has no meaning whatever unless it is interpreted in a totally new sense.  For in the sense in which socialists speak of the rise and spread of capitalism, socialism has, up to the present time, if we except a number of small and unsuccessful experiments, never risen or spread or had any existence at all.  Capitalism rose and spread as an actual working system, which multiplied and improved the material appliances of life in a manner beyond the reach of the older system displaced by it.  It realised results of which previously mankind had hardly dreamed.  Socialism, on the other hand, has risen and spread thus far, not as a system which is threatening to supersede capitalism by its actual success as an alternative system of production, but merely as a theory or belief that such an alternative is possible.  Let us take any country or any city we please—­for example, let us say Chicago, in which socialism is said to be achieving its most hopeful or most formidable triumphs—­and we shall look in vain for a sign that the general productive process has been modified by socialistic principles in any particular whatsoever.  Socialism has produced resolutions at endless public meetings; it has produced discontent and strikes; it has hampered production constantly.  But socialism has never inaugurated an improved chemical process; it has never bridged an estuary or built an ocean liner; it has never produced or cheapened so much as a lamp or a frying-pan.  It is a theory that such things could be accomplished by the practical application of its principles; but, except for the abortive experiments to which I have referred already, it is thus far a theory only, and it is as a theory only that we can examine it.

What, then, as a theory, are the distinctive features of socialism?  Here is a question which, if we address it indiscriminately to all the types of people who now call themselves socialists, seems daily more impossible to answer; for every day the number of those is increasing who claim for their own opinions the title of socialistic, but whose quarrel with the existing system is very far from apparent, while less apparent still is the manner in which they propose to alter it.  The persons to whom I refer consist mainly of academic students, professors, clergymen, and also of emotional ladies, who enjoy the attention of footmen in faultless liveries, and say their prayers out of prayer-books with jewelled clasps.  All these persons unite in the general assertion that, whatever may be amiss with the world, the capitalistic system is responsible for it, and that somehow or other this system ought to be altered.  But when we ask them to specify the details as to which alteration is necessary—­what precisely are the parts of it which they wish to abolish and what, if these were abolished, they would introduce as a substitute—­one of them says one thing, another of them says another, and nobody says anything on which three of them could act in concert.