Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/612

 -90 THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL he has a way of using expressions which a'ould naturally lead one to suppose that his point of view is very far from being a fair one. Take, for instance, this sentence ' Socialism is always some scheme for the removal of one injustice by the infliction of a greater -some scheme which, by mistaking the rights and wrongs of the actual situation. or the natural operation of its oss- provisions, or any other cause, would leave things more :.nequitable and more offensive to a sound sense of justice than it found them.' Mr. Rae seems to put this forward as a definition of Socialism! Certainly it would be difficult to give any definition of Socialism which would include all the varieties of what are commonly knon as ,Socialistic theories and Socialistic proposals. Perhaps, indeed, the term is not eapsble of any exact definition. It is only a convenient expression for a certain growing tendency. But however we are to describe that tendency it can starkly be fair to begin ore' representation of it by saying that it is based on injustice. It seeins best to characterize it simply as the reaction sginst extreme individualism a reaction running naturally, as reactions generally do, into the opposite extreme, and sometimes (as in the case of Anarchism) appsrently returning upon that against which it is a reaction, and re- asserting it in a still more extreme form, becoming (as Schiiffie puts it) ' individualism raised to a higher power.' Mr. tlae, however, as we have seen, endeavours to a considerable extent to explain axvay the existence of individualism, and consequently fails to see the full signi- ficance of Socialism. But, notwithstanding this, it cannot be denied that he has produced a most interesting and useful book. J. S. ]{ACKENZIE News from No,chore. By WILLIAM MORRIS. Pov.?s have their Utopias, their Visions of an Ideal Cmmnonwealth, s well as philosophers, and their xfsions are generally fairer if more open to objection s regards possibility of realization. Thus the Laureate Poet has his' Parlianent of Man, and Federation of the World' in which ' The common-sense of most shah hold a fretful realm in awe, And the kindly Earth shall slumber lapt in universal law,' And in the volume before us we have from an exactly opposite point of view Mr. William Morris's vision of the future society in which all parlianents and all governments shall be done away with; and in which, largely for that reason, peace and plenty sh11 reign; life shah be happy; labour shall be transformed from drudgery to delight; and all prisoners and cptives, slaves, l5ahs and psupers shall have disappeared as well as the existing evil system that generated them. The book under a slender franework of narrative and dialogue gives us in some detMl the vision of our social and economic future as seen by an imaginary nineteenth-century man who in a sort of trance