Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/287

 employer of the workless clearly tends. What will most likely happen is that devices, more and more socialistic, for dealing with emergencies, and inconveniences of various sorts, will be adopted and maintained until their own inconvenience and injustice have made themselves felt: and then a more reasonable age will get rid of them—better remedies having meantime been discovered—at the same time perceiving their deleterious effect upon private responsibility, and wondering why it has tolerated the old methods so long. In other words, socialistic experiments will have demonstrated their own evils before the habit of indulging in them has gone so far as to allow States to drift the whole way into socialism. It is even possible that the example of some single nation, drifting thus far, and setting up a socialistic State, may serve as a useful warning to the rest of the world, and determine the gradual abandonment of the dangerous tendencies which will have increasingly manifested themselves. For it is certain that, unless in exceptional and abnormal instances—of which the Australian Commonwealth is very likely to furnish an example— political systems will always continue to develop by evolutionary, and not by revolutionary, steps. We shall pass gradually, and by a process of construction and elimination, from one condition to another, until the very greatly improved system of government