we have most of the evils of a certain policy without any of the safeguards.
The need of the moment, then, is to clear the issues and to make up our minds between the alternative policies. When we have so made up our minds we must carry out the one or the other in its integrity. There is much confusion at present, because every one recognises that State action is necessary in certain public services, such as national defence, police, sanitation, education, and the relief of destitution. The fact that the State has done these things, with a varying amount of success, is used as an argument that it should do everything, and the ordinary citizen finds some difficulty in making up his mind as to where the line should be drawn. But the issues now appear to be gradually clearing themselves. In the last few years the State has entered upon a course of action which appears to be closely distinguishable from the functions enumerated above because it clearly affects the private life and conduct of individual citizens high and low. It is, for example, now trying to impose compulsory charity upon the well-to-do, compulsory thrift upon the poor, and compulsory virtue upon all classes of the population. It has abandoned the old "destitution" principle in public relief, and proposes to bring about universal material welfare through the poor law or its equivalent. All this, of course, differs fundamentally from the State action which has hitherto commended itself to the good sense of the community. The authors of this new departure are actuated by the best intentions, but we cannot on that account allow their policy to pass without criticism. The first thing that is plain is that it is a policy of despair—of despair, on the one hand, of human nature, of despair, on the other, that the industrial classes can ever live by their labour. There are many who believe that this despair is
