evils. The ideal of coöperative fraternity has found its
most coherent and dogmatic form in socialism, and social-
ism has an incomparably stronger moral appeal with the
masses than economic individualism ever had. In his
Autobiography ¹ John Stuart Mill has sketched the gradual
maturing of his social hopes, and the course traversed by
that bold, clear mind has since been followed by social
thought at large. At first he looked only for some slight
mitigation of the inequalities of property by the abolition
of primogeniture and entails in England; by the educa-
tion of the working classes, and the voluntary restraint of
propagation. In time he passed from mere democracy to
socialism: "We were now much less democratic than I
had been, because as long as education continues to be so
wretchedly imperfect, we dreaded the ignorance and es-
pecially the selfishness and brutality of the mass; but our
ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond Democracy,
and would class us decidedly under the general designa-
tion of Socialists.... The social problem of the future
we considered to be, how to unite the greatest individual
liberty of action with a common ownership in the raw mate-
rial of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the
benefits of combined labor. Between communism and all
its chances, and the present state of society with all its
sufferings and injustices, all the difficulties, small or great,
of communism would be but as dust in the balance."

If the christianizing of the social order involves ulti-
mately the evolution of a coöperative economic organi-
zation as wide as society, we confront the largest construc-
tive moral task ever undertaken. It is hard enough to get
four or five men to work together without serious friction.
To induce a hundred or a thousand to coöperate without
tyrannous coercion is a work of strategy and art. Hu-
manity took centuries to consolidate the patriarchal family,

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