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 90 havoc which competitive industry makes with nerves and bodily health, with hygiene and physique. But, above all, the man who lives in an intellectual atmosphere and with an intellectual companionship must be repelled by the qualities which can amass property to-day and which, in consequence, give tone to society. An intellectual aristocracy must be in revolt against a commercial plutocracy.

Moreover, as I shall point out in a later chapter, the Socialist method is the scientific method. It is the method of evolution applied to society. It assumes that society is fulfilling its past in evolving the more efficient forms of the future; from certain well-observed tendencies and features it constructs working hypotheses, and it uses these hypotheses as guides for experiments which by condemning or justifying them open the way for further and still more comprehensive hypotheses. Thus the whole of society, its organisation, its institutions, its activities, is brought within the sway of natural law, not merely on its descriptive and historical side but on its experimental side, and administration and legislation become arts pursued in the same way as the chemist works in his laboratory. Socialism alone is worthy now-a-days of the title of scientific politics.

But society as the subject matter for scientific study and treatment has hardly more than crossed the threshold of the laboratory. Sir Francis Galton's imperfect application of theories of heredity to government is still the best contribution made by science to