For until recently amongst cultivated people, enjoying whatever advantages may be derived from civilisation, there has been an almost universal belief, not yet much broken into, that modern or bourgeois civilisation is the final form of human society. Were this the case we should be pessimists indeed, but happily we know that civilisation is only a stage in the development of the human race, just as barbarism was, or the savagery of the progressive nations. Civilisation must of necessity develop into some other form of society, the tendencies of which we can see, but not the details; for it is now becoming clear that this new state of society can only be reached through the great economic, moral, and political change which we call Socialism; and the essential foundation of this is the raising of the working classes to a point that gives them a control over their own labour and its product.

In order that our readers may get a correct view of this, it is necessary to use the historic method-that is to say, to trace the development of society from its early times up to the full expression of

the commercial period, which has created and is now creating such a vast mass of discontent, not only amongst the working classes who suffer directly from the oppression that is a necessary part of it, but also in various and sometimes discordant forms amongst the well-to-do, who on the face of things are benefited by its working. We propose to finish the book by giving our own impressions both of the immediate issue of the present stir and commotion in socio-political life, and also of what may be reasonably expected from the new society when it has at last supplanted the ever-increasing confusion of the present day. Only it must be premised that this last part can be nothing more than the expression of our own individual views, and that we do not claim any further weight for it. Although it has been often attempted, it is impossible to build up a scheme for the society of the future, for no man can really think himself out of his own days; his palace of days to come can only be constructed from the aspirations forced upon him by his present surroundings, and from his dreams of the life of the

C

past, which themselves cannot fail to be more or less unsubstantial imaginings.

At least we can boldly assert that those who think that the civilisation of our own time will not be transformed both in shape and in essence, hold their opinion in the teeth of the witness of all history. This cannot be set aside by taking refuge in platitudes about "human nature,' which are really deduced from orthodox theology and an obsolete view of history. Human nature is itself a growth of the ages, and is ever and indefinitely moulded by the conditions under which it finds itself.

IT

CHAPTER I

ANCIENT SOCIETY

T is, or has been, a commonplace with many that the system of to-day has been made by the growth of ages, and that our wills in the present are impotent to change it but those who put this forward from their position of " standing on the ancient ways," fail to see that this very fact condemns that position. The business of progressive minds is to recognise the coming change, to clear away obstacles to it, to accept it, and to organise it in detail. Reactionists, however, although they deny it and profess to accept moderate, i.e. non-essential change, are trying consciously to stay that very evolution at the point which it has

reached to-day they are attempting to turn the transient into the eternal: therefore by persistently reading the spirit of the present into the records of the past, they really annihilate history, which is not a mere series of actual events through which society, crystallised at once and for ever as to its essentials in the form that it assumes now, has cut its way, but is really one with the present society of which we are ourselves a part; is in fact society as regarded from its dynamic aspect, as the agent and patient of change. The 18th century view of history was entirely based on the abovementioned narrowness of conception,1 which forced men to look on "Homer" as a literary man, like, say Dryden and Pope, and on Lycurgus as an early Dr. Johnson.

The hopes for the social life of the future are involved in its struggles in the past; which indeed, since they have

1 It is curious to note how this view has acted on a man of such insight and such capacity for research as the late Lewis H. Morgan, who seeks the American democratic constitution in the beginnings of social evolution, alike in the Iroquois tribe, in the Greek Tóλes, and in the Roman city of the regal period.