their philosophic, their literary, their political interest, offer excellent materials for the study of various forms of imagination labor. In no department of science or literature can we analyze with more advantage the various uses to which creative imagination may be put. With the celebrated Utopias of the past many of you are familiar. Plato, Sir Thomas More, Bacon, Harrington, have all exercised their imaginations in the creation of an ideal Republic, a Utopia, an Atlantis, or an Oceana. The creators of these older Utopias laid their fanciful communities in contemporary but distant islands, or imagined them as having existed in their own country thousands of years ago. They described the ideals which existed in their own minds rather than their hopes of what, by revolutionary changes, existing societies might ultimately become. On the other hand, the latest specimens of this kind of literature deal with the future. The paradises they create are laid a century or two hence. They are prophetical, they are evolutionary, and revolutionary.

The prophetic romance is indeed becoming a feature of the literature of to-day, but we must note that as a rule it is also a propagandist romance. Imagination is pressed into service of a zealous apostle of a particular creed. The creed may sometimes have but one article, the prophecy may be penned in illustration of a particular theory, or to bring home some special professional point. Such was the case with the "Battle of Dorking," a fine specimen of a forecast in which all the conditions of an imaginary war were graphically and realistically worked out. The writer of that clever sketch has had many followers, and the prophetic brochure has become a recognized weapon in the armory of the military, the naval, the sanitary, the municipal reformer. These are efforts of imagination, but they cover but a limited area of thought. The conditions which are brought to notice do not involve any violent hypothesis. Different from them are the Socialist novels, which assume the entire subversion of existing institutions, and portray conditions resulting from the establishment of society on what we should call a Utopian basis, though they are distinguished in many respects from the Utopia of More.

Constructive imagination has certainly been called into

play in their production; but in most cases with which I am familiar, it has been a limited imagination, imagination harnessed to theory and directed to work out particular results, in order to realize the natural effects which certain causes are likely to bring about, when all conditions of the problem are taken into account. The promise of the Socialist Utopian writer is that all the evil passions by which human nature is now marred, all sin and crime, all misery and unhappiness, are due to our existing institutions; and that after these institutions were swept away, and replaced by an ideal arrangement, under which the commercial system, the manufacturing system, the competitive system, with all their horrible accompaniments of money and exchange, buying and selling, would no longer find a place, every man and woman would be sublimely happy, incomparably beautiful, imperturbably virtuous, intolerably calm. Every human infirmity would disappear with the disappearance of money. There is but one exception-one rift within the lute. William Morris admits that so long as the passion of love remains, the passion of jealousy would also survive. I have compared Morris's fanciful picture in "News from Nowhere" with the American Bellamy's "Looking Backward." There is much that is common to both of them. The leading idea of both is a society where buying and selling have ceased, where goods are held in common, where there is no individual property and no money, and therefore no necessity for law, and no temptation to crime. In both, the underlying theory appears to be that it is the existence of our perverted social arrangements which has made men and women what they are.

But in the constructive part of their work you find a fundamental difference. Bellamy paints a society where the common stock of goods is replenished by carefully regulated labor, and distributed among the individual workers according to a minute and elaborate system, under which tickets and orders on State stores take the whole place of individual possession. Every man, woman, and child is part of a most complicated system, with a distinct place and function of their own. His society represents organization of labor and distribution in the most complete form imaginable. Morris's system, on the other

hand, is simplicity itself, for there is no organization at all. The production and consumption, collection and distribution, labor and the enjoyment of the fruits of labor are to be left to adjust themselves; and the author has an enviable confidence in their power to do so successfully. He assumes that production, free from the disturbing elements of competition, free from the necessity of manufacturing articles which people do not really want, free from the drawbacks attending private enterprise and active commerce, will easily overtake consumption, and that thus supplies will be so abundant that everybody may have their fill without stint, and no human wants remain unsatisfied. Every one will love labor when he can choose freely the work which he likes, and when he is no longer compelled to work at all. The only fear which the author feels is not that there would be difficulty in providing food, clothing, houses, and adornments for the citizens of the rural paradise, into which manufacturing England has been converted, but that all their wants would be so easily and abundantly supplied that there might be a deficiency of work for them to do, a deficiency of tasks to satisfy their keen appetite for labor. Though these works of fiction. are in one sense clearly imaginative, it seems to me that these descriptions of men and women, who gracefully people the reorganized world, are, nevertheless, lacking in imagination. The constructive faculty has been architectural, not pictorial. The men and women are nearly all alike, alike among themselves, alike in the different books. Naturally alike, the authors may say, because the endless diversity of existing types is due to the artificial disturbance of our form of civilization. And yet would a true conception of the future of human beings represent every member of human society as temperate, passionless, industrious, and intelligent? Bellamy's Bostonians of the year 2,000 are exactly like Morris's Arcadian villagers of the Twenty-first century. Human nature is suppressed in both. Or is it I who am wanting in imagination? Is it I, who, saturated with Nineteenth century notions, am unable to construct in my mind the natural results of a revolution in our existing social organism? I think not. These novelists have eliminated, discarded, dropped too much. But then they write with a purpose.

I trust that none of my academic hearers has inentally quarreled with me because I have lingered in the realms of poetry and fiction. Those who have followed me closely, and perhaps, here and there, have read between the lines, will have anticipated how I should apply the operations of constructive imagination, as illustrated in Utopian fiction, to sterner studies which are at present the business of your lives. The transition from the fantastic novels, from dreaming poets and Greek philosophy, to the hard problems of political economy is easy and natural. At first sight, as you pore over the pages of Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill, you may possibly think that you might let imagination lie dormant for a season. On the contrary, there is no branch of study where I would wish you to invoke it with more zeal. The want of imagination in writers and critics has, as I ventured to hint before, often led to profound misunderstandings. The present generation take such a book as Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations." They are startled at some of the doctrines; more startled by the illustrations. They assume, accordingly, a critical attitude. They cannot believe that wisdom and truth can exist in such surroundings. Call imagination to your aid. Endeavor to realize the conditions of the time in which the author lived. Study his theories, with a full understanding of the history of those days, and you will still be charmed and edified by almost every page of his great work. And while you use your imagination in reading his writings note the imaginative power -wonderful imaginative power-which he himself exhibits.

I once had the advantage of hearing a very able critic deliver an address on the "Wealth of Nations." "I do not mean to say," he declared, "that Adam Smith had not a great command and a very great knowledge of history, of law, of philosophy, and of almost everything that can make an accomplished writer; but he had in addition to these, this peculiar quality-that he had sagacity to enter into the minds of mankind; and in dealing with the subjects with which he dealt, he had the faculty of anticipating and foreseeing what they would do under certain circumstances; and this has given him the power of raising political economy to the dignity of a deductive science."

Lord Sherbrooke, Robert Lowe, as he was then, in those words described special quality of prospective imagination. He proceeded: "No doubt the attempt was made-and a noble attempt it was-by Mr. Bentham, Mr. Mill, and others to raise politics to a like eminence. They thought they could foresee what particular persons, or a particular class, would do under certain political conjunctures, and they attempted to raise a demonstrative and deductive science of politics as Smith did a science of political economy; but I am bound to say that, as far as my own opinion goes, that effort, meritorious and great as it was, has failed, and the science of politics is still to be written."

Possibly other authorities may think that some of Adam Smith's predictions on political economy have shared the fate which Mr. Lowe assigned to those of Mill on politics; but Mr. Lowe insisted on his point over and over again. "The test of science is prevision or prediction, and Adam Smith appears to me in the main to satisfy that condition." "I think that Adam Smith is entitled to the unique merit among all men who ever lived in this world of having founded a, deductive and administrative science of human actions and conduct."

Yet what was one of the main bases on which Adam Smith's predictions were founded?—that every man would act according to his own interest as he understands it. This was treated by Mr. Lowe as an assumption which experience has shown to be universally true; the discovery of this law he looked on as unique in mental science, and entitling Adam Smith to the very highest rank among those who have cultivated the more abstruse parts of knowledge. Mr. Lowe could not imagine that this very law would, by many men, be held to be shaken to its very foundations in these latter days-men who would not admit with him "that the principle and rules he had laid down have served for the guidance of mankind from Smith's time to the present, and will last as long as mankind shall seek after truth, or busy themselves with any intellectual study whatever."

Mill himself took a different view of the "Wealth of Nations." He praises Smith for what he calls his most characteristic quality-namely, that he invariably associates principles with their applications. But he proceeds