theory that art is stifled by inequality. The society of Athens was based first on slavery, then on a class of citizens whose name amongst persons of culture, as we have seen, meant the tasteless. There was more inequality in the Venice of Titian than there is in contemporary London. The division between classes was far more marked. And what of Florence? Let the palace of the merchant Pitti, let the palace of Strozzi the money-lender, answer.

In all his points alike Mr. Morris is a dreamer, just as are his brother Socialists. He differs from them only in this, that his dreams are the dreams of a poet, and though this prevents them from being typical of the dreams of Socialists generally, they are eminently typical of them in their obvious unreality.

Mr. Morris's own words are the best of all comments on his methods,

"Forget six centuries o'erhung with smoke,

Forget the noisy steam and piston stroke."

Mr. Morris invites us to do this; and he certainly shows us the way by having done it himself. His way of reading history is to forget it; and he thinks that the journey back to an imagined past is easy because he does not realise what lies between. He forgets, too, something more important than history-and that is the constitution of the human character. What the dreams and schemes of himself and of all his friends postulate is not only a change in institutions, but a complete change in man's character. If they can change that, the institutions will take care of themselves, and change also. Until they can change the first, they will never radically change the second; but meanwhile Mr. Morris will have done what but few men ever do-he will have fulfilled completely one of his earliest ambitions as he himself described it, and remain "The idle singer of an empty day."

W. H. MALLOCK.

IN

II. POLITICS.

N an old, long-settled country the tendency is usually against any strong expression of individualistic opinions, although there is a certain amount of adoration for the successful Individualist, expressed, of course, after he has succeeded. It is always so much easier for the ordinary mortal to float with the stream than to swim against it, or manifest eccentric methods of progression, that most persons are content with doing as others do. In this old country it is especially difficult to break through the conventions mostly unwritten, which govern human relations. In politics, Individualism, which is reasonably possible for the journalist and the public speaker, is of exceeding difficulty for the House of Commons legislator; he cannot afford to offend his electors, he must go with his party-with the added difficulty that every party, in this last decade of the nineteenth century, is in a transition state. The names Tory, Whig, Liberal, Radical, are, to-day, mere labels, and the men who are so labelled are seldom either Tories, Whigs, Liberals, or Radicals. Between the Toryism of sturdy Snipper and that of Mr. W. H. Smith there is more than the one hundred and

sixty years or so there is an impassable gulf. Divine rightasserting Toryism died out even before Lord North, and yet Lord North's Toryism is of a quality that no living member of the Cabinet could honestly pretend to inherit or maintain. The Whiggism of 1688 faded away long prior to the Reform Bill of 1832; nothing would embolden Lord Hartington or Sir Henry James to advocate the right of revolution, or even to reassert doctrines which were distinctly affirmed in both Houses of Parliament in the great Regency debate of little more than a century since. Whigs and Conservatives are, to-day, almost indistinguishable, save that one sits on the right, the other on the left of Mr. Speaker. Conservatives in office carry Liberal measures. There may be some little change of verbal expression, but that is all. Strict application of any principles in legislation would not be easy even for a statesman

who was both giant and genius, and the application might involve total disregard for continuance in office.Our Constitution is a patchwork of expedients and compro:nises, to make up which party flags have been cut into many snippets. A Disraeli has managed to make his party almost toe the line marked in the people's Charter of fifty years since, for which schoolmaster Lovett was sent to gaol; and to-day legislators on both sides of the House are far too ready to bid against each other for the popular vote, which, if it cannot give them safe lease of political power, can most certainly drive any Government from office at a general election. Those who in time. of storm should firmly steer the vessel, find it easier to run before the wind; those who might breast a strong current are content to glide along with the tide. The overwhelming influences of the great ducal houses are gone; the prestige even of a great Prime Minister is subject often to the hysterical caprices of a journalist experimentalising in sensational copy. Just now it is a fashion, in words at any rate, to measure Socialism against Individualism in politics. I will, in my advocacy of Individualism, quite exclude from the scope of this paper the Socialism which, either in grim earnest, or in merry, or is it cynical, jest, proposes "to take every square foot of land and every penny of the capital in the country and to make them public property," especially as this taking is to "be effected by coercion " and "without any further compensations than those which, ample though they may be, the proprietary classes have not been educated to appreciate." The scores of thousands of owners of single houses, and of small plots of land acquired in land and building societies through years of careful thrift; the hundreds of thousands of storers-up of small economies in the various savings banks; the numerous array of small investors in the co-operative societies, will form some reliant resistant quantity to the threatened confiscation by coercion. I should like to see even the Fabian lecturer who would have calm confidence enough to ask a crowded audience gathered in any one of the numerous co-operative halls of the Midlands, or of the North, to abandon for ever all hope of " divvy," and to graciously surrender to a new Socialistic Government the corpus of their hardly acquired shares. I am not concerned here to discuss Socialism in

art, when a Millais is to be spurred by a grandmotherly executive into efforts of genius by award of the like subsistence that will be accorded to the chimney-sweep; nor have I to examine Socialism in literature, where a Buckle, or a Ruskin, is to be gladdened by the sustenance paternally doled out in equal measure to the navvy or the sewer cleaner.

Lest I should, in these Bedlamitish illustrations, be suspected of even the faintest exaggeration, I may, perhaps, venture to quote one of the leading literati of present day Socialism, who says: "It may seem to those accustomed to the present system an injustice that the clever doctor, advocate, artist, author, or composer should be able to absorb no more of the good things of life than the man of average ability." I am, by the limitation of my subject, relieved from saying more on art and literature than that I think the dead level Socialistic government roller of like reward for every one, great or small, brave or cowardly, would probably flatten out of sight the whole of the peculiarities of cleverness and genius which sometimes help to serve and illumine the world. I have in this paper only to write on the stand to be made by the advocates of Individualism in politics. It is on projects of industrial legislation that the battle is to be really fought.

The legislation in the interest of British manufacturers, regulating manufactures and commerce in Ireland two centuries since, has sown the earth with curses which we, children of the sowers, reap to-day. The well intended remedial Irish land legislation of the last thirty-five years has, in some instances, certainly manufactured new evils without always diminishing the mischiefs honestly sought to be cured. The philanthropic factory, workshop, and mining legislation of this kingdom, though undoubtedly of enormous benefit to the general body of workers and thus to the country at large, has not been carried out without such destruction, during the past twenty-five years, to some of the smaller industries which formerly prevailed as to warn the watchful legislator that too much interference with the great industries which still keep our country well to the front in the march of nations, may do fatal injury to our capacity for progress. I am Individualist, as far as one wisely can be in such a country as our own. If I were in the

great North-West of the Dominion, far away from Ottawa or Montreal, or if I were in Western Australia, 500 miles or more from Perth, I should be still more Individualist. Here there are huge volumes of revised statutes, and as I cannot black out inconvenient chapters, as the Russian Censor blacks out from the foreign journals disagreeable columns-I have at the outset my Individualism very much cramped. So much is this the case that I fear that I am even now regarded as a very weak-kneed Individualist from the legislatorial standpoint. I hold that the Legislature ought not to limit the freedom of the adult individual except to prevent or punish crime, or to prevent, or to give remedy for, damages in the cases of matters which, not being regarded as crime, are admittedly injurious to the life, health, comfort, or property of the community in general, or of its individual members. I even deny the right of the State to inflict other punishment for crime than may be reasonably considered as preventive of the happening of similar crime. I admit that it is often exceedingly difficult to draw the line between the sphere of executive and individual action, and in all such cases I am inclined not to allow or authorise the State to interfere, except under very overwhelming evidence of general advantage resulting. I am sometimes accused of personal inconsistency in this matter because I have carried through Parliament a Truck Law Amendment Act, and because I am now invoking the assistance of the Legislature in relation to Market Rights and Tolls. On the last it is enough, at present, to observe that I am trying to cheapen the food of the workers by getting rid of artificial oppressive restrictions, imposed chiefly by charter or letters patent, and sometimes by legislation. I am not seeking to impose new restrictions. As to the Truck Act, 1887, it is sufficient for me to point out that the Truck laws are directed against cheating, and to remark, as Mr. Cunningham has done in his very able volume on Politics and Economics, that the laws against Truck do not hamper the employer in conducting his business; they can be enforced without any special reference to the scarcity of the times or the condition of trade, and are really desirable as preventing a fraudulent mode of bargain which had afforded opportunity for robbing the poor. I am further charged