PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE LIBERAL REGIME 463 



is more serious, the transmission from one generation to another 

 of the results of the conflict, the responsibility from birth onwards 

 for the conduct of the fathers, and the impossibility, or at least 

 the great difficulty, of being released from the situation created by 

 mheritance. . . . Everywhere the individual is bound by a 

 number of rules which are doubtless indispensable, but which are 

 profitable to some while injurious to others. At every step the 

 individual finds himself opposed by barriers which prevent the 

 full use of his faculties, and invalidate the results which he was 

 led to expect as the result of his conduct."^ And the late Pro- 

 fessor Ritchie derides the conception of the " beneficent private 

 war, which makes one man strive to climb on the shoulders of 

 another." " Admirable, doubtless," remarks Ritchie sarcastic- 

 ally, " this scheme of salvation for the elect by the damnation of 

 the vast majority ; but pray do not let us hear anything more 

 about its beneficence." ^ 



Thus, here we revert to the conclusion previously indicated. 

 The system of unrestricted competition, so extolled by orthodox 

 economic Liberalism, is far from having produced those benefi- 

 cent results which Adam Smith and Ricardo promised, and which 

 Mill and Spencer still believed in ; individual interest is far from 

 being harmonised with the collective interest ; the property of 

 society is far from being distributed as nearly as possible in the 

 proportion which is most agreeable to the whole society. Far 

 from all this, we find a society in which the most extraordinary 

 wastage of social energy is the rule — in which, on the one hand, 

 idleness and parasitism, on the other hand overwork and misery, 

 are the rule ; and of which, whatever else may be said of it, it 

 certaidy cannot be said that the principles of the Rechtsstaat, of 

 philosophic Liberalism, govern its polity. Does 'the capitalist 

 look upon the working man as an end in himself, or as a means to 



' P. Topinard, L' Anthropologie ei la Science Sociale, pp. 362, 363. Paris, 

 Masson, 1900. 

 2 D. Ritchie, Darwinism and Politics, p. 6. Swan Sonnenschein, 1901. 



