phenomena, good and evil, of society as it exists to-day, and the different parts played by the different classes composing it.  It has been the object of the present volume to expose, one after another, the individual fallacies of which this general misconception is the result, not with a view to suggesting that in society as it exists to-day there are no grave evils which a true social policy may alleviate, but with a view to promoting between classes, who are at present in needless antagonism, that sane and sober understanding with regard to their respective positions which alone can form the basis of any sound social policy in the future.

Of the individual demands or proposals now put forward by socialists, many point to objects which are individually desirable and are within limits practicable; but what hinders, more than anything else, any successful attempt to realise them is the fact that they are at present placed in a false setting.  They resemble a demand for candles on the part of visitors at an hotel, who would have, if they did not get them, to go to bed in the dark—­a demand which would be contested by nobody if it were not that those who made it demanded the candles only as a means of setting fire to the bed-curtains.  The demands for old-age pensions, and for government action on behalf of the unemployed, for example, as now put forward in Great Britain, by labour Members who identify the interests of labour with socialism, are demands of this precise kind.  The care of the aged, the care of the unwillingly and the discipline of the willingly idle, are among the most important objects to which social statesmanship can address itself; but the doctrines of socialism hinder instead of facilitate the accomplishment of them, because they identify the cure of certain diseased parts of the social organism with a treatment that would be ruinous to the health and ultimately to the life of the whole.

We may, however, look forward to a time, and may do our best to hasten it, when, the fallacies of socialism being discredited and the mischief which they produce having exhausted itself, we may be able to recognise that they have done permanent good as well as temporary evil—­partly because their very perverseness and their varying and accumulating absurdities will have compelled men to recognise, and accept as self-evident, the countervailing truths which to many of the sanest thinkers have hitherto remained obscure; and partly because socialism, no matter how false as a theory of society, and no matter how impracticable as a social programme, will have called attention to evils which might otherwise have escaped attention, or been relegated to the class of evils for which no alleviation is possible.