Page:Studies in socialism 1906.djvu/71

Rh numbers, in cohesion, and in self-consciousness, and when it has determined with daily increasing firmness to have done for ever with class ownership of property?

Now at the same time that the real substantial forces back of Socialism are growing and developing, the technical means of turning Socialism from a theory to a practical fact are also defining themselves. If we look at the national organisation we see that it is constantly becoming more unified, and more clearly sovereign, and that it has been forced to take on more and more economic functions, which we must hail as a sort of rude prelude to the social property of the future. In the great urban and industrial centres we see that the questions of hygiene, housing, lighting, education, and food are bringing the democracy into ever closer touch with the whole problem of property and into the administration of that part of property which is already collective. Most important again is the growing co-operative movement, including as it does co-operatives for both production and distribution. And finally, we have the labour and professional organisations, that are growing, changing, and becoming more complicated and elastic all the time: trade-unions, federations of unions, central trade committees, federations of trades, and federations of labour.

We have, then, reached a point where it can be safely asserted that the substitute for the privileges of capital is not to be the depressing monotony