industry. England, as already pointed out, since 1842, has tried many specifics for her internal state, yet still the success of the industrial revolution is very far admittedly, and in spite of four hundred optimistic prophets, Ramoth-Gilead has not been won.
In these circumstances, the nation is coming to the conclusion that, having embarked on the most complex of enterprises, the cure of a people, public policy has proceeded hitherto with a serious want of plan, with wide fluctuations of purpose, and without any very precise goal. For, tossed by many doctrines, we have favoured individualism at one moment, and socialism at the next, or both together; individualism, with its apparent hypothesis that the State should do less than it ought, and socialism, with its theory that it should do more than it can.
Accordingly, another policy for to-morrow is upon us, fills the air, and has the future with it. If individualism, it is said, can never remedy those evils which itself has allowed to grow, and if socialism, on the other, which we have pursued for a generation, has failed to save us, between these two culs-de-sac runs conceivably a middle way. In plain terms, the State is definitely to see to it that each of its subjects attains to a minimum, whether in wages, or in medicine, or in housing, or in insurance, or in education, or in leisure, or in employment, or in military training, or in food. Beyond that minimum, freedom for each on the
