which the pioneers of commerce are perpetually seeking to multiply; and how these imports are met by exports dispersed in criss-cross fashion about the globe, so that what we get from the United States may be really paid for by what we send to China and Japan, the mind grows dizzy at the contemplation of the innumerable shifting threads which, shot to and fro over the world, are the warp and woof of our interwoven lives. Consider, for example, sugar, which must ever remain an important article of consumption among us, while not an ounce of raw sugar is produced in our island. A bureau of foreign commerce might frame an estimate of the quantity that might be consumed in a year, but how could it determine the quantities to be requisitioned from Europe, from the several states of Europe, from the islands of the West Indies, from the rest of America, North and South, from Natal, from Queensland, from Mauritius, the East Indies, Dutch and English? How could it always be on the alert to detect new possibilities of supply? How could it organize the mass and the distribution of the exports that would, according to some law, we know not what, be a proper set-off against what we received? And this is only an exhibition under a magnifying-glass of the not less delicate and intricate movement of the vital functions of our economic life at home. All may, in truth, be summed up in the declaration that an industrial community is a palpitating, living organism, the corpuscles of which are in perpetual movement with reciprocal action and reaction among themselves, shifting their relations from causes so manifold and so obscure that the wit of man is not competent to forecast, to train, and to direct its growth and its life. Newton,
'Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone,'
might master and foretell the movements of the spheres, but not even his intellect would be able to track the movement of industry, detecting and weighing the thousands upon thousands of minute causes existing in the material conditions of place and circumstance, and in the variable wills and minds of mortal men, which conspire to send the current of labour here and there over the face of the earth, to make the centres of energy shift from continent to continent and from hemisphere to hemisphere, to people and unpeople states, and to crown a nation to-day master of the world, only to yield the palm of supremacy to another to-morrow.
I have dwelt upon the intellectual rather than upon the moral difficulties confronting Socialism; yet there is a line of reflection that cannot be passed without notice dealing with the bearing of
