Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/454

 482 THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL establish the Church while establishing everything else. Mr. Graham's speculations on the Socialist State may not invariably command assent, but they are always acute and interesting. In the two earlier chapters on ' Socialism before the Nineteenth Century,' and ' Modern Socialism from St. Simon to Karl Marx,' Mr. Graham uses the word Socialism with a strange combination of exces- sive latitude and excessive rigour. Among the Socialists he treats of he includes Moses, Isaiah ' the greatest of Socialists,' he says Jesus Christ, Rousseau, Fichte, Carlyle-even apparently Hobbes and Locke; but he expressly refuses to include Robert Owen, the man whose system the word was first invented to describe, because, he says, Robert Owen was not a Socialist at all, but a Communist as if a Communist were not a Socialist, and as if Owen had not in his writings anticipated that very doctrine of Collectivism to which Mr. Graham devotes the pith of his work. Mr. Graham does not explain his distinction between Communism and Socialism, but he says repeatedly that Communism is 'merely the extreme of Socialism,' and that it is preached in the Gospels; and he describes the differenti of Owen's system as being 'the rule of equality in distribution, and the abolition of private property.' What else does any Socialism aim at ? Mr. Graham himseft states that there are three current senses of the word Socialism, but that what is common to the three, ' the generic feature of all, is the aim at greater equality of social conditions; in the first case to be attained by any means; in the second and third to be attained and maintained by the State.' Equality of conditions through community of property is the principle of all properly Socialist systems, and there is perhaps even more fault in the lax extension of the word to those who befriend the poor and condemn oppression without thinking of this particular principle, than in the hesitation Mr. Graham shows to apply it to Owen and to the Anar- chists. Mr. Graham's definition of Socialism is defective. Socialism is more than ' the aim at greater equality of conditions,' for many persons besides Socialists think greater equality of conditions and better diffusion of wealth to be desirable, and would even make that the regular policy of the law. Socialism seeks to realise some false system of equality, some definite but erroneous principle of right, some mistaken idea of social justice, and the word ought not to be applied to those who merely think the present distribution of goods is not an ideal one, without proposing any wrong or unjust ideal to sup- plant it. l[r. Herbert Spencer has declared the present system to be unideal as emphatically as anyone, but Mr. Graham correctly enough considers Mr. Spencer to be as far on his right hand as the Socialists are on his left. Mr. Graham is always disposed to look on Socialism as if it were an imperfect attempt to realise a higher order of justice than exists at present, whereas in reality it is only an imperfect attempt to realise a lower order of justice. He thinks, for example, with the extremer Socialists, that it is contrary to ideal justice to pay the skilled better than the unskilled, or the gifted than the incom- petent, though, of course, he admits it to be necessary to do so on