Preface to Second Edition.

This pamphlet in reply to Mr. Herbert Spencer's rather feeble article in the Contemporary Review is now reprinted, just five years after its first publication, in response to constant demands for it in this country and from America. Since the year 1884 Socialism has spread so rapidly in Great Britain that it is scarcely too much to say that all parties are now more or less permeated with ideas which then were accepted by comparatively few. Mr. Herbert Spencer's piteous wail at the overthrow of his ill-founded theories by the inevitable development of human society from capitalism into collectivism produced little effect at the time, and the echo of it has long since died away. But the work which he has done in other fields lends a certain importance to the statement that" Mr. Herbert Spencer is opposed to Socialism especially in the United States, where he is the favourite philosopher of the successful railway man and stockjobber. That "the survival of the fittest" means the permanent supremacy of human animals of the type of Jay Gould or Edward Watkin is an interpretation of the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection which has, at any rate, its humorous side. In Great Britain, happily, the truth is now being admitted that Socialism is really neither more nor less than the science of sociology, no longer encumbered with either the theological or bourgeois prejudices which have hitherto hampered its full development. Mr. Herbert Spencer has cleared his mind of the cant of theology; but the cant of the profit-monger still holds his intelligence firmly in its grip. That this little lecture may in its way help [still further to shake his decaying influence is the hope with which its re-publication at the present time has been consented to by

The Writer.