"It is for waging implacable war against poverty and squalidness.

I cannot help hoping and believing that before this generation has passed away we shall have advanced a great step toward the time when poverty, and the wretchedness and the human degradation which always follows in its camp, will be as remote from the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests." Mr.H.G.Wells, who has been a leading figure in the British reform world and in the Fabian Society for many years, speaks on this reform movement not merely as a keen outside observer.

As an advocate of more radical measures, he argues that there is nothing Socialistic about "the national minimum." This "philanthropic administrative Socialism," as Mr.
Wells calls it, is very remote, he says, from the spirit of his own.[69] Yet, critical as Mr.Wells is, he also advocates a policy that could be summed up in the single phrase, "industrial efficiency." "The advent of a strongly Socialistic government would mean no immediate revolutionary changes at all," he says.

"There would be no doubt an educational movement to increase the economic value and productivity of the average citizen of the next generation, and legislation _upon the lines laid down by the principle of the 'minimum wage'_ to check the waste of our national resources by destructive employment.

Also a shifting of the burden of taxation of enterprise to rent would begin." (My italics.) The Liberals who are already setting these reforms on foot disclaim any connection whatever with Socialism, but Mr.Wells argues that they do not realize the real nature of their policy.
The establishment of this paternal "State Socialism," whether based on a philanthropic "national minimum" or a scientific policy of "industrial efficiency," many other "Socialists" besides those of Great Britain consider to be the chief task of Socialism itself in our generation.
Among the latter was the late Edmond Kelly, a member of the Socialist party in this country at the time of his death, who, in his posthumous work, "Twentieth Century Socialism," has summed up his political faith in much the same way as the anti-Socialist reformer might have done.