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agitation. Its funds exceed those of an ordinary political party. They are made up by subscriptions secretly given by the leading members of the class which most successfully exploits the labour of others—the class of monopolists, the class of capitalists, who would benefit most directly by the exclusion of foreign goods and the consequent raising of prices on the home market. A huge staff of itinerant agents, some of whom have been simply bought from other political organisations owing to the high wages offered, wanders over the face of the country. The public house is a fruitful field for their propaganda. One finds them standing at the bar, or sitting in the parlour, talking the most absurd nonsense to men, who, unable to follow their arguments, are but victims of their untruthfulness. The Corrupt Practices Law has become a dead letter. The upper classes are teaching us the weakness of Democracy, and the impotence of Law.

Although these facts may be observed by every intelligent person, the poor workman, harrassed, beaten, and cowed by industrial strife, turns to the alluring enticements of Tariff Reform without thought of its final effects, without considering the economic forces that will determine distribution when the system is in full working order, and he accepts it in despair, as a striken creature, broken in health and weary under physical suffering, resorts to the quack who backs his prescriptions with sufficiently unscrupulous accounts of their unlimited virtues.

And as Capitalism thus totters along, getting more and more upon the nerves of the people, Militarism reappears as a nervous disease; and, amidst the decay of moral power and authority, force—force in the shape of arms and of accumulated wealth—is regarded by the people as their only safety and succour. But all this is an indication of national decay, not of the evolution of a higher social state. The further Society drifts from a primitive state of organisation, the less and less true does it become that despair and revolution go hand in hand. It is not a Society unnerved with panic and distracted with hunger that advances towards Socialism, but one in which a certain success in satisfying physical needs has awakened mental desires and made easy the exercise of the social instincts and the community-consciousness of the individual. The success of Socialism depends upon the ability of the people to see by the eye of imagination and faith, a purer city and a juster State. A just imagination, gnawing hunger, and deadening toil do not not go together.

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