the profit of ownership of the instruments and materials of production which are unearned in terms of social utility shall form part of a common inheritance to which the energies and abilities of the individual shall be applied in conditions tending towards equal economic opportunity. In no other condition' (he continues), 'as we begin to see, can that characteristic significance of really free competition, towards which it has been from the beginning the destiny of our civilisation to carry the world, be realised.'

In other words, there is to be a general surrender on the part of the whole community of the larger portion of the reward which has hitherto fallen to the share of the leaders of commerce and industry. The most efficient are to be handicapped in the race, in order to give free play for the talents of the less efficient.

It is difficult to imagine a more chaotic dream than this; and the more closely the scattered details of it are studied in Mr Kidd's pages, the farther removed do we see it to be from anything resembling an intelligible or coherent system. In one place Mr Kidd seems to contemplate the establishment of State workshops, which will gradually supersede private enterprises by competing with them. In another he seems to look forward to an enormous national fund, derived from the spoliation of the real leaders of industry, from which fund any scatterbrained inventor will be given capital sufficient to enable him to put his follies to the test; and in any case there is one idea which seems always uppermost in his mindnamely, that the power of one man of talent to control, by means of capital, the economic operations of a number of men inferior to him will be, if not abolished, reduced to its smallest proportions. The extreme development of State socialism which would base society on a system of economic conscription, and make each citizen a soldier in the industrial army of the State, is sanity compared with this Walpurgis-nacht of Mr Kidd's imagination. He proposes to make economic competition more and more efficient by constantly undoing the conditions in which it naturally results, and which alone permit of its efficiency being increased farther.

How utterly devoid of coherence his ideas on this subject are will be seen more clearly when we reflect that,

as we have seen already, this equality of opportunity in the economic struggle is merely one part of an equality of opportunity that will be general. Not only is every human being, according to Mr Kidd, to be absolutely free to set up in business, and to try all methods of manufac ture, but the dunce, the lunatic, and the madman are to have the same facilities as those accorded to the wisest and profoundest thinkers, for trying new systems of government, advocating new religions, and making practical experiments in new systems of morals. The ideal,' says Mr Kidd, in a passage already quoted,

'is a rivalry in which the best organisations, the best methods, the best skill, the best abilities, the best government, and the best standards of action and of belief, shall have the right of universal opportunity.'

This sentence as it stands appears to us to be nonsense; for universal opportunity, as Mr Kidd conceives of it, could only give us the best governments, the best religious and moral codes, by according free play to the worst, and allowing these to disappear overwhelmed in their own failure; and this anarchical pandemonium, this tumult of universal folly, is precisely the condition of things to which Mr Kidd actually does look forward, as the opening scene of the act of the evolutionary drama which is first to bring us within appreciable distance of the glorious cosmic consummation which was implicit in its evolution from the beginning.

Mr Kidd will no doubt reply-and he has given himself every right to do so-that the new condition of things which equality of opportunity will produce, will not be advantageous to the successive generations who are born with it, and that he does not pretend that it will be. He will say that, on the contrary, the fact on which he primarily insists is the fact that nothing but a surrender of the advantages of the present generation to the future efficiency and prolonged vitality of the race could induce men to submit to a condition such as that which he here foreshadows; and that nothing could induce them to make this surrender but a motive which is essentially religious. But in urging this defence, Mr Kidd is merely bringing into view new difficulties no less disconcerting than the former, As has been observed already, he nowhere gives

us any analysis of this all-important religious motive, as it presents itself to the consciousness of the individual. Had he endeavoured to do this, he would have realised the insoluble nature of the practical difficulties in which his theory lands him.

In the first place, it must be remarked that, whenever he does condescend to adduce any facts as evidence that members of the progressive races are actually beginning to be influenced by the religious motive in question, and to surrender the good of the present for that of the remote future, his facts in reality point to a precisely opposite conclusion, and are nothing less than examples of an absolute preoccupation with the present. Thus, in one passage, he tells us that the general will is fast directing itself against competition in its existing forms; and, in order to illustrate his statement, he cites the animosity which such competition arouses in the breasts of those who, whether as capitalists or labourers, are unable, under existing conditions, to make an 'assured income.' Those whose incomes are assured can have no idea, says Mr Kidd, of the depth of this feeling in the breasts of the feebler and less successful competitors. What, then, does this feeling denote? An indifference to the present, and a religious preoccupation with the future? On the contrary, it denotes nothing more than the persistence of the old preoccupation with existing interests, which has characterised human beings since the human race began, and will continue to do so as long as the human race exists. There is not a single reform mentioned by Mr Kidd, as an example of the sacrifice of existing interests to the future, which was not similarly due to the presence of ordinary motives, though the motives were, no doubt, in a number of cases, highly distasteful to many who had to submit to them.

But, waiving this objection to Mr Kidd's theory altogether, we have yet to ask how, if we take him at his own word, and suppose that the coming generations are to take no interest in their own welfare, but are always to be sacrificing it to an ever-receding future, they are to discover any meaning or interest in human life at all. This difficulty Mr Kidd himself has perceived. We can only say that he has not been able to solve it. A life of selfdenial as a preparation for another state of existence is

intelligible; a life of self-denial for the benefit of our children and our grandchildren is intelligible; but a life of self-denial for the sake of future generations, who will never enjoy the present any more than we do ourselves— a sustained effort to produce and mature a wine, which each generation is to pass on untasted to the next-this is absolutely inconsistent with common sense and with human nature. It could be made consistent with them only by the belief that this surrender of ourselves to our children, who will in their turn make surrender of a similar kind, is a species of ascetic discipline imposed upon man by God, and revealed to man by some special channel of revelation. But if this is the meaning of Mr Kidd's philosophy, it is a meaning which could be set forth far more fittingly in a longer or a shorter catechism than in the phrases of evolutionary science; for, apart from some God of whose character we have some definite knowledge, the mere continued existence on earth of such-and-such human races, who never are, but always to be, blest,' is a prospect not calculated to excite in man, woman or child any feeling except one of weary and apathetic wonder.

On the whole, it is impossible to imagine any system of philosophy more wholly divorced from the actual processes of life than this system of Mr Kidd's. It touches fact in a large number of places, as a key may touch the wards of a lock into which it refuses to fit. But, taken as a whole, it is a system of pure self-delusion. Mr Kidd reads history as Hamlet read the shapes of the clouds. He presents us with a series of majestic, if shadowy, tableaux; but the outlines of events which he takes to resemble a whale, might stand for a weazel with precisely equal justice. Many scientific specialists fail as general thinkers because they are unable to take a wide view of existence. Mr Kidd fails because he can take nothing else. Some day, we trust, he will learn that for a philosophy of human events, a study of the individual is as necessary as a study of the mass, a study of the microbe as necessary as a study of the course of the pestilence; and that the social telescope is useless without the aid of the microscope.

Art. XIV. THE LOCAL-OPTION EDUCATION BILL. WITH the introduction of the Ministerial Education Bill by Mr Balfour on March 24th a too-long lacking element of seriousness returned to domestic politics. Here at last, in the judgment of all thoughtful Ministerialists, and probably in the hearts of the majority of educationists even outside the Ministerial ranks, is a measure which, if cleared of one radical blemish, offers a rational, fair and comprehensive solution of a problem of prime national importance. To the imperative necessity for the removal of that blemish, and to the facility which happily exists for doing so without interference with the main structure of the Bill, we shall presently refer. What, at this point and without delay, we desire to emphasise is our welcome of the general principles embodied in the legislative project now before the country for the settlement of the education question.

In these pages, least of all, can such welcome be grudged. In an article on 'The Educational Opportunity' published exactly a year ago, we urged that the Government should avail themselves of the necessity created by the Cockerton judgment to produce and carry through a measure of thorough-going and comprehensive reform. In sketching what, as it appeared to us, should be the main features of such a measure, we specified first, the establishment of a single local authority with power over the whole field of education within its area.' As to the composition of that authority, we expressed a strong preference for a committee of the existing municipal authority, strengthened by members chosen from outside under schemes allowing 'elasticity of adaptation to local circumstances.' Further, we insisted on the necessity of empowering the new local educational authority to aid the voluntary schools out of the rates in such fashion as to place them on a financial and educational equality with the schools with which they have hitherto carried on a virtually hopeless competition. Such aid, we pointed out, would need to be met by arrangements, satisfactory to the authority dispensing it, for securing the quality of the secular education given in all aided schools.

We put forward these principles in April, 1901, as