WARE SNAKE!
Says Professor Alfred Marshall, of Cambridge, the great English Economist, in his luminous Address at the British Association meeting:—
"Every year economic problems become more difficult, every year it is more manifest that we need to have more knowledge and to get it soon, in order to escape, on the one hand, from the cruelty and waste of irresponsible competition and the licentious use of wealth, and, on the other, from the tyranny and the spiritual death of an iron-bound Socialism."
Here be judicial truths, skilfully Marshalled into clear order, which may profitably be noted by the angry sciolistic skirmishers on one side and the other in the great Social War now raging.
The sniffing Laissez-faire man, the high and dry Economist, shrieks at the enthusiastic humanitarian Socialist, whom he would fain send to Anticyra,—or further; the headlong humanitarian Socialist howls at the high and dry Economist, whom he would like to despatch finally to Saturn, or "haply to some lower level," as BOB LOWE's epitaph had it. The result is cantankerous charivari!
Marshall does more and better. He emphasises "the cruelty and waste of irresponsible competition," he admits "the licentious use of wealth," but he also recognises "the tyranny and the spiritual death of an iron-bound Socialism," that violent and venomous form of Socialism, which Mr. Punch this week has represented under the apt symbol of a clinging, hampering, and suffocating Serpent.
Let the impetuous zealots who may probably demur to Mr. Punch's symbol—misunderstanding it—ponder Professor MARSHALL's words, and be not precipitate in judgment. There is Socialism and Socialism. The sort pictured by Professor MARSHALL, and Mr. Punch, is, like the Serpent of Old Myth, not the would-be friend of labour-cursed mankind, but a deceiving and glosingly deadly "incarnation of the Enemy."