of millions. Besides, the cosmological problem, isolated thus and treated as a quasi-scientific question, ceases to have a properly religious interest. Men have fought for the doctrine that God made the world,' says Mr Mallock, in his recent philosophical novel, 'The Veil of the Temple,' 'merely because they considered it essentially bound up with the doctrine that a God exists who has dealings with the human soul.' It was because Spencer's religious emotions were so little engaged that the agnostic position seemed to him so simple, and apparently satisfied him so completely.

The choice of a satisfactory title for his volume caused considerable difficulty; and the one eventually fixed upon led to misapprehensions of a kind to which Spencer was all his life peculiarly sensitive. The title he originally had in view, 'A System of Social and Political Morality,' comes much nearer a simple and intelligible description of the contents than the scientific metaphor which he afterwards pressed into his service; a friend, however, whom he consulted thought it too bald and threadbare. 'Demostatics,' a word used in the introduction (but suppressed before publication) was the next idea. Spencer considered that it accurately described the subject-matter of the book, namely, the maintenance of social equilibrium through conformity to the law of equal freedom, and suggested the strictly scientific character of the treatment. But the publisher was decisive against this pedantic neologism; and the term 'Social Statics' was eventually determined on as expressing the same idea, though his uncle warned him that it would be taken by many people for Social Statistics.' The sub-title in the original form, 'a system of equity synthetically developed,' is perhaps more accurately descriptive than that which finally appeared the conditions essential to human happiness specified, and the first of them developed'-though the second has the advantage of indicating a relation between the new work and the general utilitarian doctrine of contemporary English thought. The title, 'Social Statics,' if it was not productive of the confusion which his uncle feared, produced, not unnaturally, a wide-spread impression that the ideas promulgated in the book were inspired by the social philosophy of Comte, who had actually employed the same term for one of the divisions

of his system. It is true that a perusal of the book would have disclosed fundamental differences between the two thinkers; but it was difficult for the ordinarily constituted man to conceive that any one should undertake a treatise on social philosophy without making himself acquainted with Comte's work, a knowledge of which, through Mill and others, had been spreading in England for ten years previously; still less that he should use a technical title of that thinker's coinage without intending to indicate some relationship between their views. But we have seen how, when he set about systematic reading for his book, Spencer consistently eschewed his predecessors in the same field; and, incredible as it may seem, we have no reason to doubt his assertion that he then knew nothing more of Auguste Comte than that he was a French philosopher; did not even know that he had promulgated a system having a distinctive title, still less that one of its divisions was called "Social Statics."' The misunderstanding thus originated continued to haunt and waylay Spencer through the greater part of his life, much to his annoyance, and was the occasion of emphatic and repeated disclaimers.

When we turn to the work itself, the source of its inspiration is found to be much nearer home. The conclusions, as we have seen, are, with very slight modifications, those of the Letters on the Proper Sphere of Government.' With the practical doctrines he remained entirely satisfied; it was with their theoretical basis that he was concerned. He desired, in accordance with the synthetic bent of his mind, to exhibit the various conclusions as so many applications of a single principle, from which, when formulated, they might be deductively derived. The principles of the Spencer family,' in short, had to be philosophised; and the principles of the Spencer family were an exceptionally clear and logical expression of the principles of the English political dissenters, and of contemporary Radicalism generally. Spencer began his systematic reading for the book in the year of the abolition of the corn laws. The philosophical Radicals had given place, in popular influence, to the Manchester school; but both were at one in their devotion to the principle of laissez-faire. By both the laws of political

economy were interpreted, not in the modern scientific sense as statements of what would happen under certain given conditions-statements therefore necessarily abstract, and in no sense preceptive as to what ought to happen in the concrete-but as ordinances of nature divinely instituted, with which it would be impiety as well as folly to interfere. Those who were not in the habit of speaking theistically shared the current optimism as to the beneficent operation of these great impersonal forces. The old Liberalism also, fresh from its campaign against privilege, still occupied the field with its purely negative ideal of freedom from restriction.

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Such was the contemporary English world in which Spencer's political thinking grew to maturity; by temperament 'radical all over,' he absorbed the principles of political individualism and economic optimism so completely that they assumed for him the guise of intuitions of the moral sense. When he proceeds to formulate the true fundamental intuition which can be logically unfolded into a scientific (or, as he elsewhere calls it, a purely synthetic) morality,' what we get is the famous doctrine of Natural Rights, deriving in England from John Locke, exported to France and receiving there world-wide expression from Rousseau and the Declarations, which embody the principles of 1789,' reimported for English political use by Tom Paine and the earlier Radicals, and practically animating the Benthamite reformers, in spite of the fact that Bentham wrote a treatise on Anarchic Fallacies' to expose the French Declaration. The law of equal freedom,' or 'the liberty of each, limited alone by the like liberty of all,' is the first law, says Spencer; and 'we may almost say that the first law is the sole law' on which scientific morality and the organisation of society depend. Or, as he states it later in italics, Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.' He cites it himself in one place as the doctrine that 'all men are naturally equal,' and expressly refers, in illustrative vindication, to Locke's Treatise on Civil Government,' the Declaration of American Independence, the late European revolutions and the preambles to the new constitutions that have sprung out of them,' the political agitations that have run a successful course

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within these few years,' and even to 'the maxim of the Complete Suffrage movement.' This principle being laid down, it follows that government is a necessary evil; is, indeed, essentially immoral' (p. 207). It is necessary because man, now compelled by the increase of population to live in the social state, retains the predatory instincts of his primitive life, and therefore does not uniformly respect the rights of others. But it is a transitional phase of human development, not essential but incidental. Progress is in all cases towards less government; and, as amongst the Bushmen we find a state antecedent to government, so may there be one in which it shall have become extinct.' Indeed, such extinction is inevitable, because the process of civilisation means the adaptation of man to his new conditions. Man possesses indefinite adaptability, and humanity must in the end become completely adapted to its conditions.'

Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilisation being artificial, it is a part of nature; all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower. The modifications mankind have undergone, and are still undergoing, result from a law underlying the whole organic creation; and, provided the human race continues, and the constitution of things remains the same, these modifications must end in completeness. As surely as the tree becomes bulky when it stands alone, and slender if one of a group; as surely as the same creature assumes the different forms of cart-horse and race-horse, according as its habits demand strength or speed.. surely must the human faculties be moulded into complete fitness for the social state; so surely must the things we call evil and immorality disappear; so surely must man become perfect' (p. 65).

In the meantime, till this consummation is arrived at, the State has its function. It may be defined as 'men voluntarily associated for mutual protection' (p. 275). There is nothing to distinguish it in the abstract from any other incorporated society.' Citizenship is willingly assumed'; and one of the indefeasible natural rights enumerated is 'the right to ignore the State,' that is, to 'secede from' it, 'to relinquish its protection, and to refuse paying towards its support' (p. 250). Police protection (and, he now adds with a grudge, protection

against external enemies) being the purpose for which the State is instituted, its duty must be rigorously limited to this function. When it seeks to interfere' in any other way, whether it be by trying to regulate commerce or by maintaining a religious establishment, by instituting poor-laws or providing for national education, by imposing sanitation or maintaining the currency and the postal arrangements, it is transgressing its proper sphere and displaying, indeed (p. 295), 'an absurd and even impious presumption' by taking into its own hands 'matters that God seems to be mismanaging,' and undertaking to set them right. Those in whom the power of self-restraint needs educating

'must be left to the discipline of nature, and allowed to bear the pains attendant on their own defect of character. The only cure for imprudence is the suffering which imprudence entails. . . . All interposing between humanity and the conditions of its existence-cushioning off consequences by poorlaws or the like-serves but to neutralise the remedy and prolong the evil. Let us never forget that the law is adaptation to circumstances, be they what they may' (p. 353). Again: 'Inconvenience, suffering, and death are the penalties attached by nature to ignorance as well as to incompetence-are also the means of remedying these. And whoso thinks he can mend matters by dissociating ignorance and its penalties lays claim to more than divine wisdom and more than divine benevolence' (p. 378).

To guard ignorant men against the evils of their ignorance by protecting them, for example, against quack prescriptions is to divorce a cause and consequence which God has joined together.' What a contrast there is, he exclaims, between the 'futile contrivances of men and the admirable silent-working mechanisms of nature' (p. 355).

'Always towards perfection is the mighty movementtowards a complete development and a more unmixed good; subordinating in its universality all petty irregularities and fallings-back, as the curvature of the earth subordinates mountains and valleys. Even in evils the student learns to recognise only a struggling beneficence. But above all he is struck with the inherent sufficingness of things, and with the complex simplicity of those principles by which every defect is being remedied-principles that show themselves alike in the self-adjustment of planetary perturbations and in the