government which has enabled the people to substitute responsible for irresponsible leadership, and has made the national character what it is.  This machinery has now been adopted nearly all over the world, wherever it has been desired to make the popular will felt, but in no case has it sufficed to give effect to the underlying principles to the same extent; and success has been attained only in so far as they have been effective.  The lesson of the last century has been that the machinery which proved sufficient in England, where progress was uniform through several centuries, breaks down when the pace of progress is increased.  An extreme instance is the recent attempt to introduce party government into Japan, a country just emerging from the feudal stage, an interesting account of which is given in the Nineteenth Century for July, 1899.  The experiment failed because the clans could not be divided on questions of political principle.  In a greater or less degree that is the fundamental source of difficulty everywhere; if the representative machinery produces only sectional delegation the tendency is back through anarchy to absolutism.  Is it not an extraordinary fact, then, that the vital distinction between representation and delegation is so universally ignored?

Such is a brief outline of the evolution of human society; however inadequate it may be, it at least serves to illustrate the truth that social progress has never been made in the past except when the principles of organization and leadership have been operative.

+Future Progress.+—­As to the ultimate tendency of future progress it would be pedantry to dogmatize; our task has been the humbler one of pointing out the means by which progress is to be attained.  We have assumed, however, that there is a separate sphere of collective action in which government is an instrument for the positive amelioration of social conditions.  We are aware that this conclusion is at variance with the two extreme schools of modern thought; on the one hand, with the individualists, who hold that government should only be used for mutual protection and to keep order; and on the other hand, with the socialists, who would leave nothing to individual action.  Professor Huxley has reduced the claims of these two schools to absurdity and impossibility respectively; and we believe that the problem of the future is to find out that middle course between the anarchy of the one and the despotism of the other which makes for progress.  It seems likely that the state of society we are approaching will be one in which, while natural inequalities will be recognized, neither the artificial inequalities of fanatical individualism nor the artificial equalities of regimental socialism will be tolerated, and every man will enter the rivalry of life on terms of an equality of opportunity.  This is the state foreshadowed by Mr. Lester Ward in his “Outlines of Sociology” and called by him Sociocracy.  Such ideals, however,