Ir chanced that two sociological books published this spring fell into my hands at the same time; Morris Hillquit's Socialism in Theory and Practice and G. Lowes Dickinson's Justice and Liberty;1 and reading them together, I was led to ask myself how men of so diverse tempers could hold, or profess to hold, the same doctrine. Mr. Hillquit, I saw, was at least consistent with himself; his reconstructed society of the future is a natural outgrowth from his attitude toward that of the present. Whether he really understands the present, and whether his reconstruction of the future is humanly possible, are, of course, other questions.

Orthodox economy, in the person of the doughty M. Leroy-Beaulieu, contends that no communistic exploitation of labor would be sufficiently productive to maintain civilization; the economists may decide. So, too, the psychologist alone can determine whether any equalized system of distribution would create a condition of content among the individuals capable of stability. The historian must say whether evolution from a slave-holding régime,

1 The order of Mr. Dickinson's publications will be found significant: From King to King: The Tragedy of the Puritan Revolution (1891); Revolution and Reaction in Modern France (1892); The Development of Parliament during the Nineteenth Century (1895); The Greek View of Life (1896); The Meaning of Good: A Dialogue (1901); Letters from a Chinese Official: Being an Eastern View of Western Civilization (1901); Religion: A Criticism and a Forecast (1905); A Modern Symposium (1905); Justice and Liberty (1908). Since then, he has delivered at Harvard his Ingersoll lecture, Is Immortality Desirable? which was printed in the Atlantic Monthly for May, and which is to appear this spring in book form. The important development of his ideas begins with The Greek View of Life.

through the dominance of the feudal baron and of the "captain of industry," points logically to a self-guiding society, or merely to another change of masters. And, finally, it remains for the moralist to ask whether a revolution based avowedly on class-hatred would not result in a grosser form of egotism, rather than in Mr. Hillquit's beatific vision of a “worldwide solidarity," and of a state in which "the question of right and wrong is entirely obviated, since no normal conduct of the individual can hurt society, and all acts of society must benefit the individual."

These are brave matters, indeed, and whilst the debate goes on with words, and sometimes with blows, the mere man of letters might do well to hug the wall and chant his "Ailinon! ailinon! sing woe, sing woe, but may the Good prevail."

With Mr. Hillquit and the honorable economists of his type, I have no argument; they are out of my range. But Mr. Dickinson, who is himself really just a man of letters, however high he may stand in the craft, I am able to follow; and I seem to detect an inconsistency in his procedure, something more than a logical fault, which, if I am wrong, he may some day in his suave manner quite explain away. Meanwhile, I should have supposed that he belonged to the class of M. Anatole France rather than of Mr. Hillquit, with less of irony and more of moral earnestness, no doubt, than the wicked Parisian, but still moved at bottom by the same irritated refinement of taste. If that be so, his descent into the political maelstrom ought to have ended

in some such débâcle of horror as closes M. France's L'Ile des Pingouins, wherein

the reader is left with the spectacle of a civilization crowded into a monstrous city, evidently suggested by New York, alternating with a state of barbarism into which it is periodically thrown by a socialistic insurrection, and from which it slowly emerges to the same hideous nightmare of commercialism. To be sure, M. France has himself sat on the pierre blanche, dreaming the dream of a regenerated world, and it may be that Mr. Dickinson will yet take the same step from fancy to despair. But for the present his profession of faith, as it may be read in Justice and Liberty, closes with an avowed adherence to that party of progressive materialism from whose temperament his own would seem to be of all temperaments the furthest removed.

In one respect Mr. Dickinson stands with the more practical socialists, in so far as he, like them, is exercised by a profound discontent with the present social order. That deep-seated feeling underlies all his discussions, rising at the last in Justice and Liberty to a clamorous outcry against a society which is "a silly, sordid muddle, grown up out of centuries of violence and perpetuated in centuries of stupidity and greed," but expressed more bitingly, if more judiciously, in the earlier Letters, wherein an imaginary follower of Confucius sets forth the lack of an ethical basis in Western civilization, its absolute divorce between religion and practice, its vain endeavor to accomplish through government meddling what in China springs naturally from the institution of the family, its inherent and suicidal unrest. Your triumphs in the mechanical arts," observes this bland Oriental, are the obverse of your failure in all that calls for spiritual insight. . . . Ratiocination has taken the place of perception; and your whole life is an infinite syllogism from premises you have not examined to conclusions you

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No socialist could express a more complete animosity toward existing conditions, but the grounds of their discontent are utterly different, and it is precisely in this difference that I see the difficulty of associating Mr. Dickinson in any peaceful bond with such writers as Mr. Hillquit to take the latest comer. These writers, it is clear, have no part in the regret for the past, such as troubles the imagination of the poet and scholar; rather they are of those who reach out passionate, protesting hands to make, as Mr. Dickinson says, "a cupidinous ravishment of the future." Their quarrel with present ills is not because time affords so small a recompense for all it takes away, but because it withholds so grudgingly its promise of good. The tendency of things to them is altogether right; only by persuasion or violence they would hasten its course.

Starting with a thorough acceptance of the grande industrie as it now rules society, they aim only to carry this law to what they regard as its scientific conclusion. They are no recalcitrants against "the proud magnificence of trade." On the contrary, they are merely a part of the larger tendency, which for a century and more has been gaining visibly in acceleration, to glorify industry, commerce, labor, as things desirable in themselves and inevitable to progress. Their old testament is Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, from which individualist and collectivist alike take origin; and their Messiah is Karl Marx, with whom they agree in this, if in nothing else, that the controlling forces of the world are material, that the changing social order with its creeds and professions is entirely the result of economic forces, and that productive labor is the sole economic measure of values. They can

1 I am perfectly aware that Socialists are all things against all men, and will at a pinch

where means, nowhere an end! Society a huge engine, and that engine itself out of gear!"

terialism to idealism, in a quite bewildering manner. But I believe that my thesis represents their most continuous argument.

point to philosophers and grave historians as authority for their faith in the cash nexus to Guglielmo Ferrero, to cite the scholar we are all reading these days, who accounts for the Roman conquest of the world by " the growth of a nationalist and industrial democracy on the ruins of a federation of agricultural aristocracies."

Now, the faith of these men in industrial evolution I can understand, but with the type of writers of which Mr. Dickinson is so eminent an example it is another matter. It may be a fault of interpretation, but as I read his books, even his profession of socialism, I involuntarily class him with the long line of philosophers who have averted their eyes from industry as from a degrading influence. To them the power that raises individuals and communities has been rather that honestum which Cicero defined as something laudable in itself, apart from all utility and without thought of reward or fruit. They are of the line of the witty Lord Halifax, who thought that when by habit a man cometh to have a bargaining soul, its wings are cut, so that it can never soar; of that clerk of the India House, honest Elia, who called upon earthquakes to swallow up the

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gripple merchants,' as Drayton hath it, born to be the curse of this brave isle;'" of that anarchical vagabond, if the comparison may be offered without offense, who tramped about Concord and who in his Journal wrote down business as more opposed than crime to poetry, and as a negation of life;" of the gravely ironical Cardinal Newman, who rebuked the political economists for their theory" that the pursuit of wealth, that is, the endeavor to accumulate the means of future subsistence and enjoyment, is, to the mass of mankind, the great source of moral improvement.” In a word, for examples might be heaped up without end, they are by temperament inclined to believe that any true advance from an industrial stage of society must be through some force working contrary

to the principle of industrialism and not within it. Whether, I repeat, their attitude is in harmony with the nature of things, is another question; I am concerned with their self-consistency.

Now, this is no fanciful opposition of classes, nor does it spring from any mere theoretical disagreement. I will not presume to say that I have tracked the dividing cause to its last secret lair; he who could do that would possess such a clue to the divergent ramifications of human character as no man has ever yet laid hold of. But it is plain to see that with this opposition goes the contrast of temperaments which we call loosely democratic and aristocratic, and which is perhaps more precisely defined by the dislike or like of distinction. Not labor itself, the labor improbus of the poet, makes the difference, for the true aristocrat, whether in politics or the arts, has often been addicted to the severest toil. It is expressed rather in the phrase laborvalue.

Adam Smith marked the point of divergence in his famous text: "Labor alone, therefore, never varying in its own value, is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared." He himself, to be sure, has adverted in passing to the public admiration which makes part of the reward of the arts and sciences, and, indeed, some orthodox socialists have not denied this principle. As in all human theories, the question is one of emphasis; it is the stress laid on laborvalue that separates the socialist from the school to which Mr. Dickinson should seem to belong. For distinction is precisely that quality in man or object which is incommensurable by labor; it is, to wrest a word from the vocabulary of the enemy, the true plus-value.

On that estimation and reverence which has no basis in labor-value, which goes with the concealment of labor or at least with the suppression of labor-value, hangs the whole aristocratic ideal. You

will find this theory set forth unmistakably in Castiglione's portrait of the gentleman whose distinguishing trait is a grace arising from a certain sprezzatura or disdain of apparent toil. It is elaborated with endless repetition in the letters of Lord Chesterfield to his son, with their insistence on the Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re, and on the necessity of hiding a strenuous application under the arts and graces of life.

Mr. Dickinson himself, in his Modern Symposium, has somewhat grudgingly set forth, and in Justice and Liberty has caricatured, a society whose tone and march are given by those who are preeminent from no personal achievement, but from the deference bestowed on rank and possessions achieved in the past. The justification of such a society, if justification it have, is in the value of a distinction created or maintained by the imagination. It presupposes that the ideal of a family set apart by a certain illusion, if you please, of the people for the higher ends of life will, imperfectly no doubt, work itself out in a practice of honor and beauty and wise control. It believes that the concealment of labor in an inherited name may have this power of the imagination.

The difference is even more evident in literature and art. The common distrust of socialism among those who really cherish the imagination is soundly based; and socialists, in replying to that distrust, have fallen into the vaguest generalizations, or have frankly avowed that no scheme of socializing this form of production without destroying its inspiration has yet been devised. "The domain of the arts is to-day practically the last resting-place of the 'superman,'" says our helpful friend, Mr. Hillquit: rightly as regards the implied attitude of his class; quite wrongly in so far as he affiliates the true distinction with a Nietzschean individualism rather than with a community of the imagination, giving and taking honor, which is the very opposite of a material or economic collectivism.

There was something more than grim humor in the remark of a socialist made in my hearing: "We must first kill the poets!" He meant to say that labor in itself affords no measure for valuing the production of the artist, as the tragedy and honor of life too openly show. Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his marvelously wise Discourses, has seen the force of this law. "The value and rank," he says, " of every art is in proportion to the mental labor employed in it, or the mental pleasure produced by it. As this principle is observed or neglected, our profession becomes either a liberal art or a mechanical trade." And further: "The great end of the art is to strike the imagination. The painter, therefore, is to make no ostentation of the means by which this is done; the spectator is only to feel the result in his bosom. An inferior artist is unwilling that any part of his industry should be lost upon the spectator."

Not the picture or the poem that has cost the greatest toil is most highly prized and rewarded; and indeed the manifestation of toil, however much may have been expended, is directly harmful to the finished production. The value depends on the innate sense of distinction, or on the bastard sister of distinction which we call rarity. Industrialism is entirely consistent with itself in harboring a secret or avowed contempt for those works of the imagination which escape its means of estimation; just as a democracy is inherently jealous of distinction of man

ners.

If I do Mr. Dickinson a wrong in placing him, a professed socialist, in the class of those naturally opposed to socialism, it will be because I misjudge his writings. I find in these, to begin with, a distinction of mere language, a style marked by a rare delicacy of phrase and cadence, even verging at times on a too refined self-consciousness. To pass, for instance, from Mr. Hillquit's pages to this Cambridge don's is like changing from homespun, very good spun in this case, to an attire of silk. His language is shot through

with imaginative, above its utilitarian values.

And the ideas from which he starts are in accordance with his style. If you will open his early volume on The Greek View of Life, you will discover where his heart really lies. "With the Greek civilization, beauty perished from the world," he says; and although he admits sadly that the dissolution of that harmonious life was inevitable, yet he cannot avoid gazing back upon it regretfully, as upon the "fairest and happiest halting-place in the secular march of men." One observes, too, almost a secret satisfaction in his allusions to the Platonic and Aristotelian theory of mechanical toil as derogatory to the status of a citizen. "To regard the working-class,' " he says.and his statement cannot be dissevered from his praise of the Greek state as the fairest memory and the highest hope of mankind, — “to regard the workingclass' as the most important section of the community, to substitute for the moral or political the economic standpoint, and to conceive society merely as a machine for the production and distribution of wealth, would have been impossible to an ancient Greek."

Temperamentally, it is evident, Mr. Dickinson is with the Greeks. The tragedy of his evolution-if tragedy is not too harsh a word-springs from his wistful admiration of that fair Hellenic harmony joined with a sense that it rested on ephemeral foundations. Excellence in Greece, he thinks with some exaggeration of the fact, was confined to a privileged class and demanded the subordination of the many to the few:

the very limitations by which it was destroyed."

The aim of philosophy, then, is to discover some practice, or theory leading to practice, which may bring back to the world that vanished grace, while not circumscribing its benefits; in a word, to reconcile individual excellence with absolute justice. But, first of all, we must clear our minds as to what is the real goal and desire of humanity, about which the idea of justice plays; and to that end moves the discussion of The Meaning of Good, a subtle and somewhat perplexed dialogue after the manner of Cicero's De Finibus. Fortunately for the reader, to this long pursuit of the summum bonum, which like a will o' the wisp flickers now here, now there, over a vast illusory field, the author has prefixed a careful analysis of his argument. The negative and unphilosophical aspects of the question are first considered, and reasons are given for rejecting the opinion, on the one side, that our ideas about the Good have no relation to fact, and on the other side the opinion that we have such easy and simple criteria of the Good as infallible instinct or the course of Nature or current conventions or pleasure.

Some deeper experience of the heart must be discovered than these, some foundation in that conscious activity which is of the individual and yet pertains to the whole. It cannot be merely the good of future generations, for to be real it must be present. It cannot be merely the scientific notion of the benefit of the species, for this introduces an incompatibility between the one and the many, leaving the Good to hang, as it were, in the air, being the good of nobody at all. And so we are led by subtlest interrogatories to detect the inadequacy of theory after theory: that all activities are good, and that what seems bad in each, viewed in isolation, is seen to be good in a general survey of them all; that the Good consists in ethical activity, in art, in knowledge.

Finally, we are left to the hypothesis