The demands for old-age pensions, and for government action on behalf of the unemployed, for example, as now put forward in Great Britain, by labour Members who identify the interests of labour with socialism, are demands of this precise kind.
The care of the aged, the care of the unwillingly and the discipline of the willingly idle, are among the most important objects to which social statesmanship can address itself; but the doctrines of socialism hinder instead of facilitate the accomplishment of them, because they identify the cure of certain diseased parts of the social organism with a treatment that would be ruinous to the health and ultimately to the life of the whole.
We may, however, look forward to a time, and may do our best to hasten it, when, the fallacies of socialism being discredited and the mischief which they produce having exhausted itself, we may be able to recognise that they have done permanent good as well as temporary evil--partly because their very perverseness and their varying and accumulating absurdities will have compelled men to recognise, and accept as self-evident, the countervailing truths which to many of the sanest thinkers have hitherto remained obscure; and partly because socialism, no matter how false as a theory of society, and no matter how impracticable as a social programme, will have called attention to evils which might otherwise have escaped attention, or been relegated to the class of evils for which no alleviation is possible.
Even to suggest the manner in which these evils would be treated by a sound and scientific statesmanship would be wholly beyond the scope of a volume such as the present, for this reason, if for no other, that, as has been said already, the evils in question are not one but many, each demanding special and separate treatment, just as ophthalmia demands a treatment other than that demanded by whooping-cough.

But one general observation may be fitly made, in conclusion, which will apply to all of them.

These remedies cannot be included under the heading of any mere general augmentation of the pecuniary reward of labour taken in the aggregate.

The portion of the national dividend which goes to labour now, in progressive countries such as Great Britain, Germany, and America, is immensely greater than it was a hundred years ago, and unless industrial progress is arrested its tendency is to rise still further.

The main evils to which a scientific statesmanship should address itself arise from the incidental conditions under which this dividend is spent--conditions, largely improvable, which at present deprive it of its full purchasing power.