who compose society. This was not, however, the intention of the writer, for he adduces “the general will” as a spiritual reality, organic in character, and operative through the State, as through other organs of co-operation. We had here in the Review a first serious attempt to draw the attention, not of a few intellectuals but of a wider thinking minority of citizens, to the difficulties besetting the intrusion of the State, whether autocratic or democratic, into new economic spheres of activity. Another article, “Is Democracy a Failure?” directly confronts those difficulties which now, forty years later, figure in the forefront of political history.
But it was distinctive of the Progressive Review that, though primarily political-economic in its outlook, it realized that “progress” was “cultural” in the widest human sense. Not a few of its articles were written by leaders of free-thought in the fields of art and literature. Havelock Ellis. Edward Carpenter, William Archer, James Oliphant, Karl Blind, are among the names recorded. The early collapse of this Review was, I think, a great misfortune. Had it lived, it might have had a most useful influence in moulding the thought, policy, and structure of the new Labour-Socialist Party which was just beginning to emerge from the clouded counsels and mixed interests of diverse “progressive” movements. It was, however, the usual race between a slow-growing circulation and limited finance which has brought to an end so
