Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/402

 380 THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL control the executive power of the community is more and more falling. And in this task the Individualists receive ever less and less help from the chief executive officers of the nation. Those who have forced directly upon their notice the larger aspects of the problem, those who are directly responsible for the collective interests of the community, can now hardly avoid, whether they like it or not, taking the Socialist view. Each Minister of State protests against Socialism in the abstract, but every decision that he gives in his own department leans more and more away from the Individualist side.  Some persons may object that this gradual expansion of the collective administration of the nation's life cannot fairly be styled a Socialistic clevelopment, and that the name ought to be refused to everything but a complete system of society on a Communist basis. Bulb whatever Socialism may have meant in the past its real significance now is the steady expansion of representative self-government into the industrial sphere. This industrial democracy it is, and not any ingenious Utopia, with which indivi- dualists, if they desire to make any effectual resistance to the substitution of collective for individual will, must attempt to deal. Most political students are, indeed, now prepared to agree with the Socialist that our restrictive laws and municipal Socialism, so far as these have yet gone, do, as a matter of fact, secure a greater well-being and general freedom than that system of' complete personal liberty,' of which the ' sins of legislators' have deprived us. The sacred name of liberty is invoked, by both parties, and the question at issue is merely. one of method. As each ' diticulty' of the present social order presents itself for solution, the Socialist points to the experience of all advanced industrial countries, and urges that personal freedom can be obtained by the great mass of the people only by their substituting democratic self-government in the industrial world for that personal power which the Industrial Revolution has placed in the hands of the proprietary class. His opponents, who for the nonce may be styled Individualists, regard individual liberty as inconsistent wi!h collective control, and accordingly resist .any extension of thin 'higher freedom' of collective life. Their main difficulty is the advance of democracy, ever more and more claiming to extend itself into the field of industry. To all objections, fears, doubts, and difficulties, as to the practicability  See the present writer's Socialism in En,jland (Sonnenschein); an account of England's ' ,5Iunicipal Socialism' will be found in the Financial Reform .4lnmnac for 1891.