Turning from France to England we hit upon Robert Owen, another philanthropic castle builder. At New Harmony, Indiana, is the broken column that stands for his monument. German Socialism busies itself more with principles and less with the machinery of societies. It keeps close to the schools and the platform and uses the already constructed machinery of the state for its leverage. Its effect is seen in recent elections.

In our own country, how many millenniums are approaching with their machinery all smoothly running-on paper ! There is the Prohibition millennium, and Woman Suffrage millennium, and the Single Tax millennium, and the Industrial Army millennium, and that blissful state which would be if the tariff could ever get itself properly adjusted, and that other day-dawn of Paradise which must come when free trade comes.

It is reported that some time ago there appeared in Washington city, a humane man with a theory that our social ills arise from the lack of sufficient food for all. To his mind the products of the land are not sufficiently economized. If only the grain and fruit could be properly preserved there would be enough for all, and all would be happy. His solution of the problem was a beautifully ornamented cast-iron, or steel granary, of which he was the patentee, or wanted to be. If the farmers of our broad prairies could be induced to use his cast-iron corn-crib-why, then the sun would cease to look down on any hungry human being, and all mankind would of course be as happy as the famous pig in clover.

Now it is not in one's province to pronounce dogmatically on the usefulness or the uselessness of that reformer's castiron corn-crib. It might indeed have something like a moral effect on rats and mice and thieves; one is inclined, however, to be so impertinent as to question its effect on bulls and bears and boards of trade, and to wonder whether corn so cribbed would ever cause water-brash, dyspepsia, or bluedevils; and still further, whether corn so cribbed would be capable of producing entirely innocent whisky and beer. begins to appear upon reflection that a person mischievously

inquisitive might suggest a few minor difficulties in the way of this corn-crib millennium.

II.

To go slightly farther, one given to hyper-criticism might find fault with the cogs, or bands, or pulleys of the Industrial Army machine. A recent able critic does not honor it with my figure even, but likens it to a certain primitive onewheeled wagon, and says, "According to Mr. Bellamy's book, society in the year 2000 has not learned what is now taught in the name of science." He speaks with reference to the tobacco and temperance questions. Does any one seriously imagine that a certain adjustment of government shops and stores and dining-rooms and pneumatic tubes and telephones can produce a climax in human happiness? Does any one seriously think that an industrial militarism can possibly be an antidote for drunkenness, and lechery, and jealousy, and laziness, and theft, and rebellion and murder, and suicide? When one takes note of all that nationalism of that sort will not do and cannot do; when one thinks of the questions it raises but does not answer; of the many evils it might cause, and of the few it could possibly cure he is compelled to wonder quite as much at the serious reception of the system by others as at the ingenuity of its author.

Some of Mr. Bellamy's propositions, such as the nationalization of the railroad service, of the telegraph service, of the express service; the municipalization of the street car service, of street lighting and the telephone service seem reasonable. So much nationalism, however, is a very different matter from that of putting the whole of humanity on the dead level of a state militarism.

As to Single Tax, it is proposed by this, in the language of Mr. George, "to make all the land the common property of all the people." Would that drive Satan out of society? Would the nationalization of land cure drunkenness, unchastity, falsehood and greed? Suppose the rickety tenements were all torn down, would that mend the rickety tenants? Does the abolition of rents insure the abolition of sharks?

As long as there are lions in society they will find some means of getting the lion's share of the game. Mr. George's theory rests for its corner-stone on at least one popular fallacy, namely, that the rich are growing richer and the poor, poorer. That has been disproved by the most painstaking statistics. In general the poor were never better housed and fed and clad; wages were never higher; hours of labor never shorter; nor the purchase power of a dollar proportionately greater than at present. The poor may now, more than ever in the past, enjoy wealth without owning it. On a modest income one may command all the comforts and many of the luxuries of life. The truth seems to be that the rich are growing rapidly and enormously richer and the poor slowly and moderately richer. Not the poor and provident working people, but the unfortunate poor, the lazy poor, the intemperate poor, the criminal poor and the hereditary poor, should excite our sympathy, and they must for the most part be taken care of in reform schools and asylums, in prisons, and by charities. In proportion as we are intelligent and humane we must help the helpless, but theoretical millenniums can do them little good. Sometimes the wisest prayer the poor can offer is that they may be delivered from their "fool friends," among whom one is inclined to reckon the tariff tinkerers, the professional labor agitators, and the people generally who cheat them with the vague hope of millenniums that are to be turned out freshly ground from the hopper of some political mill while a certain party turns the crank; or that the days of earth may be made to come forth all balmy and beautiful by the privilege of trading at a government store, dining at The Elephant," receiving and paying out time cards instead of silver dollars, and having "Yankee Doodle" or "Old Hundred " fiddled into the ear by a government telephone while the listener is passing away to the land of Nod.

If in spite of the fact that it is the tendency of all communistic societies to die out there should still be conceded the success of now one and then another, especially among the Shakers, where it is said "poverty and discomfort are unknown," yet it must be remembered that such success is

achieved by a self-sacrifice and submission to discipline not readily yielded by the average American or European agitator. It seems like an example of the irony of fate that such schemes should be at all proposed during our present dispensation of the gospel of individual license, commonly called "personal liberty."

III.

Is there no remedy then? Must one turn pessimist, and settle down to the lazy conclusion that there is no betterment for human ills? Is the role of iconoclasm the best that one can play in these eager times when all men are hungering and thirsting for something better than the past has given them? We need not despair. These social failures are indices. Their great significance lies not in themselves, but in the spirit of unrest that is back of them. Franklin's kite string was not a telegraph line. So the theories of Fourier and George and Bellamy are not millenniums. They are only indices. When the social millennium does come these will be to it only as Franklin's kite string to the ocean cable, or Watt's tea-kettle to the Corliss engine.

The crowning fallacy underlying all socialistic, communistic, governmental millennium theories lies in mistaking the potency of environment for omnipotence. Environment may direct, but it cannot create; may develop, but cannot generate an organism. It may retard or stimulate innate tendencies, but it can neither give birth to new creatures nor wholly transform old ones. The environment of the barn-yard fowl and of the pig are the same, yet the pig never exchanges his grunt for a cackle, nor the hen her cackle for a grunt. Any genuine tadpole would rather die than turn into an ostrich or a bear just to accommodate his environment, and some men are very much like tadpoles in this matter of machine-made millenniums. Any genuine loafer would suffer much rather than turn into a hard-working member of an industrial army just to accommodate the state. If Mr. George could environ us with nationalized land, those of us who are thieves would still find something to steal.

Of all creatures man is the least subject to his environment simply because he is so largely the creator of it. This fact is too frequently overlooked by those who are themselves the busy creators of millennial environments. Myriads become what they are in spite of environment rather than by reason of it. To assume that a man situated so and so will infallibly be so and so is to assume that he is not a man. Unconsciously, perhaps, this fallacy grows out of the more radical forms of evolution, and the faithful historian should be taken as an antidote to the radical evolutionist. On themes like this Spencer may be heard; Carlyle should be heeded. "Constitutions can be built," says the latter with his usual rugged grip on vital principles, "constitutions enough à Sieyes, but the frightful difficulty is that of getting men to come and live in them." "Singular," he adds, "what Gospel men will believe, even gospel according to Jean Jaques." And again: "With endless debating we get the rights of man written down and promulgated. . true paper basis of all paper constitutions. Neglecting to declare the duties of men! Forgetting to ascertain the mights of men, one of the fatalest omissions!" This great Scotchman suggests much to the social reformer in contrasting the mights of men with the rights of men. Above sixty millions of people in the United States, and each one capable of creating largely his own social state; and what is worse, incapable of suddenly adopting that of anybody else that is the real problem for social reformers to meet. In the last analysis it is not a question of finance, or of government groceries, or the nationalization of land that confronts us, but that stubborn, well-nigh insoluble, old-fashioned question of human nature. Social reformers must begin with the man himself. Get the man rectified, and he will not be long in rectifying his social state. Leave him depraved, and there is no social régime that can do him very great good. Getting the machinery of human happiness all properly geared and running before the human beings themselves are fitted to be happy, is simply, in homely phrase, getting the cart before the horse. France tried the Republic before the French republican was born,