It is not necessary or just to bring railing accusations against any class as a body.  Power is always abused, and in this case there is much honest ignorance, stimulated by agitators who are seldom honest.  In a recent number of the Edinburgh Review Sir Lynden Macassey speaks of the widespread, almost universal, fallacies to which the hand-worker has fallen a victim.  They believe that all their aspirations can be satisfied out of present-day profits and production.  They believe that in restricting output they are performing a moral duty to their class.  They do not believe that the prosperity of the country depends upon its production, and are opposed to all labour-saving devices.  They refuse co-operation because they desire the continuance of the class-war.  Such perversity would seem hardly credible if it were not attested by overwhelming evidence.  The Government remedy is first to create unemployment and then to endow it—­the shortest and maddest road to ruin since the downfall of the Roman Empire.

We may have a faint hope that some of these fallacies will be abandoned by the workmen when their destructive results can no longer be concealed.  But sentimentalism seems to be incurable.  It erects irrationality into an act of religious faith, gives free rein to the emotion of pity, and thinks that it is imitating the Good Samaritan by robbing the Priest and Levite for the benefit of the man by the road-side.  The sentimentalist shows a bitter hatred against those who wish to cure an evil by removing its causes.  A good example is the language of writers like Mr. Chesterton about eugenics and population.  If social maladies were treated scientifically, the trade of the emotional rhetorician would be gone.

We have seen that democracy—­the rule of majorities—­has been discredited and abandoned in action, though officially we all bow down before it.  Another popular delusion is that the chief change in the last fifty years has been a conversion of the world from individualism to socialism.  In the language of the Christian socialists, who wish to combine the militant spirit and organisation of medieval Catholicism with a bid for the popular vote, we have ’rediscovered the Corporate Idea.’  But if we take socialism, not in the narrower sense of collectivism, which would be an economic experiment, but in the wider sense of a keen consciousness of the solidarity of the community as an organic whole, there is very little truth in the commonly held notion that we have become more socialistic.  It is easy to see how the idea has arisen.  It became necessary to find some theoretical justification for raising taxes, no longer for national needs, but for the benefit of the class which imposed them; and this justification was found in the theory that all wealth belongs to ‘the State,’ and may be justly divided up as ’the State’—­that is to say, the majority of the voters—­may determine.  Whenever the question arises of voting new doles to