CHAPTER   VI
TOWARDS A SOCIALIST SOCIETY
I.   THE   BEGINNINGS
it would be an exaggeration to say that the Industrial
Revolution created the social problem, for the world has always
had the poor with it, and concern about poverty,, its causes
and its prevention, has never been entirely absent from the
minds of men. The Industrial Revolution only brought the
problem into a new phase by the creation of a new social class,
the urban proletariat, and by raising the question whether
the conception of private property which had been dominant
in a mainly agricultural society could be carried over unaltered
into a society in which industry was evidently going to exert
a steadily increasing importance.
This problem could not be eluded, and after the Restora-
tion it can be seen looming larger and larger in men's minds.
Statesmen, economists, philanthropists were soon  surveying
it from their respective angles and, with minor divergencies
of opinion, bringing the same answer : poverty, even in this
new form, and all the other attendant problems of growing
industrialism are essentially natural phenomena, and as such
entirely outside the scope of governmental or other deliberate
action, the production and distribution of wealth being in
the   sole dependence  of economic " laws " outside human
control. Occasionally an exceptionally enlightened thinker like
Tocqueville wondered how far this view was not breaking
down under the pressure of a new industrial development that
seemed to depend quite as much on human volition as on in-
tangible laws of supply and demand; while later, in the Radical
camp, men like Michelet and Hugo, profoundly stirred by the
sufferings of the new proletariat, also wondered about the
possibility of measures for the relief of distress becoming
practical politics. But such opinions awoke but slight echoes;
for it was not merely a matter of slightly enlarging the scope
of Government action; it was the fact that no interference of
any kind could take place in this domain without imposing or
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