Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/286

 controlled by various public authorities, after education, some other functions, including the feeding and clothing of poor children during school age, and the care of the unemployed (which States before long will certainly have embraced) have by a more enlightened polity been returned to the proper hands? The whole question of whether socialism is a probable solution of the difficulties which its advocates believe it capable of solving is here involved. Applying our familiar principle of estimating the tendencies of the future by the trend of events in the past, it seems certain that there will for a good many years immediately to come be an increase in the functions assumed by the State: but that the whole plunge into socialism will not be undertaken. For, while measures undisguisedly socialistic in character are more and more advocated and adopted, the open principle of State socialism seems to find less support every year. Whenever distress becomes prevalent, plenty of writers, for instance, loudly denounce Governments for not finding work for everyone who fails to find work for himself—so long as he is a man! (No one appears to think it the Government's duty to find work for women.) But when socialism is openly propounded, the same authors just as vehemently denounce the socialistic system to which this principle of regarding the State as the duty-bound