production of wealth brings ruin and misery in its train.

That science stands helpless and perplexed before this enigma, that no beam
of light has yet penetrated and dispelled the gloom of this--the
social--problem, though that problem has exercised the minds of the noblest
and best of to-day, is in part due to the fact that the solution has been
sought in a wrong direction.

Let us see, for example, what Stuart Mill says upon this subject: 'I looked
forward ... to a future' ... whose views (and institutions) ... shall be
'so firmly grounded in reason and in the true exigencies of life that they
shall not, like all former and present creeds, religious, ethical, and
political, require to be periodically thrown off and replaced by others.'
[Footnote: _Autobiography_, p. 166.]

Yet more plainly does Laveleye express himself in the same sense at the
close of his book 'De la Propriete': 'There is an order of human affairs
_which is the best ... God knows it and wills it_. Man must discover and
introduce it.'

It is therefore an _absolutely best, eternal order_ which both are waiting
for; although, when we look more closely, we find that both ought to know
they are striving after the impossible. For Mill, a few lines before the
above remarkable passage, points out that all human things are in a state
of constant flux; and upon this he bases his conviction that existing
institutions can be only transitory. Therefore, upon calm reflection, he
would be compelled to admit that the same would hold in the future, and
that consequently unchangeable human institutions will never exist. And
just so must we suppose that Laveleye, with his '_God_ knows it and wills
it,' would have to admit that it could _not_ be man's task either to