succour for the unworthy, whereas the reality is quite the reverse of this! Scientific socialism seeks, first of all, the means of so raising the working-classes that they may be better able to maintain themselves and, consequently, to dispense with the help of others; and, secondly, it seeks to find what laws are the most in conformity with absolute justice, and with that admirable precept, "Benefit in proportion to merit, reward in proportion to desert." In the speech delivered by Mr. Shaw Lefevre, last year (1884), as President of the Congress of Social Science, at its opening meeting at Birmingham, he traced, in most striking language, all the good that State intervention had effected in England of late years: Greater justice enforced in the relations between man and man, children better educated and better prepared to become useful and self-supporting members of the community, the farmer better guaranteed against the exaggerated or unjust demands of the proprietor, greater facilities for saving offered, health ensured to future generations by the hours of labour being limited, the lives of miners further safeguarded, so that there are less frequent appeals to public assistance, and, as a practical result of this last measure, the mortality in mines fallen in the last three years to 22·1 per thousand, as compared to 27·2 per thousand during the ten previous years—a decrease of 20 per cent.! One fact is sufficient to show the great progress due to this State legislation: in an ever-increasing population, crime is rapidly and greatly diminishing.
Suppose that, through making better laws, men arrive gradually at the condition of the Norwegian peasantry, or at an organization similar to that existing in the agricultural cantons of Switzerland; that is to say, that each family living in the country has a plot of ground to cultivate and a house to live in: in this case every one is allowed to enjoy the full fruit of his labour, and receives reward in proportion to his activity and industry, which is certainly the very ideal of justice—cuique suum.
The true instinct of humanity has ever so understood social organization that property is the indispensable basis of the family, and a necessary condition of freedom. To prevent any one individual from being deprived of a share in the soil, which was in primitive ages considered to be the collective property of the tribe, it was subjected to periodical divisions; these, indeed, still take place in the Swiss Allmend, in some Scottish townships, in the greater part of Java, and in the Russian Mir.
If such a régime as this were established, there would be no more "tramps wandering from union to union." In such a state of society as this, not in such as ours, the supreme law which ought to govern all economic relations might be realized. Mr. Herbert Spencer admirably defines this law in the following passage:
