In the first thirty or forty years of the century (writes Dr. Alfred Russell Wallace) it was believed in Europe that the United States of America had really attained to the social millennium. It was their just boast that there was to be found in America ample food and clothing, proper rest and a healthy life for all who would work. Every European traveller who visited the States agreed that there were no beggars and no tramps, but universal or almost universal well being. And it was all imputed to their freedom, to the republican government, to the universal suffrage, to more general education and to the absence of a State church and an hereditary peerage. It is this absolute failure of all political or administrative reform, of education and of an ever-increasing stream of religious and moral teaching and of almost unbounded charity, under the most favourable conditions it is possible to conceive--that of a continuous increase of man's power over nature, and an almost inconceivable development of labour-saving machinery--it is this

under these extremely advantageous conditions that has at length caused a number of independent thinkers to perceive that the source of the evil is far deeper than has generally been suspected; that it is not to be found in political or administrative reform, but depends upon some fundamental defect in the very foundations of our social system. It is true that great and independent thinkers have raised their voices at long intervals during many previous centuries, but they have been too much in advance of their time and have been treated as either dreamers or revolutionists. Marx, Liebknecht, Bebel and others in Germany, Proudhon and Louis Blanc in France, may be said to have established modern Socialism about the middle of the century, and they have been so successful as to make it a real power in the Legislatures of their respective countries. Socialism has also spread widely in Belgium and Holland, in Spain and Italy, and under the form of Anarchism in Russia. In England and America Socialism has been slower in taking hold of the public mind, but, thanks to such great writers as Bellamy and Gronlund in America, William Morris and Robert Blatchford ("Nunquam") in England, it is now firmly established, and seems likely to increase steadily in both countries.