The four articles which followed in quick succession on “The Natural Inequality of Man,” “Natural and Political Rights,” “Capital the Mother of Labour,” and “Government,” appeared in the January, February, March, and May numbers of the “Nineteenth Century”, and, as was said above, are directed against a priori reasoning in social philosophy.  The first, which appeared simultaneously with Mr. Herbert Spencer’s article on “Justice,” in the “Nineteenth Century”, assails, on the ground of fact and history, the dictum that men are born free and equal, and have a natural right to freedom and equality, so that property and political rights are a matter of contract.  History denies that they thus originated; and, in fact, “proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother.”  Yet, in justice to Rousseau and the influence he wielded, he adds:—­]

It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.

Thus if, in their plain and obvious sense, the doctrines which Rousseau advanced are so easily upset, it is probable that he had in his mind something which is different from that sense.

[When they sought speculative grounds to justify the empirical truth:—­]

that it is desirable in the interests of society, that all men should be as free as possible, consistently with those interests, and that they should all be equally bound by the ethical and legal obligations which are essential to social existence, “the philosophers,” as is the fashion of speculators, scorned to remain on the safe if humble ground of experience, and preferred to prophesy from the sublime cloudland of the a priori.

[The second of these articles is an examination of Henry George’s doctrines as set forth in “Progress and Poverty”.  His relation to the physiocrats is shown in a preliminary analysis of the term “natural rights which have no wrongs,” and are antecedent to morality, from which analysis are drawn the results of confounding natural with moral rights.

Here again is the note of justice to an argument in an unsound shape (page 369):  “There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued.”  And a trifling abatement of the universal and exclusive form of Henry George’s principle may make it true, while even unamended it may lead to opposite conclusions—­to the justification of several ownership in land as well as in any other form of property.

The third essay of the series, “Capital the Mother of Labour” ("Collected Essays” 9 147), was an application of biological methods to social problems, designed to show that the extreme claims of labour as against capital are ill-founded.

In the last article, “Government,” he traces the two extreme developments of absolute ethics, as shown in anarchy and regimentation, or unrestrained individualism and compulsory socialism.  The key to the position, of course, lies in the examination of the premisses upon which these superstructures are raised, and history shows that:—­]