wilfulness of caprice; but the gaiety of life has depended much on the freshness and vivacity of its movement and its quests. Is this freedom of selection to be foregone in the future, or will the permissible changes be prescribed by authority, or will some triumphant brain undertake to discover the law of fashion and provide, at the exact time and in the exact quantity required, the novelty necessary for the perfect equilibrium of desire and satisfaction. The difficulty has been felt by historic founders of communistic societies, who have carefully provided a uniformity of garb and of food for their refugees. Take, again, the fact of experience that industries shift their habitats within the area of the same political society; the work done in pursuit of a particular result waxes in one spot and wanes in another as local circumstances are favourable or unfavourable, and tends at any time to settle where the desired result can be accomplished with least labour. In a Socialist state the central brain must discover the proper situation of each industry and direct it to be planted there at the peril of losing the advantage of the change. But all these alterations would bring about different relations of the quantity of labour involved in the production of different results, and some corresponding changes in the relation of distribution might be expected. This repartition would be one of the greatest puzzles of the social brain. Mr. Bellamy in Looking Backward has manfully tried to grapple with this and other difficulties. He does not allot to each worker a definite quantity of commodities from central stores; he recognizes the fact that different men want diiferent things, and he provides for a survival of this taint of individualism in his regenerated society. Accordingly, each worker receives a definite credit at the central stores, which he can exhaust according to his own sweet will. Money has, indeed, ceased to exist, and the labour spent in searching for it is saved; but reckonings are still to be kept of nominal prices of things and the workman's credit is limited by a nominal total. This might prove workable, if all things always remained in the same relation to one another, but as the conditions of their production are, and must be—whatever the organization of society—continually changing, the brain, which we have already, perhaps, over-weighted, must be continually rearranging the relation of things to one another without the assistance of commerce in guiding its determinations. And when we turn from domestic to international exchanges, and remember how large a part of our ordinary life depends upon supplies arriving in ever-varying kinds and quantities from thousands of ports
