"SOCIAL EVOLUTION 211 



Such is the present drama of life ; and we are all 

 compelled to take a part in this drama. 



Now Nature is so prolific in her resources that the 

 raw material seems to exist without a power of ex- 

 haustion. As we keep on dividing and sub-dividing 

 by division of labour, the greater and greater are the 

 quantities of manufactured commodities produced, 

 until we are reduced to a position of absolutely giving 

 away the products of labour. This is illustrated by 

 the new institutions free libraries. Do these institu- 

 tions do good ? If education fundamentally consists 

 in teaching man his own constitution, the relation of 



uncontrolled rights of wealth and capital are in reality merely the 

 surviving rights of feudalism adapted to new conditions." (Idem, 

 p. 246.) 



" A word of admonition, if not of advice, might even be profitable 

 to rulers, statesmen, and legislators in these days. The socialist 

 and nihilist movement all over Europe, from Russia to Spain, the 

 simultaneous attempts on the lives of most of the Continental 

 sovereigns, as the recognized key-stone of the social fabric, are surely 

 symptoms of some deep-rooted disease, of something seriously wrong 

 in our present social system, which is well worthy the attentive 

 consideration of statesmen as well as of thinkers ; and something for 

 the cure of which neither more stringent repression nor aggressive 

 foreign wars, the favourite treatment hitherto adopted, will suffice in 

 future. The root cause of the socialistic movement is in reality the 

 poverty of the many in our modern rich communities, joined to a 

 rankling sense of injustice, neither of which, difficult as they may be 

 and are of cure, are to be removed by internal repression or foreign 

 aggression ; but, if by anything, by internal reform in institutions, 

 and by the removal of social injustices which still everywhere exist, 

 notwithstanding the reforming spirit that has been active for a long 

 time in their partial removal. For justice may be reached on the 

 Earth, even though fraternity and social equality be only possible in 

 the Happy Republic of the philosophers." (" The Creed of Science," 

 William Graham, M.A., 1884, p. 287.) 



