Page:The Story of Philosophy.pdf/459

 As this passage indicates, Spencer believes that socialism is a derivative of the militant and feudal type of state, and has no natural affiliation with industry. Like militarism, socialism involves the development of centralization, the extension of governmental power, the decay of initiative, and the subordination of the individual. "Well may Prince Bismarck display leanings towards State Socialism." "It is the law of all organization that as it becomes complete it becomes rigid." Socialism would be in industry what a rigid instinctive equipment is in animals; it would produce a community of human ants and bees, and would issue in a slavery far more monotonus and hopeless than the present condition of affairs.

Economic relationships are so different from political relationships, and so much more complex, that no government could regulate them all without such an enslaving bureaucracy. State interference always neglects some factor of the intricate industrial situation, and has failed whenever tried; note the wage-fixing laws of medieval England, and the price-fixing laws of Revolutionary France. Economic relations must be left to the automatic self-adjustment (imperfect though it may be) of supply and demand. What society most wants it