SPENCER'S INDIVIDUALISM 163 



chief mouth-piece and Henry George as a 

 somewhat belated trumpeter. 



In this heyday of Individualism the "rate 

 of profit" was at its highest, one Lancashire 

 cotton spinner boasting of one thousand per 

 cent. But the social hell in which the English 

 working class of this period lived is without 

 parallel in modern times. Its system of child 

 labor, as recorded in the government blue 

 books as well as already shown by Owen, 

 was indescribably horrible, but the manufac- 

 turers were opposed to "government interfer- 

 ence'' and the individualist philosophy and its 

 bogey of "paternalism" was their craven plea. 



With the grouping of the workers in fac- 

 tories production became socialized, and now 

 came this contradiction, production was so- 

 cial while ownership and appropriation were 

 individual. The Socialists of that period right- 

 ly maintained that society should either go 

 back in production to the individual form so 

 as to be in harmony with the existing indi- 

 vidual form of ownership and appropriation, 

 or it should adopt social ownership and social 

 appropriation to harmonize with the already 

 existing social production. 



But the wheel of history never revolves 

 backward, and the latter solution is destined 

 ultimately to prevail. Social evolution has al- 



