When capitalism is a little better organized, the working people will be guaranteed "the next best": steady work and the food, conditions, and training necessary to make that work efficient--just as surely as valuable slaves were given these rights by intelligent masters or as valuable horses even are given care and kindly treatment to-day.
"A Socialist Social Worker" has published anonymously in the _Survey_ a letter which presents in a few words the whole Socialist position as to this type of reform.

The writer claims that the very fact that he is a social worker shows that even as a Socialist he welcomes "every addition to the standard of living that may be wrested or argued from the Capitalist class," since all Socialists recognize that "no undernourished class ever won a fight against economic exploitation, but that the more is given the more will be demanded and secured." But he does not feel that the material betterments have any closer relation to Socialism.
"The new feudalism," he says, "will care for and conserve the powers of the human industrial tool as the lord of the manor looked after the human agricultural implement...." Here is the essential point: the efficiency of the human industrial tool is to be improved with or without his consent.
"Unrestrained Capitalism," says the same writer in explanation of his prediction, "has hitherto invariably meant the physical deterioration of the working class and the marginal disintegration of society--the loosening of social ties and the pushing of marginal members of society over the brink into poverty, pauperism, vagrancy, drunkenness, prostitution, wife desertion and crime, _but this deterioration is not the main indictment against capitalism_, and will be remedied by the wiser capitalists themselves.

The main indictment of capitalism is that it selfishly and stupidly blocks the road of orderly and continuous progress for the race." The proposal of the social reformers, as far as the workers are concerned aims to put an end to this deterioration, to standardize industry or to establish a minimum of wages, leisure, health, and industrial efficiency.

The writer says that the Socialists aim at something more than this.
"The criterion of social justice in every civilized community," he writes, "is, and always has been, not how large or how intense is the misery of the social debtor class, but what is done with the social surplus of industry?
It was formerly used to build pyramids, to create a landed or ecclesiastical or literary aristocracy, to conduct wars, or to provide the means of a sensuous life for the majority of a privileged class, and the means of dilettantism for the minority of it.

_The difference between the near Socialist and the true Socialist is principally that the main attention of the former is given to the negative side of the social problem--the condition of the submerged classes, while that of the latter is given to the positive side of the problem--the wonderful development, power, and life that would come to that race and the individual if a wise and social use were to be made of the surplus of industry._" FOOTNOTES: [46] "Fabianism and Empire," p.