Our social instincts, which are perhaps the religious development of a sentiment at first merely gregarious, make us desire a greater amount of equality among all classes of men. It is right that we should wish to see the poorer classes of the country sharing, more largely than they do at present, in the security of maintenance which civilisation ought to give. If it were not for this moralised instinct we might absolve ourselves from all concern in the process of human domestication. We should then regard differences of social condition in human society as the divergences of incipient varieties or species. Such a view is repellent to our humanity; we desire to see human progress, or in a narrower sense national progress, represented by a more or less uniform type of prosperity and comfort. We seek to raise the poorer classes, which, from causes for which the present generation is not responsible, have fallen below the due level of comfort, to a state more consonant with the demands of civilised sentiment.

This is the problem. It is the business of the statesman to discover the law of progress, and to endeavour to give free scope to its operation at those points of our social arrangements where reformation is necessary.

Our argument has been that most of the evils from which we are suffering have been brought about by State interference with the natural ability of each individual organism to adjust itself to its environment.