Page:Studies in socialism 1906.djvu/40

xxxiv can best reach that ideal by introducing reforms gradually as the strength of their party and economic conditions admit, instead of hoping to apply a cast-iron dogmatic system as a unit. The details are too complicated, the new factors that may have to be considered in the field of industrial invention alone are too diverse for any cut and dried revolutionary action to meet with success. The general principle on which the Reformists must act is clear enough to them: it guides them in the practical solution of each problem as it presents itself. And by the light of this principle they have formulated in every country party programmes which, according to their Fabian method, will be gradually adopted by the various legislatures.

These Socialist programmes demand as a rule the same general reforms: a legal limitation of the working day, a legal minimum wage, compulsory insurance against illness, accidents, and non-employment, old age pensions, compulsory arbitration on the New Zealand pattern, drastic amendment of factory legislation, especially with the object of abolishing child-labour, the substitution of an income-tax or land-tax for all indirect taxation, and, most important perhaps of all, the gradual extension of the domain of public services (national and municipal), beginning with railways, mines, and other "natural monopolies." Socialists are also advocates of at least partial disarmament and of the extension of international