But though all this is plausible, yet if we look at the matter more closely, we can easily see that it is the very reverse of true. It must be plain to every one who will consider the labor movement for a moment, that its vitality depends on three separate classes. It depends on both those of which we have just spoken -on those who openly promote it from above, and on the troubled multitude below-and farther, on a third class, consisting of those who, though not belonging to any definite labor party or distinctly assenting to any revolutionary theories, yet give the movement a certain amount of encouragement, the exact extent and grounds of which they are themselves unable to define.

Of the first class such persons as Mr. Henry George are examples, or, again, socialists like Mr. Lawrence Gronlund.

Of the second class no examples need be given. It may be said to consist of the laboring masses generally.

Of the third class, a good example may be found in the English Radicals. These men, or at least the most eager among them, are continually, in the press and on public platforms, indorsing and emphasizing the more general language of the socialists with regard to the injustice of existing society, the claims and wrongs of the poor, and the tyranny and false position of the rich; and they have during this winter actually joined hands with the socialists for the purpose of organizing labor demonstrations in London. And yet these men, with regard to certain points, and those the very points which the socialists think most essential, are not only not adherents of socialism, but are bitterly and irreconcilably opposed to it. A good specimen of this class is Mr. Stead, the editor of the "Pall Mall Gazette." No socialist could declaim with more energy than he against the tone and influence of the capitalistic classes, and the implied iniquity of riches and luxury generally. But whereas the socialists, in using such language, have a definite economic theory at the back of it a theory which maintains that all interest and all profits are illegitimate, and simply represent so many thefts from laborMr. Stead, and others like him, whatever their own theories may be, certainly consider this a most fatal and monstrous heresy; for not only do they never join in any definite attack upon capital, but they always treat capitalistic enterprise with the quiet

acceptance of ordinary business men, and without any concealment, apology, or self-reproach, are active in the pursuit of profitmaking themselves. But this class I am speaking of is not composed only of Radicals. Many of its members are by natural temper conservative, but a vague misgiving assails them that the times are out of joint. Though they cannot accept for a moment the formal theories of the socialists, yet they are haunted with ideas of some widespread social injustice, and what the Radicals proclaim with exultant bitterness these men echo in dejection.

Such are the three classes concerned in the labor movement; and it is almost an identical proposition to say that, in a certain sense, the most important of them is the mass of the laborers themselves. Not only is this movement a movement in their behalf, but from them, if from anywhere, must come the strength which alone can bring it to a conclusion. The voting strength. must be theirs, and, in the last resort, the physical strength. Now, without speaking of the education of the laborers at large in any terms of undue disparagement, it may safely be said that they are not, as a body, profound and critical students of the science of political economy, either of the orthodox version of it or of the socialistic. The latter especially, as being comparatively new and strange, requires considerable time and concentration of thought to master it, and the average socialist workingman has as little accurate knowledge of its doctrines as an Italian peasant has of the philosophy of the Athanasian Creed. But are we to conclude from this that economic science plays but a small part in the labor movement; that it has done little to stimulate and direct it, and can do still less to curb it? Those who think thus fail to understand one of the chief facts of the situation.

No social revolution can be made by a theory: it is equally true that it can never be made without a theory. The most ignorant men, stimulated into revolt against their circumstances by mere physical suffering, are obliged, if they would combine for any continuous action, to unite themselves and direct themselves by a general principle of some sort, by some common theory, however rude or crude.

"When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then the gentleman?"

Even there we have some attempt at a social philosophy, something beyond the mere cry of hunger or the momentary passion of a street fight. The French Revolution shows us the same thing; so does the Nationalist movement in Ireland, and the recent land agitation among the Crofters in the Scotch Highlands. Mere hunger and suffering may produce a riot; a creed is needed as well to produce a sustained movement. And if this is true of the most ignorant populations, much more is it true of the modern laboring classes as a whole. The artisans and factory hands in the great centers of industry may not have assimilated the actual teachings of science to anything like the extent that some optimists suppose; but they have, at any rate, learned to respect science, if not to understand it; and if any scheme of revolution is to win their adherence, it must have the semblance of a scientific basis. The modern revolutionary workingman, however scantily educated, knows that science is too complex to be shut up in a couplet, and he does not ask to master the body of its doctrines himself; but he does ask to be assured that such a body of doctrines exists, and that they are capable of holding their own in the world of research and controversy. His scientific theory and his scientific programme of revolution he may get at second or even at third hand; but he must get them somehow, and they must be derived from sources which he believes to be authoritative.

We shall perhaps realize the state of the case more vividly if we turn for a moment from the social question to religion. The laboring classes, as a body, are certainly not readers either of Strauss or of Colenso, of Darwin or of Herbert Spencer; but contemporary atheism, as found among these classes, is backed up by, and takes its special tone from, a more or less vague impression that great scholars and great scientific philosophers have proved the Bible to be of purely human origin, and man, like the other animals, to be a mere creature of evolution. No impression can be falser than that thought produces its main influence directly. Its great practical influence is almost entirely indirect. Who, for instance, has affected the thought of the age more powerfully than Darwin? Our modern socialists, among others, confessedly owe half their theory of life to him.

And yet more copies probably are sold of a sensational novel, or book of travels, in one year, than are sold of all Mr. Darwin's works in ten. The circle to which the philosopher directly appeals is small, but in countless ways it is active, and influences a larger circle, and that circle a circle larger yet. From the volume the thought passes to the review, to the pulpit, to the newspaper; from these again to the leaflet, to the tract, to the debating society, and to common conversation. Thus do doctrines and theories, no matter how abstruse, where they have pushed themselves to the front in the narrow world of thinkers, at once begin to filter downward, ever extending the area of their influence.

But though the case of religion may offer us the most obvious example of this, that afforded by social and economic questions is in many ways even more striking. They exhibit a far more rapid and a far closer connection between theory and action, and with regard to the labor movement we may with truth say this: that if popular passion is the metal out of which it is made, theory is the mold into which the metal is run. Theory gives an agitation its shape, and determines how far it shall be useful or useless, how far it shall be for good or evil. Of course theory will not fill empty stomachs, or make people contented who are bitter with penury and privation; but on the nature of the theories accepted by such people depend the direction and the temper in which they will seek for a remedy. There is this farther to add: Though there are some sufferings which mere theory by itself never can alleviate, inasmuch as mere theory has not caused them, there are others which it has caused, and which it consequently can alleviate. Such are the sufferings which come, not from physical hardship, but from mere comparison of what is with what ought to be or what may be. The labor movement, then, is produced by both these causes, bodily suffering and mental suffering; and theory, whether it be true or false, base or noble, determines the character of both, and actually produces the second.

Thus the doctrines of the labor movement depend, not, as at first sight they may seem to do, on ideas that originate in the mass of the laboring multitude, but on ideas which that multi

tude receives from above, from a class or from classes comparatively small. The small classes I speak of are socially the most heterogeneous mixture, recruited from all ranks; but intellectually they have one bond of union, in that they read and think, that they appreciate logical argument or what they believe to be such, that they recognize the complexity of our social problems, and the necessity for study and statistical research if we would understand them rightly. In a word, they constitute the circle to which social and economic science directly appeals, and whose influence on the classes below them is directly shaped by the teaching of such science, as they themselves interpret it.

And now let us ask this highly pertinent question: What is the condition of economic science at present? There is no science, there is no department of knowledge, in a state so disorganized, so chaotic, and so incomplete as this. There are certain conclusions, indeed, of certain great economists, which are generally accepted by all who understand them, and which no thinker of any school has been able to call in question. But these are imbedded in a mass of other doctrines, with regard to which there is no such agreement, and the whole is commonly spoken of, and too often thought of, under the common name of political economy. To illustrate this it is enough to cite the celebrated saying of a living English statesman, that, under certain circumstances, "political economy might go to Saturn." What a revelation is contained in the fact that the use of such a phrase was possible! If political economy has established any truths whatever, if it has put anything beyond the reach of doubt, it is as ridiculous to say that these truths may go to Saturn, as it would be to say that arithmetic might go to Saturn. Plainly, then, in the mind of the statesman who used the phrase, and the public that tolerated it, there was complete confusion as to what political economy is or comprises. Its undoubted conclusions were confounded with its debatable ones, as if in a madman's dream; the former were eclipsed or discredited by the latter, and the whole province of economic thought, for the time being, had relapsed into anarchy.

And there is precisely such an anarchy now. Of what is settled in this science and what is debatable, there is no general, efficient,