FROM FREEDOM TO BONDAGE. 737 



separate sets of regulators, they constitute the whole community, 

 governed by a consolidated system of such regulators, when func- 

 tionaries of all orders, including those who officer the press, form 

 parts of the regulative organization ; and when the law is both 

 enacted and administered by this regulative organization ? The 

 fanatical adherents of a social theory are capable of taking any 

 measures, no matter how extreme, for carrying out their views : 

 holding, like the merciless priesthoods of past times, that the end 

 justifies the means. And when a general socialistic organization 

 has been established, the vast, ramified, and consolidated body of 

 those who direct its activities, using without check whatever co- 

 ercion seems to them needful in the interests of the system 

 (which will practically become their own interests), will have no 

 hesitation in imposing their rigorous rule over the entire lives of 

 the actual workers ; until, eventually, there is developed an offi- 

 cial oligarchy, with its various grades, exercising a tyranny more 

 gigantic and more terrible than any which the world has seen. 



Let me again repudiate an erroneous inference. Any one who 

 supposes that the foregoing argument implies contentment with 

 things as they are, makes a profound mistake. The present social 

 state is transitional, as past social states have been transitional. 

 There will, I hope and believe, come a future social state differing 

 as much from the present as the present differs from the past 

 with its mailed barons and defenseless serfs. In Social Statics, as 

 well as in The Study of Sociology and in Political Institutions, is 

 clearly shown the desire for an organization more conducive to 

 the happiness of men at large than that which exists. My oppo- 

 sition to socialism results from the belief that it would stop the 

 progress to such a higher state and bring back a lower state. 

 Nothing but the slow modification of human nature by the 

 discipline of social life, can produce permanently advantageous 

 changes. 



A fundamental error pervading the thinking of nearly all 

 parties, political and social, is that evils admit of immediate 

 and radical remedies. " If you will but do this, the mischief 

 will be prevented." "Adopt my plan and the suffering will 

 disappear." " The corruption will unquestionably be cured by 

 enforcing this measure." Everywhere one meets with beliefs, 

 expressed or implied, of these kinds. They are all ill-founded. 

 It is possible to remove causes which intensify the evils ; it is 

 possible to change the evils from one form into another ; and it is 

 possible, and very common, to exacerbate the evils by the efforts 

 made to prevent them ; but anything like immediate cure is im- 

 possible. In the course of thousands of years mankind have, by 

 multiplication, been forced out of that original savage state in 

 which small numbers supported themselves on wild food, into the 



VOL. XXXVIII. 50 



