No doubt this general statement shows the Revolutionaries of 1848-71 as simpler than they appear on their own records. Proudhoni was full of proposals: one of them, the minimum wage turns out to be of the very first importance now that Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb have put the case for it on an invincible basis of industrial fact and economic theory. Lassalle really knew something of the nature of law, the practice of Government, and the mind of the governing classes. Marx, though certainly a bit of a Liberal fatalist (did he not say that force is the midwife of progress without reminding us that force is equally the midwife of chaos, and chaos the mid good wife of martial law?), was at all events no believer in Laissez-faire. Socialism involves the introduction of design, contrivance, and co-ordination by a nation consciously seeking its own collective welfare, into the present industrial scramble for private gain; and as dear it is that this cannot be a spontaneous result of a violent over-throw of the existing order, and as the Socialists of 1848-71 were not blind, it would be impossiblf to substantiate a claim for Fabian Essays as the first text-book of Socialism in which catastrophism is repudiated as a method of Socialism