ment of gas, electric lighting, and waterworks, even under untoward conditions of city government for spoils, have on the whole been such as to fully justify the movement in that direction. The points in the controversy, on the respective sides, are well stated in the papers by Mr. Richardson of Philadelphia and Mr. Loomis of Buffalo, read at the last Conference for Good City Government at Baltimore. In the interesting discussion which followed the reading of these papers, Mr. Richardson said:

We have had for nearly forty years in Philadelphia the complete power by the City Councils and the city government to control the street railways. They had the power under the original ordinance, before a rail was laid in the city, to take the property of every company that was thereafter allowed to lay its tracks, at cost. With that power they could certainly have controlled it, so far as legal power is concerned; but as a matter of fact the companies have controlled the city, and control the City Councils to-day.

Now Mr. George's Single Tax, as well as all other tax reforms which aim to recover from city land, for the people, the unearned increment which the people themselves have created, is to be classified as a species of municipal control. Would it be treated with any more consideration by conscienceless millionaires and corporations who have permanent corruption funds for tax-assessors, than previous attempts at municipal control? On the other hand, would not municipal ownership of the city site tend to do away with the bribery of tax officials, in proportion as the class of city landholders became extinct, just as, under the system of municipal ownership and operation of public franchises, bribery abates in proportion as there are fewer companies to do the bribing?

Of course it is not practicable to put the system of municipal site-ownership in full operation in our old cities. The amount required to condemn and appropriate the site of New York City, for instance, would appall the imagination of the boldest reformer. But that is no reason why a beginning should not be made, the same as the New York Dock Department made a beginning. Wherever the slums are condemned and demolished, as they are sure to be, and wherever the land is not needed for parks, let the city hold and lease the cleared area, under conditions such as will insure its being rebuilt on

in a proper manner. Let the municipality be given authority, under carefully guarded provisions, to acquire additional areas, as favorable opportunity occurs, say after an extensive fire in the business or tenement-house districts, where the abuses of unearned-increment anticipation are found in their most malignant form.

But, however hopeless this problem may appear in our older cities, it need not be permitted to arise at all in the new cities which are still to be founded by the thousands in this city-building country. It is only necessary to apply the principle of land-municipalization at the start. In the far West, town-sites are still being carved out of land which is comparatively worthless until society has conferred a value upon it. How easy it would be for the infant municipality to hold its town-site intact, for the common benefit of all its people, present and to come, the same as the square reserved for the court-house and the block set aside for the school! How much baneful and demoralizing gambling in real estate would be forestalled, how many disastrous booms averted! As the new town grew populous and wealthy, the unearned increment from the municipal lots would construct the sewers, grade and pave the streets, uniform the police, and educate the children. There could be no unearned-increment anticipators in that city, and the maintenance of normal ground rents would reduce the cost of living and production to an extent quite astounding. It is probable that in such a city the line of life for the average man would approach much more nearly to the theoretical curve of ease, the condition of greatest reward for least effort.

And that, after all, is only what we have a right to expect

from a centre of human society.

STUDIES IN ULTIMATE SOCIETY.

I. A NEW INTERPRETATION OF LIFE.

BY LAURENCE GRONLUND.

Author of "The Coöperative Commonwealth."

"None is accomplished, as long as any is incomplete." — Emerson. OLLECTIVISM - that is rational socialismis, ex

C

clusively, an economic system, which in its full-blown development will mean: public, or collective, management of all means of production, of land, machinery, raw material. It has nothing directly to do with morals and religion, but indirectly almost everything. The reason for this lies in the fact, too often overlooked, that economic, industrial relations are the foundation of society and of civilization, while morality and religion are the flower and fruit thereof. N. P. Gilman, in his "Socialism and the American Spirit," complains that "the monotonous emphasis of Socialists is upon the material side of life rather than on the slow moral advancement that conditions lasting material progress,' and that "the characteristic article of the socialist creed is, that circumstances are all that we need to change." To be sure, we emphasize the material circumstances as the first thing to change - not "the all," by any means, just as in a garden the flowers and fruits, which of course, as the essential objects, entirely depend upon the roots underground and the seeds from which they sprang. We do say with complete assurance, that it is contrary to reason that the masses of our people should be moral and religious in their present material surroundings, that is to say, as long as they are cursed with the present insecurity and dependence, often not knowing where their next meal is to come from; as long, moreover, as they constantly are being tempted to immoralities, as in fact they are by the existing system. Huxley here agrees with us: "It is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.' It is for maintaining this evident proposition, that Gilman charges us with "wor

ship of the majority!" Well, surely, this writer may rather be charged with "worshipping" the minority- the "remnant," as Mathew Arnold quaintly calls it; I mean the enlightened, warm-hearted few who are to be the instruments in raising the whole of society upon a higher plane; and they evidently must be filled with the very highest ideals, since it is these that will furnish them with the powerful motives they will need. But with the great majority of men, and with society as a whole, it is entirely different: they and it have no high ideals at all, can in fact have nothing worthy to be called an "ideal." I shall now try to show that the new economic system called Collectivism will naturally evolve the very highest moral and religious ideals, for which reason alone the noblest among us ought to bless and work for the advent of this new social order.

We have a competitive industrial system, and we have a reigning philosophy that justifies and upholds this system. I now call attention to the fact, that it is the competition in our daily affairs that has created this philosophy and made it acceptable to us. All the influential writers of our age are permeated by it, but it is Herbert Spencer who has been the principal expounder of this philosophy to us, so much so that he may be called par excellence the philosopher of this competitive era. There is a curious contradiction in Spencer's writings, which also Huxley' has observed; while he has devoted essays to demonstrating that society is an organism, all his social and moral speculations start from and are throughout controlled by the very opposite assumption, adopted, it seems, unconsciously to himself, to wit: that we men are purely "autonomous" individuals, with no vital organic relations between us at all; that we have come into this world, each exclusively for the sake of himself; that in consequence society, far from being an organism or anything like it, is rather to be compared to a heap of sand, a heap of conscious grains of sand, whose sole business with each other is simply that of getting along together as tolerably as possible. This, as a matter of fact, is the reigning philosophy, and Spencer has become so popular as he is, because

1 In "Administrative Nihilism."

he has most perfectly given expression to it. One thing that shows that it is our competitive system which is really the parent of this philosophy is, that the latter originated with the genesis of private capital, and has spread with its growth; the preceding centuries knew nothing about it. Lecky confirms this by saying: "When we look back to the cheerful alacrity with which in former ages men sacrificed all their material interests to what they believed to be right, and realize the unclouded assurance that was their reward, it is impossible to deny that we have lost something in our progress."

This "something" which we have lost not compensated for by our own vast material progress was, I say, the inner, underlying meaning of all robust faiths of the past, with all their myths and dogmas. I refer to the conviction of our belonging together, the sense of man's organic unity, of the solidarity of man. This it was that actually dominated the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews, as also the Christians during the so-called Ages of Faith. With the ancients this sense was very strong, in the form of devotion to the commonwealth, which we know was the vital principle of their polity. It is here instructive to observe how wholly incapable Herbert Spencer is of comprehending this feeling; he speaks of the Greek citizen being a slave of his city!' Why, this devotion to his state, this close fellowship, was a very necessity to these ancient people; this living Athens, these altars, these customs, were to them a part of their very being, without which they absolutely could not live! And so we know that the Hebrews were moulded into unity by their ideas about Jehovah, their national God, who held out promises and threatened punishments, always referring exclusively to the national life of the entire people, always bringing general weal or general woe upon their commonwealth. This surely was solidarity in its strongest expression. But there was a deplorable limitation to the sense of man's unity in all these ancient folk; they confined it narrowly to an exceedingly small part of mankind, to the free-men only of their own city, or, at most, of their own nationality; all others

1 In "European Morals."