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right to use his human tool with reckless cruelty, although many do. The wise exploiter of his fellows will treat his men" as he does his horses. He will keep them in good condition and temper, because they will work the better. Sufficient corn and a comfortable stall are more than worth whatever margin they represent beyond the minimum. of accommodation. So are good wages and a kind word, while they in no way affect the capitalist contention that laborers' treatment is, by Divine right, of the stable and manger, not of the drawing room and butler's pantry order. The capitalist, indeed, is, in this respect, a ruder edition of the hereditary and landholding aristocrat, who, besides being the creator of Manners, nearly the highest possession of civilized humanity, does often, within his own little world, and to its recognized mem bers, exhibit the noblest and the most beautiful virtues, although for the dim and distant millions outside Society he has neither sympathy nor concern, and they are to him as though they were

not.

Probably the power to assume and maintain this attitude, so indispensable to success in his peculiar role, arises out of the capitalist's consciousness of the third great characteristic that goes to the making of him. He must have, on a greater or smaller scale, capacity for organization, ability to combine men, materials, and opportunities into a unity which, as an adaptation of means to end, he can handle as an instrument for raking in toward himself the largest quantity of possession that is meanwhile accessible. According to his powers in this direction he develops into a small or a colossal capitalist.

The difference in this respect between him and the laborer is clear and striking. No doubt natural selection and heredity, operating in the boundless past, can explain it all, but there it is, a fact not to be blinked, that the real capitalist possesses a class of abilities of which the real laborer is virtually destitute. The laborer has his gift, of course. As poet, he can fashion his prose or verse creation and entrance the world. As paragraphist he can write his leader or critique, and damn or immortalize Governments and authors.

As mechanic he can guide the thread or drive the nail home, and aid in clothing or conveying the nations. But there is a thing he cannot do. He cannot piece together a number of his brother poets, paragraphists, or mechanics into a machinery for enriching himself.

Another genus of man, however, can. A publisher can yoke a team of poets together, and drive himself into a fortune that makes their mouths water and occasionally foam. A newspaper proprietor can marshal and drill a thousand paragraphists and printers into a regiment, and, at their head, capture the largest circulation, and by no means the smallest income, in the world. A manufacturer can group a townful of mechanics into the hugest and ugliest shed constructible by human misingenuity, and make them so play into each other's hands, and finally into his own, that while they are fain to kennel in close and squalid rows of comfortless barrack rooms, he expatiates in a castle with its park and vineries, and rolls in daily in his chariot to see that they are all working together for his good. A financier, in the mean time, can sit in a room in Lombard Street, and, with no visible appliance beyond a small quantity of stationery, can so connect publisher, newspaper proprietor, manufacturer, hoc genus omne, that their hundreds of thousands pale before his decades of millions.

The laborer naturally resents this. Nobody likes to be exploited to feel that he is being made use of by another, very much to that other's advantage, and very little to his own. But what can he do? Disconnected from organized industry he must starve, and as he cannot organize his industry himself, he is at the mercy of the capitalist who can. How is the poet, the paragraphist, the mechanic to make an approach to a decent living without the publisher, the newspaper proprietor, the manufacturer to put their productions upon the market and obtain a return out of which they may get a subsistence? Let the poet and the paragraphist try to sell their faculty themselves, and they will see what they can make of it if they survive. Put a thousand men into a factory and lock out the capable organizer

to whom it is a matter of life and death that their work should be concentrated on a profitable object, and within a week they will be scattered in a thousand directions in the desperate search for bread.

For, though it may be an unwelcome truth, it is a truth nevertheless, that the laboring type, the artistic and artisan capacity, is helpless outside its own sphere. You may blame nature if you like; you may abuse heredity and the survival of the fittest to your heart's content; but it is a simple matter of fact that faculty and the faculty of organizing faculty are, as a rule, lodged in different skulls, and that the organizing faculty is among the rarest of human faculties. I do not say that no laborer can organize other laborers to some extent and for some purposes, or that no capitalist has any working talent of any kind or degree, but I do say that, to all practical intents and purposes, the born Worker is helpless apart from his own special gift, and that the born Organizer is less usefully fitted for working himself than for setting other people to work.

To put the matter plainly and bluntly, as regards wealth-producing industry, the capitalist is a stronger man and has a better brain than the laborer, and, all the universe over, the creature with the shortened supply of encephalon on any side of it is, in the long run, at the mercy of the creature that has a spoonful more of gray matter or whatever else in that quarter. In other respects the capitalist may be, very often is, a much inferior being to his laborer. He may be ignorant, unintellectual, selfish, incapable of higher pleasures than eating, drinking, and vulgar display, while his worker may be a man of keen intelligence, of artistic, literary, or philosophical sympathies, of varied reading, of high and comprehensive views of life, perfectly conscious of his real human superiority to his employer; yet, because he is deficient in the exploiting and organizing capacity, he remains through life the impoverished tool of the lower, yet, in the one fatal respect, more powerful type of being.

On his side, the capitalist, too, knows this. He may, according to his particular nature, put the proposition to

himself more or less brutally, cynically, apologetically, or otherwise, but what he says to his laborer in his mind is substantially to this effect: "You may be a clod, or you may be as clever as you like, but without me to direct you, you could not get butter to your bread, even if you could get the bread. If, therefore, I use you and men like you as my instruments for enriching myself with as much of the world as I can possibly get hold of, you may consider yourself very well off if I share out a more or less sufficient subsistence to you. I mean to enjoy the world myself, and if you think I am taking too much, and you are getting too little, you can try what you can do without me, and see where you will land yourself." In short, the capitalist's selfjustification for treating himself to every luxury and bidding his workmen. accept a pittance is, that he is the benefactor of the workman, who owes his life to him and ought to be thankful instead of complaining.

Ethics apart, and on the facts, I think the capitalist is not far in error. Without the organizer of industry, most of us would probably have been still living on acorns, and not too many of those. Not that he has done it all out of his great bounty and benevolence; he has simply followed his great acquisitive instincts, using in their service his equally great acquisitive powers, and incidentally to this we have had to be furnished with a living, and a living that has improved with time. It is not for us to deny that the capitalist is a useful, if quite unintentional, servant of society.

But now I desire to return to our starting-point, and ask the Socialist how he proposes to dispose of the capitalist. Here he is, born with the propensities and the powers for using up the laborer, and he will do it as surely as nature is nature. The laborer may be in the numerical majority-he is, vastly so; he may be deft and clever in his own specialty-he often is; but either because he is not greedy enough, or not hard enough, or destitute of exploiting and organizing capacity, or a combination of all three, he is helpless in presence of the industrial organizer. There are the two species of brain,

located in the two species of cranium, and the one is the predestined food of the other.

Call him a tiger, if you will-but he is a tiger you dare not kill. Can you tame him? Can you convert his cupidity into altruism? Some evolutionists think there may be an approach to it a few æons hence. In the mean time, the Church has been trying it for a period of about two thousand years. What speed has it made? The capitalist goes to church, perhaps subscribes-largely -for the Sunday show, and then he is himself again for the next six days. Indeed, the Church itself is to a great extent a paying concern. The reproduction of Christ, the preaching and professed practice of self-sacrifice is a genteel business, at which gentlemen of enterprise will sometimes clear their £10,000 or £15,000 a year. I confess the conversion of the capitalist does not seem to me a hopeful alternative.

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Suppose your Socialist Utopia set up -the State" owning the land and all the instruments of production and distribution, and everybody working on a just salary as settled by somebody or other-how long do you expect the capitalist to put up with it? Do you think he will go on exercising his or ganizing powers in the service. of the State" for a modest stipend, exactly as he does now at the bidding of his own boundless ambitions?

I say he will soon capture the "State" if it stands in his way. What will the "State" be? It will practically mean a syndicate of political gentlemen who have climbed to the top of the tree, and who can be identified and got at in a suite of rooms somewhere in Whitehall. These gentlemen will be predominatingly either of the capitalist or of the worker type of brain. At the outset they will probably be workers, full, we shall say, of enthusiasm and hope, and believing that they will be able permanently to produce and distribute wealth on principles of abstract justice.

How long will they hold on? Just as long as it will take the men of capitalist brain to organize a revolution, and that will not be very long. Abstract reason may king it in its own ideal world, but in a world of material

reality force governs, and the man of practical and organizing brain, motived by the ungovernable desire to rule and. possess, is certain to be one too many for the mere reasoner and dreaming sentimentalist. A township where they are trying to make the lions and tigers of the neighborhood, that may not be shot, draw the carts and omnibuses on two meals of vegetables a day, will not be able to maintain the arrangement for an hour after the lions and tigers have had a sufficient look round.

I do not see how the Socialist State can be worked with a mixed population of born capitalists and laborers. The capitalists will never allow it, and they are able to prevent it. If it came to fighting they would bring one body of laborers into the field to fight the rest, and they would beat them, as the landholding nobles of the Middle Ages-the capitalists of their time-did in the peasants' wars. They have the brain. for that kind of work, and that makes all the difference. I am sorry that it should be so, for my sympathies are with the laborer. I suppose I am one myself. At all events, I am not a capitalist. In the presence of a man of business I feel like a piece of putty.

If I did not believe that it will never do, I could wish Socialism well. Especially as regards its protest against the present unjust distribution of wealth. I am not denying that the capitalist, without meaning it, performs great services for society, but he is often ridiculously overpaid. I am told that Vanderbilt, Astor, the late Jay Gould, Rothschild, and many of the nobility and manufacturers were or are worth millions, some of them a good many tens of millions. It seems monstrous. I doubt if any man can be worth a million to the world, however signal his services.

To the extent of overpay, it would in no way shock my sense of justice to recover-in a lawful and regular manner, of course-what could be got of their accumulated takings from such persons and apply it to public purposes. The mere negative work of correcting excess is in itself a good thing to do. If any positive justification were wanted, it is to be found in the fact that it is society which makes it possible for them

to acquire on the scale they practise, and enables them to employ their possessions as means to power, celebrity, beauty, enjoyment, and all that makes life attractive. They are getting more out of us than they deserve, and we have a right, if it is not even a duty, to level them down nearer to the plane of their merits.

The question of real interest in connection with this levelling process is how best to do it. I have explained why, in my judgment, we cannot expect permanent success by the Socialist method. What else is there? Nothing that I can see but using more resolutely the legislative, and particularly the taxing power, we already possess, while taking care that we do not so use it as to let it slip out of our hands. Graduated taxation is merely one element in a general movement which has long been going on in which Labor seeks through the action of law to redress the balance which Nature has loaded against it in favor of capital. The factory and mines legislation of the last half-century is another and riper element in the same movement.

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That legislation does not, like Socialism, aim at extinguishing the capitalist, but at regulating him. It recognizes his usefulness as a social force, whose operation, however, requires fencing in to prevent public mischiefs. says to him, We will allow you, we will even encourage you, to enrich yourself as much as you can or like, by the organization of industry, but we will not let you overwork women and children." That this legislation has been useful in practice seems to be the verdict of experience. Whether the law should advance to the same position as regards adult male labor is simply a question of expediency, of whether the matter would be better dealt with through legislation or the free activity of labor combinations. To discuss the right of To discuss the right of the law to interpose is to raise a futile question.

Similarly the question of graduated taxation is merely one of further regulating the capitalist, by limiting his results as well as his processes. How much is it possible, and how much is it prudent, to take back from the capitalist's acquisitions? These are the only

questions worth spending time upon. The possibility is very much a tax-collector's question. I have no doubt a great deal could be done. The prudence of it is a less technical matter, and more amenable to lay consideration.

For one thing, it will not do to tax down the capitalist below the point at which he will still continue to exert himself heartily for his objects. must not make him less useful to us as an organizer of industry and creator of wealth; and with that view we must bear in mind that different men have different wants. Three-quarters of a pound of beefsteak satisfies one man's hunger, another requires a pound and a quarter; one man wants books, another wants champagne, and so on through everything and everybody. The capitalist wants a good slice of the worldthe whole of it, if he could have it, but that, of course, is absurd. As a laborer, and on the point of taste, I think this lust of possession rather vulgar, but there it is, and you have got to deal with it.

How much will the capitalist endure to be taken from him before he becomes desperate? That is the point. The Lancashire child-sweaters of fifty or sixty years ago are said to have cleared a hundred per cent., and sometimes more. I am told their modern successors are content with two per cent. and pleased with four. A man who makes à hundred thousand a year would, I dare say, still work, and work as hard for fifty per cent., but if you tried to cut him down to five-and-twenty, I am not sure that, with his large ideas of acquisition, he would not either emigrate to where capital was less hard pressed, or join a capitalists' revolutionary league for the political restraint of labor. At the same time, I think it certain that a large amount of the excessive reward of capital could be safely recovered through taxation.

Labor, however, must beware of killing the layer of the golden eggs. Labor may attempt to pass the point where its own strength and capital's patience break down, and an encounter may ensue, in which it will have the worst. Ethically, labor seems a higher thing than capital, because the essence of it is to transfer an idea from itself to nature

and enrich it by the incorporation of a human conception, while capital merely covets nature to enrich itself. Labor gives, capital takes, and giving is the nobler function. Accordingly in any contest organized for gain alone, labor will never make way against capital. It has not, or has not enough of, the inspiring motive. Being positively moral in its nature, it can organize for justice, but if it outruns justice and begins pressing capital to death, it will rouse a sense of justice in capital itself, which will naturally think that it has a right to live, and, moreover, to get something, and a good deal too, for its trouble; and when capital, with its ordinary inspirations thus reinforced, turns upon labor in self-defence as well as self assertion, with its full powers of political and practical organization, the moral and artistic fighting qualities of labor will make but a very poor show.

I do not know why the old Greeks made Hercules kill his lion, and Bacchus yoke his plus the tiger to his chariot, but I do know that the god was wiser than the hero. Labor may

find this classic myth a not entirely idle tale, if it learns from it to use rather than destroy the capitalistic instinct and capacity, driving them with legislative bit and bridle, yet so as not to make them turn again and rend itself.

To a tête-montée Socialism, mad upon setting up a new heavens and a new earth, this passing of Factory Acts and graduated or other budgets, may seem a very humdrum employment, but the failure of many sanguine enterprises of a like kind seems to show that the existing heavens and earth are the only thing of the kind we are ever likely to have, and that all we can do is to keep it in repair, and treat it to the usual spring cleaning and periodic painting. Life, in its very highest form, is not going to be for any of us a rest in any realized ideal, but a perpetual pegging away and patching away at a very imperfect and continually wasting actuality, until that final and only rest comes, on which the tragic drawback is that we shall not be aware of it when it has arrived.-Fortnightly Review.

THERE is no department of antiquarian study which has been so flourishing and so fruitful of recent years as that of the papyrus literature found in Egypt. In the first place, the materials available have increased enormous ly, owing partly to the occupation of the country by a civilized Power, and the consequent diffusion among the natives of the knowledge that fragments of papyrus may be exceedingly valuable; owing, however, still more to the genius of individual explorers, among whom Mr. Petrie now takes the first place, who have either found or bought many precious documents which had else been lost. The two districts of Egypt formerly least known and least visited the Fayyûm and the Deltahave sprung into capital importance as mines of archæology, and we may prophesy with confidence that what has

been found is but a tithe of what will yet be brought to light.

The two European centres which have pre-eminently deserved the gratitude of the learned for publishing promptly their newly acquired treasures are Vienna and London. The débris of a great library at Medinet, the capital of the Fayyûm, which were bought by the Archduke Rainer, are now being published by a committee of savants in a special periodical, and exceed both in variety and in quantity anything yet discovered of the kind. Seven or eight centuries, and seven or eight languages, are represented in these fragments. But in quality they are disappointing. The fragments of classical authors are many in number, but not important as regards new authors or readings. The scrap from an ancient Gospel, with verses concerning