1889 ESSAYS ON POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 265 



as an attempt to justify those who, content with the present, are 

 opposed to all endeavours to bring about any fundamental 

 change in our social arrangements (ib. p. 423). 



So far from this, he continues : — 



Those who have had the patience to follow me to the end 

 will, I trust, have become aware that my aim has been altogether 

 different. Even the best of modern civilisations appears to me 

 to exhibit a condition of mankind which neither embodies any 

 worthy ideal nor even possesses the merit of stability. I do not 

 hesitate to express my opinion that, if there is no hope of a 

 large improvement of the condition of the greater part of the 

 human family; if it is true that the increase of knowledge, the 

 winning of a greater dominion over Nature which is its con- 

 sequence, and the wealth which follows upon that dominion, 

 are to make no difference in the extent and the intensity of 

 Want, with its concomitant physical and moral degradation, 

 among the masses of the people, I should hail the advent of 

 some kindly comet, which would sweep the whole affair away, 

 as a desirable consummation. What profits it to the human 

 Prometheus that he has stolen the fire of heaven to be his 

 servant, and that the spirits of the earth and of the air obey him, 

 if the vulture of pauperism is eternally to tear his very vitals and 

 keep him on the brink of destruction? 



Assuredly, if I believed that any of the schemes hitherto 

 proposed for bringing about social amelioration were likely to 

 attain their end, I should think what remains to me of life well 

 spent in furthering it. But my interest in these questions did 

 not begin the day before yesterday; and, whether right or 

 wrong, it is no hasty conclusion of mine that we have small 

 chance of doing rightly in this matter (or indeed in any other) 

 unless we think rightly. Further, that we shall never think 

 rightly in politics until we have cleared our minds of delusions, 

 and more especially of the philosophical delusions which, as I 

 have endeavoured to show, have infested political thought for 

 centuries. My main purpose has been to contribute my mite 

 towards this essential preliminary operation. Ground must be 

 cleared and levelled before a building can be properly com- 

 menced; the labour of the navvy is as necessary as that of the 

 architect, however much less honoured; and it has been my 

 humble endeavour to grub up those old stumps of the a priori 

 which stand in the way of the very foundations of a sane politi- 

 cal philosophy. To those who think that questions of the kind 



