252 THE GOSPEL, AND THE SOCIAL CREED OF SCIENCE. 



The cause of our chief social evils persists the 

 socialist is the constitution of society, our present social 

 system, a system partly of consecrated hereditary privi- 

 lege, which is, however, happily everywhere dying ; but 

 mainly and more perniciously, our present industrial 

 system, of individual competition, of employer and 

 employed, of capital and labour, a system not dying, 

 but everywhere in feverish active life all around ; whose 

 first principle is each one for himself; in which all 

 struggle furiously to push their way to the front, to 

 " get on," as the expressive phrase is, which means to get 

 and to grasp the greatest possible sum of the good things 

 going, that constant and concentrated effort, skill, and 

 cunning, conducted within the bounds of the civil but by 

 no means the moral law, may secure ; a system certainly 

 not favourable to the further development of the social, 

 or kindly, or disinterested virtues, being scarcely com- 

 patible with the primary virtues of truth, or justice, or 

 honesty, but, on the contrary, directly tending to de- 

 velop the intensest forms of selfishness ; a system, more- 

 over, which works badly for mankind, or for nations, or 

 for classes in the gross, being demonstrably inconsistent 

 Avith the "greatest happiness of the greatest number," it 

 being mathematically certain that in the competitive 

 race the greater number will be wholly distanced, that a 

 considerable number, from chance, or circumstance, or 

 strain in the contest, will break hopelessly down, while 

 the happiness of the few who win the prize is a small 

 set-off against the misery of the many who fail, a lottery 

 system, of few prizes and many blanks ; in which the 

 best do not win, where the fortunes of the few are made 

 by the failures of the many; a system, moreover, in 

 which the few successful must, after all, however 

 grudgingly, subscribe to the support of the same dismal 



