of private property, with increasing facilities of exchange, combination, and aggrandisement, become more and more dangerous to human liberty by the expropriation and reduction to private wages slavery of larger and larger proportions of the population.  Every school of socialism states this in some more or less complete form, however divergent the remedial methods suggested by the different schools.  And, next, every school