Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/531

Rh may be the stress of expediency or compulsion in the world as we find it? But is that the question that was raised on the conversation between Mr. Laidler and Mr. Morley at Newcastle? Not at all. By that conversation we saw in a remarkably plain way that large numbers of the most intelligent and powerful representatives of labor in this country had derived from Mr. Spencer's teaching these conclusions: That private property in land is a public wrong based on force and fraud, and that to right one wrong it is sometimes necessary to do another. This they took to be a lesson in practical politics; and what it points to, in practice, is perfectly clear. Resume possession of the stolen land, if you please, for as private property it still is, and under its present ownership it must ever remain, a wrong to the community. For the rest, though compensation must be made for whatever is in the land which was not in it when it was stolen, yet to right one wrong it is sometimes necessary to do another. That is the point for attention as the matter stands at present. For though Mr. Spencer tells the people, as he could and should have told them from the first, that just compensation would entail a disastrous outlay, infallibly to become more disastrous through inferior management of the land by public officials, what of that if, to right one wrong, it is sometimes necessary to do another? What of just compensation, if it makes a standing crime against the community completely irremediable, and if the people are at liberty to decide whether this is not a case where to right one wrong it is necessary to do another? The point has been actually considered by labor societies and the leaders of the new Socialist movement all over the country, and it seems quite clear that the Newcastle Labor Electoral Association, for one, has come to the conclusion that, morally, there need not be much punctilio about compensation.

But perhaps Mr. Spencer has never said that to right one wrong it is sometimes necessary to do another. In one of his letters to "The Times" he wrote that he could not be positive whether he had or not; which seems to imply that he would not be surprised to learn that at one time or another he had included this doctrine in his teaching of absolute political ethics. Be that as it may, however, he could have told us when he was challenged on the subject whether this is his teaching now or not. He has written three letters; we remain in the dark on the most important point of all, and at the close of an argument entirely occupied with a defense of propagating "absolute political ethics" Mr. Spencer announces his determination to go no further with the controversy. Meanwhile here is Mr. Laidler in his old position, and here left. To be sure, it seems difficult to include the dogma he rests upon in any system of absolute political ethics; and if Mr.