The domination of the principle of violence was naturally not restricted to the sphere of property. The spirit which put its trust in might alone, which sought the fundamentals of welfare, not in agreement, but in ceaseless conflict, permeated the whole of life. All human relations were settled according to the ‘Law of the Stronger’, which is really the negation of Law. There was no peace; at best there was a truce.

In internal politics Liberalism demands the fullest freedom for the expression of political opinion and it demands that the State shall be constituted according to the will of the majority; it demands legislation through representatives of the people, and that the government, which is a committee of the people’s representatives, shall be bound by the Laws. Liberalism merely compromises when it accepts a monarchy. Its ideal remains the republic or at least a shadow-principality of the English type.

Political democracy necessarily follows from Liberalism. But it often said that the democratic principle must eventually lead beyond Liberalism. Carried out strictly, it is said, it will require economic as well as political rights of equality. Thus logically Socialism must necessarily evolve out of Liberalism, while Liberalism necessarily involves its own destruction.

The view that democracy and Socialism are inwardly related spread far and wide in the decades which preceded the Bolshevist revolution. Many came to believe that democracy and Socialism meant the same thing, and that democracy without Socialism or Socialism without democracy would not be possible.

Beyond the dictatorship of the proletariat lies the paradise, the ‘higher phase of the communist society’, in which, ‘with the all round development of individuals, the productive forces will also have increased, and all the springs of social wealth will flow more freely’.1  In this land of promise ‘there will remain nothing to repress, n

It is the aim of Socialism to transfer the means of production from private ownership to the ownership of organized society, to the State.1  The socialistic State owns all material factors of production and thus directs it.

The programme of the liberal philosophy of the State was summarized in a number of points which were put forward as the demands of natural law. These are the Rights of Man and of Citizens, which formed the subject of the wars of liberation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They are written in brass in the constitutional laws composed under the influence of the political movements of this time.

The contrast between realism and nominalism which runs through the history of human thought since Plato and Aristotle is revealed also in social philosophy.1  The difference between the attitude of Collectivism and Individualism to the problem of social associations, is not different from the attitude of Universalism and Nominalism to the