SPENCER'S INDIVIDUALISM 157 



With a humanity united to subdue the cosmic 

 world by which it is interprenetrated and sur- 

 rounded. 



Happily for us, society evolves independ- 

 ently of anybody's opiniqn. Our opinions fol- 

 low blindly and gropingly in the rear. The 

 opinions of individualists do not manufacture 

 social laws, according to certain ethical re- 

 quirements; they interpret and explain those 

 laws which they discover in operation. The 

 fundamental question is not, "is Individualism 

 better than Socialism?" but "Is society mov- 

 ing in the direction of the one or the other?'' 



To answer this question it is only necessary 

 to compare the world of to-day with that of 

 ten or even five years ago. America moves 

 steadily toward Socialism, while Europe ad- 

 vances in great leaps. Every civilized country 

 tells the same story, and the recent develop- 

 ment of Finland and Austria astonished the 

 world. 



Society moves forward, as irresistibly as 

 the ocean tides, and it moves in a direction 

 predicted by those greatest thinkers of this 

 or any age — the men who linked their lives 

 with the blood and the tears and the struggles 

 of half a century in the greatest cause that 

 ever throbbed in the brain of man — the cause 

 of Socialism. 



