SHOOTING NIAGARA 213

for they were unaware of it.1 And their struggle against it, like
all English struggles, was grudging and tenacious. But, while
denouncing the name of Socialism which they believed to he
synonymous with mob plunder and the bloody destruction of
their homes and altars, they allowed socialist principles to inspire
their laws and, in an illogical, piecemeal and incomplete way
they increasingly applied socialist practice. For the void in the
great industrial towns that their fathers' search for wealth had
created left them no alternative. The more the towns grew the
more it clamoured to be filled.

• •*•••••

The triumphs of science hastened the triumph of the collecti-
vism Gas and electric lighting and fuel, steam and electric trans-
port, the telegraph and the telephone made for a communal
rather than an individualist organisation of life. So did the course
of capitalism itself. For the new collectivism that was imper-
ceptibly'destroying laissez-faire did not only spring from working-
class discontent at laissez-faire conditions.

It arose out of the very core of Benthamism. For the Bent-
hamite, in his exaggerated tenderness for the individual, pro-
claimed his right to make any contract he liked in the pursuit of
his own interests. It followed that two or more individuals
were free to associate in any way they chose and in pursuit of
their aggregate interests to agree to act as a single person.

With the extension of machinery and transport, industry
perpetually tended to increase its scale of operations. For this it
needed ever more capital. The individual trader was thus increas-
ingly impelled to bind himself in association with others. The

1 Mr. Sidney Webb, now Lord Passfield, spoke of this unconscious conversion of the
capitalist middle classes to Socialism in a conversation recorded by Mr. George
Eastgate in The Times of 23rd August, 1902.

"The practical man, oblivious or contemptuous of any theory of the social
organism or general principals of social organisation, has been forced, by the necessities
of the time, into an ever deepening collectivist channel. Socialism, of course, ne still
rejects and despises. The individualist town councillor will walk along the municipal
pavement, lit by municipal gas, and cleansed by municipal brooms with municipal
water, and seeing by the municipal clock in the municipal market that he is too early
to meet his children coming from the municipal school, hard by the county lunatic
asylum and municipal hospital, will use the national telegraph system to tell them not
to walk through the municipal park, but to come by the municipal tramway to meet
him in the municipal reading-room by the municipal art gallery, museum and library
where he intends to consult some of the national publications in order to prepare his
next speech in the municipal town hall in favour of the nationalisation of canals and
the increase of Government control over the railway system. 'Socialism, Sir,* he
will say, * don't waste the time of a practical rna-n by your fantastic absurdities. Self-
help, Sir, individual self-help, that's what's made our city what it is.* *