SOCIALISM. 581 



members and decrease of its most worthy members &quot; 

 ( 322). Now, more or less fully, the doctrine of collec- 

 tivists, socialists, and communists, ignores this distinction 

 between the ethics of family-life and the ethics of life out 

 side the family. Entirely under some forms, and in chief 

 measure under others, it proposes to extend the regime of the 

 family to the whole community. This is the conception set 

 forth by Mr. Bellamy in Looking Backwards ; and this is 

 the conception formulated in the maxim &quot; From each ac 

 cording to his capacity, to each according to his needs.&quot; 



In low grades of culture there is but vague consciousness 

 of natural causation ; and even in the highest grades of cult 

 ure at present reached, such consciousness is very inadequate. 

 Fructifying causation the production of many effects each 

 of which becomes the cause of many other effects is not 

 recognized. The socialist does not ask what must happen if, 

 generation after generation, the material well-being of the 

 inferior is raised at the cost of lowering that of the superior. 

 Even when it is pointed out, he refuses to see that if the supe 

 rior, persistently burdened by the inferior, are hindered in 

 rearing their own better offspring, that the offspring of the 

 inferior may be as efficiently cared for, a gradual deteriora 

 tion of the race must follow. The hope of curing present 

 evils so fills his consciousness that it cannot take in the 

 thought of the still greater future evils his proposed system 

 would produce. 



Such mitigations of the miseries resulting from inferiority 

 as the spontaneous sympathies of individuals for one another 

 prompt, will bring an average of benefit ; since, acting sepa 

 rately, the superior will not so far tax their own resources in 

 taking care of their fellows, as to hinder themselves from 

 giving their own offspring better rearing than is given to the 

 offspring of the inferior. But people who, in their corporate 

 capacity, abolish the natural relation between merits and 

 benefits, will presently be abolished themselves. Either 

 they will have to go through the miseries of a slow decay, 



