Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/387

 DIFFICULTIES OF INDIVIDUALISM 365 But although the principles of Individualism have long been tacitly abandoned by our public men, they have remained, until quite recently, enshrined in the imagination of the middle class citizen and the journalist. Their rapid supersession in these days, by principles essentially Socialist, is due to the prominence now given to 'social problems,' and to the failure of Individualism to offer any practicable solution of these. The problems are, as Mr. Courtney reminds us, not in themselves new; they are not even more acute or pressing than of yore; but the present genera- tion is less disposed than its predecessors to acquiesce in their insolubility. This increasing social compunction in the presence of industrial disease and social misery is the inevitable result of the advent of political democracy. The power to initiate reforms is now rapidly passing into the hands of those who themselves directly suffer from the evils to be removed; and it is therefore not to be wondered at that social re-organization is a subject of much more vital interest to the proletarian politicians of to-day than it can ever have been to the University professors or Whig proprietors of the past. Now the main ' difculties ' of the existing social order, with which, as we suggest, Individualist principles fail to deal, are those immediately connected with the administration of industry and the distribution of wealth. To summarize these difculties before examining them, we may say that the Socialist asserts that the system of private property in the means of production permits and even promotes an extreme inequality in the distribution of the annual product of the united labours of the community. This dis- tribution results in excess in the hands of a small class, balanced by positive privation at the other end of the social scale. An inevitable corollary of this unequal distribution is wrong pro- duction, both of commodities and of human beings; the preparation of senseless luxuries whilst there is need for more bread, and the breeding of degenerate hordes of a demoralized 'residuum' unfit for social life. This evil inequality and disastrous realproduction are enabled to continue through the individual ownership of the instruments of in. dustry, 6!m in- evitable accompaniment of which is the continuance, m the commercial world, of that personal rule which is rapidly being expelled from political administration. The increasing integra- tion of the grande industrie is, indeed, creating--except in so far as it is cotinteracted by the adoption of Socialist principles--a kind of new feudalism, based upon tenure, not of land, but of capital employed in the world-commerce, a financial autocracy