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president's address — SECTION G (l.). 



in the case of the recent Tobacco Commission), supposed to be a judicial 

 body, issues a report which is an immediate deduction from an a 'priori 

 theory of the functions of the State, rather than a careful induction 

 from fact, we may reasonably assume that the education of the socialist 

 party has still a long way to go. Yet the important and hopeful thing 

 for Australian political progress is that the socialist party is learning 

 by experience. It is acquiring that sense of responsibility which comes 

 with the consciousness of power and with the consciousness of the limita- 

 tions before which the fanatical propagandist stands blind and helpless. 

 It is difficult, no doubt, for enthusiasts for co-operation to resign them- 

 selves to the slow movements of the processes of social evolution. 

 The kingdom of collectivism, it would seem, must be taken by violence. 

 But no radical system, not absolute individualism, and not absolute 

 collectivism, can do anything but fail when it tries to impose its arti- 

 ficially simplified solution of the social problem on an organism so com- 

 plex as the society of the present. And the society of the future 

 promises to be more complex still. He that believeth in liberty and 

 the law of liberty will not make haste to abolish those conditions under 

 which poor humanity has reached its present measure of spiritual 

 development, or seek to enslave men in order to unite them. 



