Mr. John Morley addressed the Eighty Club on Tuesday night
concerning the Social questions of the- day. He denied that he was a Socialist, and said that he was quite content with the name of Radienl; indeed, that if Socialism
any denial of the principle of private property, or any
assertion of the principle that land ought to be held by the State, it was inconsistent with human nature and intrinsically absurd. If, however, Socialism only meant that the State ought to interfere to protect the weak against the strong, he was an ardent supporter of Socialism of that kind, and had always approved the Ten-Hours Factory Act, and all the legislation which was founded on it. He then proceeded to explain what sort of interference by the State with the rights of property he would approve. He would approve compulsory expropria- tion of private landowners for any public object, like the making of a needed railway ; and further, he would approve, as we understand him, the expropriation of private landowners at a reasonable compensation, for the purpose of providing con- venient allotments for workingmen. This, in ourunderstanding of the word, is not a public object at all, but only a class-object, and, moreover, the object of a class who would never be sure that they might not in their turn be displaced for reasons of exactly the same kind as those which had led to the extrusion of their predecessors. Mr. Morley further approved of giving power to the County Councils to make the aged and respectable poor comfortable at the expense of the rates,—which strikes us as a. proposal closely resembling the restoration of the old Poor- Law, the worst evil under which, during this century, the poor have suffered. Mr. Morley is not a Socialist out-and-out, but he is a Socialist Nor'-Nor'-West. He likes to go to meet Socialism half-way.
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