Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/384

 362 THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL Although the very last century has seen an almost complete up- setting of every economic and industrial relation in the country, it seems to be assumed that the existing social order, thus new- created, is destined inevitably to endure in its main features un- changed and unchangeable. History is tacitly considered as having stopped with the last great convulsion of the Industrial Revolution, and Time to have then suddenly ceased to be the Great Innovator. Conversely, Socialism is, to such persons, still only a statical heaven sought to be substituted, u,w ictu, for an equally statical world here present. So accustomed, indeed, were English students of the last generation to think of Socialism as a mere Utopia, spun from the humanity-intoxicated brains of various Frenchmen of the beginning of this century, that even Mr. Courthey evidently finds great difficulty in recognizing it in its modern scientific form. But this is merely a consequence of the same imperfect appreciation of historical evolution. Down to the present generation every aspirant after social reform, whether Socialist or Individualist, naturally embodied his ideas in a, de- tailed plan of a new social order, from which all contemporary evils were eliminated. Bellamy is but a belated Cabet, Babceuf, or Campanella; and it is a little too bad to mistake this New England Utopian scheme for the essentially evo!utionary Socialist movement now surging throughout Europe. Indeed, this very flux of things, which Bellamy and most of his critics ignore, constitutes the main' difficulty' of Individualism. Whatever we may think of the existing social order, one thing is certain. namely, that it will now, as heretofore, inevitably undergo considerable modification in the future. Those modi- fications will be partly the result of forces not consciously initiated or directed by human will. Partly, however, the modifications will be the results, either intended or unintended, of deliberate attempts to readjust the social environment to suit man's real or fancied needs. It is therefore not a question of whether the existing social order shall be changed, but of how this inevitable change shall be made. In the present phase of acute social compunction, the mal- adjustments which occasion these modifications appear to us in the guise of 'social problems.' But whether or not they are the subjects of conscious thought or conscious action, their in- fluence is perpetually at work, silently or obtrusively modifying the distribution of social pressure, and altering the weft of that social tissue of which our life is made. The characteristic feature of our own age is not this constant evolution itself--for that, of