Contemporary Socialism
BY JOHN RAE, M.A.

SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED

New York
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1891

PREFACE.

In the present edition the original work has not only been carefully revised, but very considerably enlarged. The chapters on "The Progress and Present Position of Socialism" and "Russian Nihilism" contain a few sentences retained from the first edition, but otherwise they are entirely new—the former necessarily so on account of the nature of its subject, and the latter on account of the importance of the fresh materials that have been recently given to the world. A new chapter has been added on "Anarchism," and another, of considerable extent, on "State Socialism." No apology is required for the length of the latter, for though State socialism is only a growth of yesterday, it has already spread everywhere, and if it is not superseding socialism proper, it is certainly eclipsing it in practical importance, and to some extent even modifying it in character. Revolutionary socialism, growing more opportunist of late years, seems losing much of its old phrenzy, and getting domesticated into a shifty State socialism, fighting a parliamentary battle for minor, though still probably mischievous, changes within the lines of existing society, instead of the old war à l'outrance against existing society in whatever shape or form. Anyhow the socialistic controversy in the immediate future will evidently be fought along the lines of State socialism. It is there the hostile parties meet, and it is well therefore to get, if we can, some more exact knowledge of the ground. Some of the other chapters in the work have been altered here and there for the purpose of bringing their matter, where necessary, down to date, or embodying fresh illustrative evidence, or occasionally of making the exposition itself more lucid and effective; but it is unnecessary to specify these alterations in detail.

April, 1891.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

Revival of Socialism, [1]—Extinction of Old Types, [2]—Main Surviving Type, Social Democracy, [3]—Its Two Varieties, Socialist and Anarchist, [4]—Its Relations to Political Democracy, [4]—Definition of Socialism, [5]—Cairnes on Mill's Profession of Socialism, [6]—Ruling Characteristic common to Old and New Socialism, [9]—State Socialism, [11]—Conservative Socialism, [13]—The Minimum of Socialism, [14]—First Rise of Social Democracy, [15]—Rousseau, [16]—Baboeuf, [17]—Connection of Socialism with Democracy, [18]—The Danger to Free Institutions, [24]—Necessity and Probability of Wider Diffusion of Property, [25].

CHAPTER II.

THE PROGRESS AND PRESENT POSITION OF SOCIALISM.

National Conditions Favourable to Socialism, [31]—Germany, [31]—Progress of Socialist Vote, [33]—Action of Socialist Party in Reichstag, [34]—Party Programme, [38]—Halle Congress of 1891, [40]—France, [45]—Anarchists, [47]—Socialist Revolutionary Party, [48]—Possibilists, [50]—Blanquists, [53]—The Socialist Group in the Chamber, [53]—Austria, [54]—Italy, [57]—Spain, [60]—Portugal, [65]—Norway and Sweden, [66]—Denmark, [67]—Belgium, [70]—Holland, [72]—Switzerland, [73]—United States, [77]—Boston Anarchists, [77]—Mr. Henry George, [78]—Mr. Bellamy's Nationalism, [79]—Anarchists, [80]—Socialistic Labour Party, [81]—Knights of Labor, [82]—England, [83]—Social Democrats, [84]—Anarchists, [86]—Christian Socialists, [87]—Fabians, [88]—Land Nationalization, [89]—Scotland, [90]—Australia, [90].

CHAPTER III.

FERDINAND LASSALLE.

German Socialists before Lassalle, [93]—Favourable Conditions for Socialist Agitation in Germany, [94]—Character of Lassalle, [96]—The Hatzfeldt Case, [99]—Theft of the Cassette, [100]—Trial for Sedition, [101]—Literary Activity, [102]—Letter to Leipzig Working Men, [103]—Foundation of General Working Men's Association, [105]—Lassalle's Agitation, [105]—His Death, [106]—Funeral, [108]—Political Views, [109]—Idea and Position of the Working Class, [109]—Functions of the State, [111]—Economic Doctrines, [113]—Anarchic Socialism of the present Industrial Régime, [117]—Ricardo's "Iron Law" of Wages, [119]—A National, not an International Socialist, [124]—Internationally not Peculiar to Socialist Parties, [126]—Reason of Socialist Condemnation of Patriotism, [127].

CHAPTER IV.

KARL MARX.

Reception of his Work on Capital, [128]—The Young Hegelians, [130]—Feuerbach's Humanism, [131]—"Young Germany," [136]—Weitling and Albrecht, [137]—Early Socialistic Leanings of Marx, [139]—Marx in Paris, [141]—in Brussels, [142]—The Communist League, [142]—Communist Manifesto of 1847, [144]—New Rhenish Gazette, [146]—Marx in London, [147]—The International, its Rise and Fall, [149]—Tendency to Division in Revolutionary Parties, [152]—"Das Capital," [155]—Historical Rise of Capitalism, [156]—Origin of Surplus Value, [157]—Theory of Value, [160]—Price, [163]—Criticism of his Theory of Value, 165—Wages, [166]—Normal Day of Labour, [168]—Machinery, [170]—Piecework, [172]—Relative Over-population, [174].

CHAPTER V.

THE FEDERALISM OF CARL MARLO.

Rodbertus, [178]—Professor Winkelblech (Marlo), [180]—His Awakening to Social Misery, [180]—Application to Economic Study for Solution, [181]—View of Social Problem, [182]—Heathen Idea of Right (Monopolism) to be replaced by Christian Idea of Right (Panpolism), [183]—Liberalism and Communism both Utopias, [184]—Federalism alone realizes Christian Idea of Right, [188]—Natural Right of all to Property, [189]—Right to Labour and to Fruits of Labour, [191]—Necessity of Controlling Increase of Population, [192]—Of Suppressing Unproductive Acquisition, [193]—Collectivization of Land and Productive Capital, [193].

CHAPTER VI.

THE SOCIALISTS OF THE CHAIR.

The Name, [195]—Held's Vindication of it, [196]—Objections to it, [197]—Founders of the Historical School, [200]—Their Departure from Manchester Party, [202]—Eisenach Congress, [202]—The Historical Method, [204]—The Historical School a Realist School, [205]—An Ethical School, [209]—Their Theory of the State, [211]—The Social Question, [212]—Von Scheel, [215]—Brentano, [215].

CHAPTER VII.

THE CHRISTIAN SOCIALISTS.

Socialism and Christianity, [218]—Views of St. Simon and Cabet, [218]—Irreligious Character of Contemporary Socialism, [219]—The Christian Socialists of England in 1850, [220]—Those of Germany now, [223]—The Catholic Group, [223]—Ketteler, [224]—Moufang, [230]—Protestant Group, [233]—Stöcker, Todt, [234]—Christian Social Working Men's Party, [239]—The Social Monarchical Union, [241]—The Evangelical Social Congress of 1890, [241]—Is there a Specific Christian Social Politics? [242]—Christian Socialism in Austria, [242]—In France, [243]—International Catholic Social Congress of 1890 at Liège, [243]—The Pope's Encyclical, [245].

CHAPTER VIII.

ANARCHISM.

Recent Activity of Anarchists, [247]—Individualist Anarchists and Communist Anarchists, [248]—Latter are Ultra-Socialist, [249]—Ultra-Democratic, [250]—Proudhon's Anarchic Government, [250]—No Representative Institutions, [251]—Prince Krapotkin's Plan for Housing the Poor, [252]—The Russian Mir the Anarchist Model of Government, [252]—Anarchism Atheistic, [254]—Ultra-revolutionary, [255]—Propaganda of Deed, [256]—Disunity and Weakness of Anarchism, [257].

CHAPTER IX.

RUSSIAN NIHILISM.

Haxthausen's Opinion of Russia's Safety from Socialism, [259]—Successive Phases of Nihilism, [260]—Origin of Nihilism, [261]—Influence of the Rural Commune on Revolutionary Thought, [262]—Decabrist Conspiracy of 1825, [263]—Extreme Opinions at Russian Universities in Reign of Nicholas, [264]—Ascension of Alexander II., [264]—Alexander Herzen, [265]—Turgenieff and the word Nihilist, [266]—Koscheleff and Fircks's Accounts of Nihilism, [267]—Causes of it, [268]—Nihilist Sunday Schools, Tchernycheffsky, [269]—Effect of Emancipation of Serfs, [270]—Ruined Landlords, [270]—Jews, [271]—Heretics, [272]—Bakunin, [273]—Herzen's Recantation of Revolutionism, [273]—Bakunin in London, [274]—His "Amorphism," [274]—His Picture of the Good Revolutionist, [275]—Netchaïeff founds Branches of the International in Russia, [276]—The first Attempt on the Czar, [276]—Reversion to Arbitrary and Despotic Government, [276]—Bakunin and Lavroff at Zurich, [278]—"Going into the People," [279]—Secret Societies, [280]—Nihilist Arrests and Trials, [281]—Terrorism, [282]—Assassination of Czar, [283]—Present Socialist Parties, [283]—The Black Division Party, [283]—Alarming Growth of a Proletariat in Russia, [284]—Impoverishment of Peasantry, [286]—Break up of Communistic System, [288]—Dissolution of House Communities, [289]—The Black Division, [292]—The Labour Emancipation League, [295].

CHAPTER X.

SOCIALISM AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION.

A Social Question recognised by Contemporary Economists, [297]—Mr. Cairnes on the Situation, [297]—Socialist Indictment of Existing Régime, [299]—1st, the "Iron Law of Wages," [300]—Alleged Deterioration of Wage-Labourers' Position Unfounded, [301]—Their Standard of Living Better, [302]—Their Individual Share in the National Wealth more, [304]—The "Iron Law" Misunderstood by Socialists, [305]—The "Iron Law" Itself Unsound, [307]—The Rate of Wages really Depends on the per capita Production, [307]—Prospects of Increasing per capita Production, [312]—Piecework, [314]—Shorter Day of Labour, [318]—2nd, Alleged Multiplication of Vicissitudes, [323]—Effects of Machinery, [323]—Temporary Redundancies, [324]—Serious Redundancies Lessening, [324]—Value of Good System of Commercial Statistics, [325]—3rd, Alleged Expropriation of the Value of the Labourer's Work, [327]—How Value is Constituted, [327]—Justice of Interest, [329]—Social Importance of Work of Capitalist Employer, [330]—Public Value of Private Property, [333]—Value of Freedom, [334]—Laissez-faire, [336]—Necessity for Opportunities of Investment, [338]—Co-operative Production, [338]—Advantage of Interlacing of Classes, [340]—Reason of exceptionally good House Accommodation among Working Classes of Sheffield, [341].

CHAPTER XI.

STATE SOCIALISM.

1. State Socialism and English Economics.

M. Léon Say on State Socialism, [345]—State Property and State Industries in Germany, [345]—Mr. Goschen and others on Change in English Opinion regarding State Intervention, [346]—Their Views Exaggerated and undiscriminating, [347]—Little done in England in Nationalizing Industries, [348]—Much done in enlarging Popular Rights, [349]—English Thinkers never Believers in Laissez-faire, [351]—Except Mr. H. Spencer, [352]—Adam Smith's "Simple and Obvious System of Natural Liberty," [353]—His Theory of Social Politics, [356]—Ricardo's Views, [359]—McCulloch's, [360]—On the Manufacturing System, [362]—On Crises, [363]—On Irish Pauper Labour, [364]—On Factory Legislation, [366]—On Housing the Poor, [366]—On the Poor Law, 368—The So-called Manchester School, [372]—The English Theory of Social Politics, [373].

2. The Nature and Principle of State Socialism.

Different Definitions of Socialism, [374]—Origin and Meaning of State Socialism, [379]—The Social Monarchists, [380]—Rodbertus, [380]—His Theory of Social Politics, [381]—M. de Laveleye and Establishment of Equality of Conditions, [384]—Alleged Disinheritance of the People from the Primitive Economic Rights, [385]—Mr. Chamberlain's Doctrine of "Ransom," [386]—Professor A. Wagner's State Socialism, [387].

3. State Socialism and Social Reform.

Cobden's Praise of the Prussian Government for its Social Work, [393]—Property, a Requisite of Progress, not of Freedom, [394]—Limits of Legitimate Intervention, [395]—Short Definition of State Socialism, [399]—Error of Plea for State Socialism as Extinguisher of Chance, [399]—As Saving the Waste from Competition, [400]—Wastefulness of Socialism, [401]—As shown in Samoa, [401]—In England under Old Poor Law, [402]—In Brook Farm, [402]—Idleness the Destroyer of the American Owenite and Fourierist Communities, [403]—Idleness, the Great Difficulty in the Shaker and Rappist Communities, [405]—"Old Slug," [406]—Contentment with Squalid Conditions, [407]—Special Liability to Mismanagement, [408].

4. State Socialism and State Management.

Natural Qualities and Defects of State as Industrial Manager, [409]—Post Office, [410]—Dockyards, [410]—Forestry, [412]—Mint and other Forms of Attesting, [412]—Monopolies, [413]—Municipal Management of Gas and Water Supply, [413]—Land Nationalization, [414]—State Railways, [415]—State Insurance in New Zealand, [417]—Results of Joint-Stock Management and Private Management in Massachusetts, [417].

5. State Socialism and Popular Right.

Why Impracticable Legislation is Socialistic, [418]—Rule of Intervention for Realizing Rights, [419]—Right to Existence, [421]—Right to Superannuation, [421]—Right to Labour, [423]—Problem of the Unemployed, [425]—Free Education, Libraries, Parks, [427]—Where Stop? [427]—Legal Fixing of Prices, as in Fares and Rates, [428]—Of Fair Rent, [429]—Of Fair Wages, [430]—Compulsory Arbitration, [430]—Legal Minimum Wages, [431]—Sweating System and Starvation Wages, [432]—International Compulsory Eight Hours Day, [434].

CHAPTER XII.

THE AGRARIAN SOCIALISM OF HENRY GEORGE.

Mr. George Predicts that his Book would find Apostles, [441]—Fulfilment of the Prediction, [441]—Sisyphism, [442]—Loses His Religious Belief through Perception of Poverty, [443]—Recovers it again, [445]—1st, His Problem, [445]—Its unverified Assumption, [445]—Evidence of Facts against it, [448]—Average Scale of Living has Risen, [449]—Proportion of Paupers, unable to obtain it, has Declined, [449]—Special Decline of Able-bodied Pauperism, [450]—Increase of Length of Life, [452]—Mr. George Changes his Problem from one of Quantity to one of Proportion, [453]—Rent really no larger Proportion of National Wealth or even of Agricultural Produce than before, [454]—Wages no Smaller Proportion, [456]—Indications of Increasing Distribution of Wealth, [457]—2nd, Mr. George's Explanation, [461]—Alleged Tendency of Wages to a Minimum that gives but a Bare Living, [462]—The Wages Fund and Population Theories, [464]—Mr. George's New Population Theory, [465]—His New Wages Fund Theory, [468]—His Explanation of the Distribution of Wealth without taking Profits into Account, [474]—Views on Rent, [476]—on Interest, [483]—Wages, [484]—Margin of Cultivation, [484]—Absurdities of his Explanation, [485]—3rd, Mr. George's Remedy, [487]—Land Nationalization Movement in England, [488]—Futility of Mr. George's Remedy, [489]—Confiscation, [490]—Difference of Mr. George's Proposal from Mr. Mill's, [491]—Agricultural Land as truly the Fruit of Labour as other Commodities, [492]—Real Distinction between Land and other Property, [494]—Social Claim on all Property, [495]—Is Private Property the best Guarantee for the most Productive use of Land? [496]—Land Nationalization no Assistance to the Reforms that are Needed, [498].

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY.

It was a common topic of congratulation at the Exhibition of 1862 that the political atmosphere of Europe was then entirely free from the revolutionary alarms which overclouded the first Exhibition in 1851; but in that very year the old clouds began to gather once more at different quarters of the horizon. It was in 1862 that Lassalle delivered to a club of working men in Berlin his address on "The Present Epoch of the World, and the Idea of the Working Class," which was published shortly afterwards under the title of "The Working Man's Programme," and which has been called by his friends "The Wittenberg Theses" of the new socialist movement; and it was at the Exhibition itself that those relations were established between the delegates of English and French trade societies which issued eventually in the organization of the International. The double train thus laid has put in motion a propaganda of social revolution more vigorous, widespread, and dangerous than any which has preceded it.

But though the reappearance of socialism was not immediately looked for at the time, it could cause no serious surprise to any one who considered how nearly the socialist theory is allied with some of the ruling ideas of modern times, and how many points of attraction it presents at once to the impatient philanthropy of enthusiasts, to the passions of the multitude, and to the narrow but insistent logic of the numerous class of minds that make little account of the complexity of life. Socialism will probably never keep long away during the present transitional period of society, and there is therefore less interest in the mere fact of its reappearance than in marking the particular form in which, after a prolonged retirement, it has actually returned; for this may perhaps be reasonably taken to be its most vital and enduring type, and consequently that with which we shall mainly have to reckon in the future.

Now the present movement is, before all, political and revolutionary. The philanthropic and experimental forms of socialism, which played a conspicuous rôle before 1848, perished then in the wreck of the Revolution, and have never risen to life again. The old schools have dispersed. Their doctrines, their works, their very hopes have gone. The theories of man's entire dependence on circumstances, of the rehabilitation of the flesh, of the passional attraction, once in everybody's mouth, have sunk into oblivion. The communities of Owenites, St. Simonians, Fourierists, Icarians, which multiplied for a time on both sides of the Atlantic, are extinct. The socialists of the present day have discarded all belief in the possibility of effecting any social regeneration except by means of political authority, and the first object of their endeavours is therefore the conquest of the powers of the State. There are some exceptions, but these are very unimportant. The communistic societies of the United States, for instance, are mostly organizations of eccentric religious sects which have no part or influence in the life of the century. The Colinsian Collectivists, followers of the Belgian socialist Colins, are a mere handful; and the Familistère of Guise in France—a remarkable institution, founded since 1848 by an old disciple of Fourier, though not on Fourier's plan—stands quite alone, and has no imitators. Non-political socialism may accordingly be said to have practically disappeared.

Not only so, but out of the several sorts and varieties of political socialism, only one has revived in any strength, and that is the extremest and most revolutionary. It is the democratic communism of the Young Hegelians, and it scouts the very suggestion of State-help, and will content itself with nothing short of State-transformation. Schemes such as were popular and noisy thirty years ago—schemes, involving indeed organic changes, but organic changes of only a partial character—have gone to their rest. Louis Blanc, for example, was then a name of some power; but, remarkably enough, though Louis Blanc was but the other year buried with great honour, his Organization of Labour seems to be as completely forgotten as the Circulus of Leroux. M. G. de Molinari writes an interesting account of the debates that took place in the working men's clubs of Paris in the year 1868-9—the first year they were granted liberty of meeting after the establishment of the Second Empire—and he states that while Fourier and Cabet were still quoted by old disciples, though without any idea of their systems being of practical moment, Louis Blanc's name was not even mentioned. Proudhon's gospel of a State bank of mutual credit for furnishing labourers with capital, by issuing inconvertible notes without money and without price, has still a sprinkling of faithful believers, who call themselves Mutualists; but they are extremely few, and, as a rule, the socialists of France at the present day, like those of Germany, put their faith in iron rather than paper. What they want is a democracy of labour, to use one of their own phrases—that is, a State in which power and property shall be based on labour; where citizenship shall depend on a labour qualification, instead of a qualification of birth or of property; where there shall be no citizen who enjoys without labouring, and no citizen who labours without enjoying; where every one who is able to work shall have employment, and every one who has wrought shall retain the whole produce of his labour; and where accordingly, as the indispensable prerequisite of the whole scheme, the land of the country and all other instruments of production shall be made the joint property of the community, and the conduct of all industrial operations be placed under the direct administration of the State. Furthermore, all this is contended for as a matter of simple right and justice to the labouring classes, on the ground that the wealth of the nation belongs to the hands that made it; it is contended for as an obligation of the State, because the State is held to be merely the organized will of the people, and the people is the labouring class; and it is contended for as an object of immediate accomplishment—if possible, by ordinary constitutional means; but, if not, by revolution.

This is the form in which socialism has reappeared, and it may be described in three words as Revolutionary Socialist Democracy. The movement is divided into two main branches—socialism proper, or collectivism, as it is sometimes called, and anarchism. There are anarchists who are not socialists, but hold strongly by an individualist constitution of property. They are very few, however, and the great mass of the party known by that name in our day, including the Russian Nihilists, are as ardent believers in the economic socialism of Karl Marx as the Social Democrats of Germany themselves. They diverge from the latter on a question of future government; but the differences between the two are only such as the same movement might be expected to exhibit in passing through different media, personal or national. Modern democrats have been long divided into Centralists and Federalists—the one party seeking to give to the democratic republic they contemplate a strongly centralized form of government, and the other preferring to leave the local communes comparatively independent and sovereign, and free, if they choose, to unite themselves in convenient federations. The federal republic has always been the favourite ideal of the Democrats of Spain and of the Communards of Paris, and there is generally a tendency among Federalists, in their impatience of all central authority, to drop the element of federation out of their ideal altogether, and to advocate the form of opinion known as "anarchy"—that is, the abolition of all superior government. It was very natural that this ancient feud among the democrats should appear in the ranks of socialist democracy, and it was equally natural that the Russian Radicals, hating the autocracy of their country and idealizing its rural communes, should become the chief adherents of the federalist and even the anarchic tradition.

This is the only point of principle that separates anarchism from socialism. In other respects anarchism may be said to be but an extremer phase of socialism. It indulges in more violent methods, and in a more omnivorous spirit of destruction. Its fury takes a wider sweep; it attacks all current beliefs and all existing institutions; it puts its hopes in universal chaos. I shall endeavour in a future chapter to explain, from peculiarities of the national character and culture, why this gospel of chaos should find so much acceptance in Russia; but it is no exclusively Russian product. It was preached with singular coolness, as will be subsequently shown, by some of the young Hegelians of Germany before 1848, and it obtains among the more volatile members of most socialist organizations still. Attacks on religion, patriotism, the family, are very usual accessories of their practical agitations everywhere. As institutions and beliefs are seen to lend strength to each other, teeth set on edge against one are easily brought to gnash at all. A sharp check from the public authority generally brings out to the front this extremer element in German socialism. After the repressive legislation of 1878 the German socialists struck the restriction of proceeding "by legal methods" out of their programme, and the wilder spirits among them would be content with nothing short of a policy of general destruction, and, being expelled from the party, started an organization of their own on thoroughly anarchist lines.

Under these influences, the word socialism has come to contract a new meaning, and is now generally defined in a way that would exclude the very theories it was originally invented to denote. Its political element—its demand on the public power in behalf of the labouring class—is taken to be the pith and essence of the system. Mr. Cairnes, for example, says that the circumstance which distinguishes socialism from all other modes of social speculation is its invocation of the powers of the State, and he finds fault with Mr. Mill for describing himself in his "Autobiography" as a socialist, merely because his ideal of ultimate improvement had more in common with the ideal of socialistic reformers than with the views of those who in contradistinction would be called orthodox. The passage from the "Autobiography" runs as follows:—"While we repudiated with the greatest energy that tyranny of society over the individual which most socialistic systems are supposed to involve, we yet looked forward to a time when society will no longer be divided into the idle and the industrious; when the rule that they who do not work shall not eat will be applied, not to paupers only, but impartially to all; when the division of the produce of labour, instead of depending, as in so great a degree it now does, on the accident of birth, will be made by concert on an acknowledged principle of justice; and when it will no longer either be, or be thought to be, impossible for human beings to exert themselves strenuously in procuring benefits which are not to be exclusively their own, but to be shared with the society they belong to." ("Autobiography," pp. 231-232). On this passage Mr. Cairnes observes:—"If to look forward to such a state of things as an ideal to be striven for is socialism, I at once acknowledge myself a socialist; but it seems to me that the idea which 'socialism' conveys to most minds is not that of any particular form of society to be realized at a future time when the character of human beings and the conditions of human life are widely different from what they now are, but rather certain modes of action, more especially the employment of the powers of the State for the instant accomplishment of ideal schemes, which is the invariable attribute of all projects generally regarded as socialistic. So entirely is this the case that it is common to hear any proposal which is thought to involve an undue extension of the power of the State branded as socialistic, whatever be the object it may seek to accomplish. After all, the question is one of nomenclature merely; but people are so greatly governed by words that I cannot but regret that a philosophy of social life with which I so deeply sympathize should be prejudiced by verbal associations fitted, as it seems to me, only to mislead." ("Leading Principles of Political Economy," p. 316.)

Mr. Cairnes's objection is just; for a reformer's position ought to be determined, not by the distant ideal he may think best, if the conditions were ripe for its realization, but by the policy which he counts to be of present importance under the conditions that exist. He may cherish, as many orthodox economists do, the socialist hope. He may look for a time when comfort and civilization shall be more universally and securely diffused; when heads and hands in the world of labour shall work together in amity; when competition and exclusive private property and self-interest shall be swallowed up in love and common labour. But he knows that the transformation must be gradual, and that the material conditions of it must never be pushed on in advance of the intellectual and moral. And this cuts him off by a whole diameter, from those who are now known as socialists. In every question of the day he will be found in an opposite camp from them. For he makes the ideal what it is and ought to be—the goal of his action; they make it their starting-point, and the peculiarity of the case is that with their view of the situation they cannot make it anything else. For to their mind the struggle they are engaged in is not a struggle for amelioration, but for plain and elementary right. It is not a question of providing greater happiness for the greatest number; it is a question of doing them bare justice, of giving them their own, of protecting them against a disguised but very real expropriation. They declare that, under the present industrial arrangements, the labouring classes are in effect robbed of most of the value of the work of their hands, and of course the suppression of systematic robbery is an immediate obligation of the present. Justice is a basis to start from now, if possible, and not a dream to await hereafter. First let the labouring man have his rights, they cry, and then, and then only, shall you have the way clear for any further parley about his future. It is true that he is not the victim of individual rapacity so much as of the system, and that he cannot get his rights till the system is completely changed; but the system, they argue, can never be completely changed except by the power of the State, and why then not change it at once? Now, it is obvious how, to people who take this view of the matter, there should seem no other alternative but an instant reconstruction of industrial society at the hands of the State. For if it is justice that has to be done, then it appears only natural to conclude that it falls upon the State, as the organ of justice, to do it, and that it cannot do it too soon. The demand for the immediate accomplishment of their scheme by public authority is thus no accidental accessory of it merely, but is really inseparable from the ideas on which the scheme is founded. It is, in fact, so much, if I may use the word, the note of socialism wherever socialism makes itself heard in the world now, that it can only produce confusion to give the name of socialist to persons who hold this note in abhorrence, and virtually desire no more than the gradual triumph of co-operation.

It may be answered that the latter, like the former, aim not at a mere reform of the present industrial system, but at an essential change in its fundamental principles—at an eventual suppression of exclusive property and unrestricted competition—and that it is therefore only proper to classify them with those who seek the like important end, however they may differ from the latter as to the means and seasons of action. This might be right, perhaps, if our only consideration were to furnish a philosophical classification of opinions; but we have to deal with a living and agitating party whose name and work are much canvassed, and there is at any rate great practical inconvenience in extending the current designation of that party so as to include persons who object strongly to its whole immediate work.

The inconvenience has doubled since Mill's time, because socialism has now become a much more definite programme of a much more definite party. Even in the old romantic schools the ruling characteristic of socialism was always its effort to realize some wrong view of distributive justice. It was more than merely an impracticable plan for the extinction of poverty, or the more equable diffusion of wealth, or the correction of excessive inequalities, although that seems to be so prevailing an impression that persons who have what they conceive more feasible proposals to offer for these purposes put them forward under the name of Practicable Socialism. But so far as these purposes go, they are common to almost all schools of social reformers, even the most individualist. If socialism meant only feeling earnestly about those inequalities, or desiring earnestly their redress, or even strongly resenting their inconsistency with an ideal of justice, then Mr. Herbert Spencer is as much a socialist as either Marx or Lassalle. "The fates of the great majority," says he, "have ever been, and doubtless still are, so sad that it is painful to think of them. Unquestionably the existing type of social organization is one which none who care for their kind can contemplate with satisfaction; and unquestionably men's activities accompanying this type are far from being admirable. The strong divisions of rank and the immense inequalities of means are at variance with that ideal of human relations on which the sympathetic imagination likes to dwell; and the average conduct, under the pressure and excitement of social life as at present carried on, is in sundry respects repulsive." ("A Plea for Liberty," p. 4.) Socialists are far from being the only persons whose sense of justice is offended by much in the existing régime, and many very moderate politicians have held that the policy of the law should always favour the diffusion of wealth rather than its concentration; that it should always favour the active business interest rather than the idle interest; that it should always favour the weaker and more unprotected interest rather than the more powerful and the more contumelious. The socialism comes in not with the condemnation of the existing order of things, but with the policy recommended for its correction. There is no socialism in recognising the plain fact that the gifts of fortune, whether riches or talents, are not distributed in the world according to merit. There is no socialism in declaring that the rich, by reason of their riches, have responsibilities towards the poor; or that the poor, by reason of their poverty, have claims upon the rich. Nor is there any socialism in holding that the State has responsibilities towards the poor, and that the law ought, when necessary, to assert the reasonable claims of poverty, or enforce the reasonable duties and obligations of wealth. All that merely says that justice and humanity ought to govern in economic affairs, as they ought to govern in all other affairs of life; and this is an axiomatic position which nobody in the world denies. Only, axiomatic though it is, it seems to dawn on many minds like a revelation late in life, and they feel they are no longer as other men, and that they must henceforth call themselves socialists. This awakening to the injustice or inhumanity of things is not socialism, though socialism may often proceed out of it. Socialism is always some scheme for the removal of one injustice by the infliction of a greater—some scheme which, by mistaking the rights and wrongs of the actual situation, or the natural operation of its own provisions, or any other cause, would leave things more inequitable and more offensive to a sound sense of justice than it found them. The rich idler, for example, is always a great offence to the socialist, because, according to the socialist sense of justice, no man ought to be rich without working for his riches; and many other people will possibly agree with the socialist in that. But then the socialist proposes to abolish the rich idler by a scheme which would breed the poor idler in overwhelming abundance, and for the sake of equalizing poverty and wealth, would really equalize indolence and industry—at once a more fatal and a more offensive form of injustice than that which it was designed to redress. Socialists find fault with the present order of things because the many workers support the few idlers; but most of the old socialist communities of France and America failed because of the opposite and greater injustice, that the few workers found themselves supporting the many idlers, and the consequence was a more harrowing sense of unfairness and a more universal impoverishment than prevailed under the old system. The rich idler who merely lives on what he has inherited may not belong to an ideal state of society; but the poor idler, who shirks and dawdles and malingers, because an indulgent community relieves him of the necessity of harder exertion, is equally unideal, and he is much more hurtful in the reality.

But the socialists, in their mistaken ideas of justice, do not stop at the rich idler. The rich idler is, in their view, a robber; but the rich worker is a greater robber still. It is characteristic of socialist thought to hold the accumulations of the rich to be in some sort of way unjustly acquired by spoiling the poor. The poor are always represented as the disinherited; their property is declared to have been taken from them perforce by bad laws and bad economic arrangements and delivered without lien into the hands of the capitalists. This view lived and moved in the old socialism, but it has been worked into a reasoned and professedly scientific argument as a basis and justification for the new. The old socialism usually exclaimed against the justice of interest, rent, property, and all forms of labourless income; but the new socialism pretends to prove the charge by economic principles. It alleges that all these forms of income are so many different forms of plundering the working classes, who are the real producers of wealth, and it sets up a claim on behalf of those classes to the whole value of the things they produce without any deductions for rent, interest, or profit—the right, as they call it, of the labourer to the whole produce of his labour. Now this is a very distinct and definite claim of right and justice, and the whole final object of the socialist organizations of the present day is to get it realized, and realized at once, as claims of right and justice ought, and must, by the powers of the State. I shall have better opportunities at a later part of this work of proving how absolutely unfounded and unjust is this claim; but I mention it here merely to show that the essence of modern socialism is more and more unmistakably revealing itself as an effort to realize some false ideal of social or distributive justice. This is the deepest and most ruling feature of socialism, and it really necessitated the advance of the movement from the philanthropic to the political stage. The Owenites were content with the idea of a voluntary equality of wealth; but that is now dismissed as the mere children's dream, for popular rights are things to be enforced by law, and questions of justice are for the State. The political character of the movement has only brought forward into stronger relief the distorted ideal of justice which gave it being; and it has therefore become much more confusing than it formerly was for one to call himself a socialist merely because he dreams of better things to come, or because he would like to extinguish poverty, or to diffuse property, or to extend the principle of progressive taxation, or promote co-operation or profit-sharing, or any other just or useful measures of practical social reform. That is shown very well by a simple little tidemark. In the old days it was still possible, though it never was a happy choice, for Maurice and the promoters of the new co-operation movement to assume the designation of Christian Socialists; but although Schultze-Delitzsch was working on the same lines with even greater éclat at the time when the present socialistic movement began in Germany, he was left so far behind that he was thought the great anti-socialist, and the people to whom it was now considered appropriate to transfer the name of socialists were a set of university professors and others who advocated a more extended use of the powers of the State for the solution of the social question and the satisfaction of working-class claims.

The Socialists of the Chair and the Christian Socialists of Germany contemplate nothing beyond correctives and palliatives of existing evils; but then they ask the State to administer them. They ask the State to inspect factories, or to legalize trades unions, or to organize working-class insurance, or to fix fair wages. Their requests may be wise or foolish, but none of them, nor all of them together, would either subvert or transform the existing industrial system; and those who propound them are called socialists merely because they make it part of the State's business to deal with social questions, or perhaps more particularly because they make it the State's business to deal with social questions in the interest of the working class. This idea of socialism seems largely to govern the current employment of the term. We often hear any fresh extension of the functions of the State condemned as socialistic even when the extension is not supposed to be made in the interests of the working class, or to be conducive to them. The purchase of the telegraphs was socialistic; the proposal to purchase the railways is socialistic; a national system of education is socialistic; and an ecclesiastical establishment, if it were now brought forward as a new suggestion, would be pronounced socialistic too. Since, in a socialistic community, all power is assigned to the State, any measure which now increases the power of the State gets easily represented as an approach to socialism, especially in the want—and it is one of our chief wants at present—of a rational and discriminating theory of the proper limits and sphere of public authority.

But in the prevailing use of the word, there is generally the idea that the intervention of authority to which it is applied is undertaken to promote the well-being of the less fortunate classes of society. Since socialism seeks to construct what may be called a working class State, where the material welfare of each shall be the great object of the organization of all, it is common to represent as socialistic any proposal that asks the State to do something for the material well-being of the working class, and to describe any group of such proposals, or any theory that favours them, by the name of socialism. The so-called State-socialism of Prince Bismarck, for example, is only, as he has himself declared, a following-out of the traditions of the House of Hohenzollern, the princes of that dynasty having always counted it one of their first duties as rulers to exercise a special protection and solicitude over the poorer classes of their subjects. The old ideas of feudal protection and paternal government have charms for many minds that deplore the democratic spirit of modern society. In Germany they have been maintained by the feudal classes, the court, and the clergy; their presence in the general intellectual atmosphere there has probably facilitated the diffusion of socialistic views; and they have certainly led to the curious phenomenon of a Conservative socialism, in which the most obstinately Conservative interests in the country go to meet the Social Democrats half way, and promise to do everything to get them better wages if they will but come to church again and pray for the Kaiser. The days of feudal protection and paternal government are gone; as idealized by Carlyle, they perhaps never existed; at any rate, in an age of equality they are no longer possible, but their modern counterparts are precisely the ideas of social protection and fraternal government which find their home among socialists. On the strength of this analogy, Prince Bismarck and the German Emperor are sometimes spoken of as socialists, because they believe, like the latter, that the State should exercise a general or even a particular providence over the industrial classes. But socialism is more than such a belief. It is not only a theory of the State's action, but a theory of the State's action founded on a theory of the labourer's right. It is at bottom, as I have said, a mistaken demand for social justice. It tells us that an enlargement of social justice was made when it was declared that every man shall be free—or, in other words, that every man shall possess completely his own powers of labour; and it claims that a new enlargement of social justice shall be made now, to declare that every man shall possess the whole produce of his labour. Now those who are known as Conservative Socialists, in patronizing the working people, do not dream of countenancing any such claim, or even of admitting in the least that there is anything positively unjust in the present industrial system. None of them would go further than to say that the economic position of the labourer is insufficient to satisfy his legitimate aspirations in a civilized community; few of them would go so far. It is therefore highly confusing to class them among socialists.

M. Limousin, again, speaks of a "minimum of socialism." He would call no man a socialist who does not hold this minimum, and he would call every man a socialist who does hold it. And the minimum of socialism, in his opinion, is this, that the State owes a special duty of protection to labourers because they are poor, and that this duty consists in securing to them a more equitable part in the product of general labour. The latter clause might have been better expressed in less general terms, but that may pass. The definition recognises at any rate that the paternal or the fraternal theory of government does not of itself constitute socialism, and that this must be combined with the demand for a new distribution of wealth, on supposed grounds of justice or equity, before we have even the minimum of socialism. But it would have been more correct if it had recognised that the demand for a better distribution must be made not merely on supposed, but on erroneous grounds of justice or equity. If the proposed distribution is really just and equitable, nothing can surely be more proper than to ask the State to do its best to realize it and any practicable intervention for that purpose is only a matter of the ordinary expansion of the law. What is law, what is right, but a protection of the weak? and all legal reform is a transition from a less equitable to a more equitable system of arrangements. The equitable requirements of the poor are the natural concern of the State on the narrowest theory of its functions, and M. Limousin's definition would really include all rational social reformers under the name of socialist.

If we are in this way to stretch the word socialism first to the one side, till it takes in J. S. Mill and Maurice and the co-operators, who repudiate authority and State help, and then on the other side, till it takes in Prince Bismarck, and our own aristocratic Conservative Young England Party, and all social reformers who want the State to do its ordinary duty of supplying the working classes with better securities for the essentials of all humane living, how can there be any rational and intelligible use of the word at all? Mill holds a more or less socialistic idea of what a just society would be; Bismarck holds a more or less socialistic view of the functions of the State; but neither of these ideas separately make up the minimum of socialism; and it would therefore be misleading to call either of them by that name, while to call both by it would be hopeless confusion, since the one politician holds exactly what the other rejects, and no more. But, after all, it is of less importance to define socialism in the abstract than to describe the actual concrete socialism that has organization and life, especially as the name is only transferred in common speech to all these varying shades of opinion, because they are thought to resemble that concrete socialism in one feature or another.

Having now ascertained the general nature of the contemporary socialistic movement, we shall be in a better position to judge of its bearings and importance. We have seen that the only form of socialism which has come to life again since 1848 is the political and revolutionary phase of Social Democracy. Now, this was also the original form in which socialism first appeared in modern Europe at the time of the earlier Revolution of 1789. The tradition it represents is consequently one of apparently vigorous vitality. It has kept its place in European opinion for a hundred years, it seems to have grown with the growth of the democratic spirit, and it has in our own day broken out simultaneously in most of the countries of the Continent, and in some of them with remarkable energy. A movement like this, which seems to have taken a continuous and extensive hold of the popular mind, and which moreover has a consciousness of right, a passion for social justice, however mistaken, at the heart of it, cannot be treated lightly as a political force; but at the same time its consequence is apt to be greatly overrated both by the hopes of sanguine adherents and by the apprehensions of opponents. Socialists are incessantly telling us that their system is the last word of the Revolution, that the current which broke loose over Europe in 1789 is setting, as it could not help setting, in their direction, and that it can only find its final level of repose in a democratic communism. Conservative Cassandras tell us the same thing, for the Extreme Right takes the same view as the Extreme Left does of the logical tendency of measures. They feel things about them moving everywhere towards equality, they feel themselves helpless to resist the movement, and they are sure they shall waken one morning in a social revolution. Stahl, for example, thought democracy necessarily conducted to socialism, and that wherever democracy entered, socialism was already at the door. A few words will therefore be still necessary towards explaining, first, the historical origin of modern socialism; second, the relations of socialism to democracy, and, finally, the extent and character of the spread of the present movement.

Respecting the first of these three points, modern socialism was generated out of the notions about property and the State which appeared towards the close of last century in the course of the speculations then in vogue on the origin and objects of civil society, and which were proclaimed about the same time by many different writers—by Brissot, by Mably, by Morelly, and above all by Rousseau. Their great idea was to restore what they called the state of nature, when primitive equality still reigned, and the earth belonged to none, and the fruits to all. They taught that there was no foundation for property but need. He who needed a thing had a right to it, and he who had more than he needed was a thief. Rousseau said every man had naturally a right to whatever he needed; and Brissot, anticipating the famous words of Proudhon, declared that in a state of nature "exclusive property was theft." It was so in a state of nature, but it was so also in a state of society, for society was built on a social contract, "the clauses of which reduce themselves to one, viz., the total transfer of each associate, with all his rights, to the community." The individual is thus nothing; the State is all in all. Property is only so much of the national estate conditionally conceded to the individual. He has the right to use it, because the State permits him, while the State permits him, and how the State permits him. So with every other right; he is to think, speak, train his children, or even beget them, as the State directs and allows, in the interest of the common good.

These ideas circulated in a diffuse state till 1793. They formed as yet neither system nor party. But when Joseph Baboeuf, discarding his Christian name of Joseph (because, as he said, he had no wish for Joseph's virtues, and so saw no good in having him for his patron saint), and taking instead the ominous name of Caius Gracchus, organized the conspiracy of the Egaux in that year, then modern socialism began, and it began in the form in which it still survives. Baboeuf's ambition was to found what he called a true democratic republic, and by a true democratic republic he meant one in which all inequalities, whether of right or of fact, should be abolished, and every citizen should have enough and none too much. It was vain, he held, to dream of making an end of privilege or oppression until all property came into the hands of the Government, and was statedly distributed by the Government to the citizens on a principle of scrupulous equality. Misled by the name Caius Gracchus, people thought he wanted an agrarian law and equal division. But he told them an agrarian law was folly, and equal division would not last a twelvemonth, if the participants got the property to themselves. What he wanted, he said, was something much more sublime—it was community of goods. Equality could only be made enduring through the abolition of private property. The State must be sole proprietor and sole employer, and dispense to every man his work according to his particular skill, and his subsistence in honourable sufficiency according to his wants. An individual who monopolized anything over and above such a sufficiency committed a social theft. Appropriation was to be strictly limited to and by personal need.

Baboeuf saw no difficulty in working the scheme; was it not practised every day in the army, with 1,200,000 men? If it were said, the soil of France is too small to sustain its population in the standard of sufficiency contemplated, then so much the worse for the superfluous population; let the greater landlords first, and then as many sansculottes as were redundant, be put out of the way for their country's good. He actually ascribed this intention to Robespierre, and spoke of the Terror as if it were an excellent anticipation of Malthusianism. Did any one say that, without inequalities, progress would cease and arts and civilization decay, Baboeuf was equally prepared to take the consequences. "Perish the arts," said a manifesto discovered with him at his apprehension, "but let us have real equality." "All evils," he said in his newspaper, "are on their trial. Let them all be confounded. Let everything return to chaos, and from chaos let there rise a new and regenerated world."

We have here just the revolutionary socialist democracy that is still rampant over Europe. Socialists now, indeed, generally make light of the difficulty of over-population which Baboeuf solved so glibly with the guillotine, and they contend that their system would humanize civilization instead of destroying it. They follow, too, a different tradition from Baboeuf regarding the right of property. While he built that right on need, they build it on labour. He said the man who has more than he needs is a thief; they say the man who has more than he wrought for is a thief. He would have the State to give every man an honourable sufficiency right off, according to his need; they ask the State to give every man according to his work, or, if unfit for work, according to his need, and they hold that this rule would afford every one an honourable sufficiency. But these differences are only refinements on Baboeuf's plan, and its main features remain—equality of conditions, nationalization of property, democratic tyranny, a uniform medium fatal to progress, an omnipresent mandarin control crushing out of the people that energy of character which W. von Humboldt said was the first and only virtue of man, because it was the root of all other excellence and advancement. In short, socialists now seek, like Baboeuf, to establish a democratic republic—a society built on the equal manhood of every citizen—and, like Baboeuf, they think a true democratic republic is necessarily a socialistic one.

This brings me to the next point I mentioned, the interesting problem of the true relations of socialism to democracy. Is socialism, as Stahl and others represent, an inevitable corollary of democracy? If so, our interest in it is very real and very immediate. For democracy is already here, and is at present engaged in every country of Europe in the very work of reorganizing the social system into harmony with democratic requirements. Its hammer may make little sound in some places, but the work proceeds none the less effectually for the silence, and it will proceed, slowly or more rapidly, until all the institutions of the country have been renovated by the democratic spirit. Will the social system, which will result from the process, be socialism? "The gradual development of the principle of equality," says De Tocqueville, "is a providential fact. It has all the characteristics of such a fact. It is universal; it is durable; it constantly eludes all human interference; and all events, as well as all men, contribute to its progress. Would it be wise to imagine that a social movement, the causes of which lie so far back, can be checked by the efforts of one generation? Can it be believed that the democracy which has overthrown the feudal system and vanquished kings will retreat before tradesmen and capitalists? Will it stop now that it has grown so strong, and its adversaries so weak?" If, then, the natural tendency of democracy is to socialism, to socialism we must eventually go.

But the natural tendency of democracy is not to socialism. A single plain but remarkable fact suffices to establish that. Democracy has been in full bloom in America for more than a century, and there are no traces of socialism there except among some German immigrants of yesterday; for, of course, the communism of the eccentric religious sects of America proceeds from religious ideals, and has no bearing one way or other on the social tendency of democracy. The labouring class is politically everything in that country—everything, at least, that electoral power can make them in an elective republic; and they have never shown any desire to use their political power to become socially everything or to interfere with the freedom of property. Had this been in any way the necessary effect of democratic institutions, it must have by this time made its appearance in the United States. De Tocqueville, indeed, maintains that so far from there being any natural solidarity between democracy and socialism, they are absolutely contrary the one to the other. "Democracy," he said in a speech in the Republican Parliament of France in 1849, "extends the sphere of individual independence; socialism contracts it. Democracy gives every individual man his utmost possible value; socialism makes every man an agent, an instrument, a cipher. Democracy and socialism coincide only in the single word equality, but observe the difference: democracy desires equality in liberty; socialism seeks equality in compulsion and servitude."

That is so far substantially true, but it cannot be received altogether without qualification. We have had experience in modern times of two different forms of democracy, which may be called the American and the Continental. In America equality came as it were by nature, without strife and without so much as observation; the colonists started equal. But freedom was only won by sacrifice; the first pilgrims bought it by exile; the founders of the Republic bought it a second time by blood. Liberty therefore was their treasure, their ark, their passion; and having been long trained in habits of self-government, they acquired in the daily exercise of their liberty that strong sense of its practical value, and that subtle instinct of its just limits, which always constitute its surest bulwarks. With them the State was nothing more than an association for mutual protection—an association, like any other, having its own definite work to do and no more, and receiving from its members the precise powers needed for that work and no more; and they looked with a jealousy, warm from their history and life, on any extension of the State's functions or powers beyond those primary requirements of public safety or utility which they laid upon it. In the United States property is widely diffused; liberty has been long enjoyed by the people as a fact, as well as loved by them as an ideal; the central authority has ever been held in comparative check; and individual rights are so general a possession that any encroachment upon them in the name of the majority would always tread on interests numerous and strong enough to raise an effectual resistance. Democracy has in America, accordingly, a soil most favourable to its healthy growth; the history, the training, and the circumstances of the people all concur to support liberty.

But on the Continent democracy sprang from very different antecedents, and possesses a very different character. Equality was introduced into France by convulsion, and has engrossed an undue share of her attention since. Freedom, on the other hand, has been really less desired than power. The Revolution found the affairs of that country administered by a strong centralized organization, with its hand everywhere and on everything, and the Revolution left them so. Revolution has succeeded revolution; dynasties and constitutions have come and gone; almost every part of the political and social system has suffered change; the form of government has been republic, empire, monarchy, empire and republic again; but the authority of government, its sphere, its attributes, have remained throughout the same. Each party in succession has seized the power of the State, but none has sought to curb its range. On the contrary, their temptation lay the other way; they have been always so bent on using the authority and mechanism of government to impair or suppress the influence of their adversaries, whom they regarded as at the same time the adversaries of the State, that they could only wish that authority to be larger and that mechanism more perfect than they already were. Even the more popular parties are content to accept the existing over-government as the normal state of affairs, and always strive to gain the control of it rather than to restrain its action. And so it has come about that, while they sought liberty for themselves, they were afraid to grant it to their opponents, for fear their opponents should be able to get the authority of this too powerful administration into their hands and serve them in the same way. The struggle for freedom has thus been corrupted into a struggle for power. That is the secret of the pathetic story of modern France. That is why, with all her marvellous efforts for liberty, she has never fully possessed it, and that is why she seems condemned to instability.

A growing minority of the democratic party in France is indeed opposed to this unfortunate over-government, but the democratic party in general has always countenanced it, perhaps more than any other party, because to their minds government represents the will of the people, and the people cannot be supposed to have any reason to restrain its own will. Besides, they are still dominated by the doctrines of Rousseau and the other revolutionary writers who looked with the utmost contempt on the American idea of the State being a kind of joint-stock association organized for a circumscribed purpose and with limited powers, and who held the State, on the contrary, to be the organ of society in all its interests, desires, and needs, and to be invested with all the powers and rights of all the individuals that compose it. Under the social contract, by which they conceived the State to be constituted, individuals gave up all their rights and possessions to the community, and got them back immediately afterwards as mere State concessions, which there could be no injustice in withdrawing again next day for the greater good of the community. Instead of enjoying equal freedom as men, the great object was to make them enjoy equal completeness as citizens.

From historical conditions like these there has sprung up on the Continent—in Germany as well as France—a quite different type of democracy from the American, and this type of democracy, while it may not be the best, the truest, or the healthiest type of it, has a tendency only too natural towards socialism. It contains in its very build and temperament organic conditions that predispose it to socialism as to its peculiarly besetting disease. It evinced this tendency very early in the history of the Revolution. As Ledru-Rollin reminded De Tocqueville, in replying to his speech, the right to labour on the part of the strong and the right to assistance on the part of the weak were already acknowledged by the Convention of 1793. Claims like these constitute the very A B C of socialism, and they have always moved with more or less energy in the democratic tradition of the Continent. Democracy, guided by the spirit of freedom, will resist socialism; but authoritative democracy, such as finds favour abroad, leans strongly towards it. A democratic despotism is obviously more dangerous to property than any other, inasmuch as the despot is, in this case, more insatiable, and his rapacity is so easily hid and even sanctified under the general considerations of humanity that always mingle with it.

It is therefore manifest that the question whether political democracy must end in social, is one that cannot be answered out of hand by deduction from the idea. The development will differ in different countries, for it depends on historical conditions, of which the most important is that I have now touched on, whether the national character and circumstances are calculated to guide that development into the form of democratic liberty, or into the form of democratic tyranny. A second condition is scarcely less important, viz., whether the laws and economic situation of the country have conduced to a dispersion or to a concentration of property. For even in the freest democracy individual property can only be permanently sustained by diffusion, and, if existing conditions have isolated it into the hands of the few, the many will lie under a constant, and, in emergencies, an irresistible temptation to take freedom in their hand and force the distribution of property by law, or nationalize it entirely by a socialistic reconstruction. It used to be a maxim in former days that power must be distributed in some proportion to property, but with the advent of democracy the maxim must be converted, and the rule of health will now be found in having property distributed in some proportion to power. That is the natural price of stability under a democratic régime. A penniless omnipotence is an insupportable presence. When supreme power is vested in a majority of the people, property cannot sit securely till it becomes so general a possession that a majority of the people has a stake in its defence, and this point will not be reached until at least a large minority of them are actually owners, and the rest enjoy a reasonable prospect of becoming so by the exercise of care and diligence in their ordinary avocations.

The belief of Marx and modern socialists, that the large system of production, with its centralized capital and its aggregation of workpeople in large centres, must, by necessary historical evolution, end in the socialist State, is, as Professor A. Menger has pointed out, not justified by history. The latifundia and slavery of the decline of the Roman empire were not succeeded by any system of common property, but by the institutions of mediæval law which made the rights of private property more absolute and exclusive. And in our own time the tendency to concentration of property in the hands of a few great capitalists is being corrected by the newer tendency to joint stock management, i.e., to the union and multiplication of small capitalists; and this is of course a tendency back from, and not on towards, the social revolution Marx conceived to be imminent. But though the modern concentration of wealth may not for the moment be increasing, and if it were, may not on that account necessarily spell socialism, it certainly spells social peril; and the future, therefore, stands before us with a solemn choice: either property must contrive to get widely diffused peacefully, or it will be diffused by acts of popular confiscation, or perhaps be nationalized altogether; and the fate of free institutions hangs upon the dilemma. For in a democratic community the peril is always near. De Tocqueville may be right in saying that such communities, if left to themselves, naturally love liberty; but there are other things they love more, and this profound political philosopher has himself pointed out with what exceptional vigour they nourish two powerful passions, either of which, if it got the mastery, would prove fatal to freedom. One is the love of equality. "I think," says he, "that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom; left to themselves they will seek to cherish it, and view every privation of it with regret. But for equality their passion is ardent, insatiable, insistent, invincible; they call for equality in freedom, and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery. They will endure poverty, servitude, pauperism, but they will not endure aristocracy." The other is the unreined love of material gratification. By this De Tocqueville does not mean sensual corruption of manners, for he believes that sensuality will be more moderate in a democracy than in other forms of society. He means the passion for material comfort above all other things, which he describes as the peculiar passion of the middle classes; the complete absorption in the pursuit of material well-being and the means of material well-being, to the disparagement and disregard of every ideal consideration and interest, as if the chief end and whole dignity of man lay in gaining a conventional standard of comfort. When a passion like this spreads from the classes whose vanity it feeds to the classes whose envy it excites, social revolution is at the gates, and this is one of De Tocqueville's gravest apprehensions in contemplating the advance of democracy. For he says that the passion for material well-being has no check in a democratic community except religion, and if religion were to decline—and the pursuit of comfort undoubtedly impairs it—then liberty would perish. "For my part," he declares, "I doubt whether man can ever support at once complete religious independence and entire public freedom; and I am inclined to think that if faith be wanting in him he must serve, and if he be free he must believe." It is impossible, therefore, in an age when the democratic spirit has grown so strong and victorious, to avoid taking some reasonable concern for the future of liberty, more especially as at the same time the sphere and power of government are being everywhere continually extended, the devotion to material well-being, and what is called material civilization, is ever increasing, and religious faith, particularly among the educated and the working classes, is on the decline.

This is exactly the rock ahead of the modern State, of which we have been long warned by keen eyes aloft, and which seems now to stand out plainly enough to ordinary observers on the deck. Free institutions run continual risk of shipwreck when power is the possession of the many, but property—from whatever cause—the enjoyment of the few. With the advance of democracy a diffusion of wealth becomes almost a necessity of State. And the difficulty only begins when the necessity is perceived. For the State cannot accomplish any lasting or effective change in the matter without impairing or imperilling the freedom which its intervention is meant to protect—without, in short, becoming socialist, for fear of socialism; and when it has done its best, it finds that the solution is still subject to moral and economic conditions which it has no power to control. In trade and manufactures which occupy such vast and increasing proportions of the population of modern countries, the range of the State's beneficial or even possible action is very little; and in these branches the natural conditions at present strongly favour concentration or aggregation of capital. The small masters have simply been worsted in ordinary competition with the large producers, and so long as the large system of production continues the cheapest system of production, no other result can be expected. The social problem, therefore, so far as these branches are concerned, is to discover some form of co-operative arrangement which shall reconcile the large system of production with the interests of the labouring class, unless, indeed—what is far from impossible—the large system of production is itself to be superseded in the further advance of industrial development. The economic superiority of that system depends greatly on the circumstance that the power now in use—water or steam—necessitates the concentration of machinery at one spot. Mr. Babbage predicted fifty years ago that if a new power were to be discovered that could be generated in a central place in quantities sufficient for the requirements of a whole community, and then distributed, as gas is, wherever it was wanted, the age of domestic manufactures would return. Every little community might then find it cheaper, by saving carriage, and availing itself of cheaper local labour, to manufacture for itself many of the articles now made for it at the large mills; and the small factory or workshop, so suitable, among other advantages, for co-operative enterprise, would multiply everywhere. Now, have we such a power in electricity? If so, not the least important effect of the new agent will be its influence on the diffusion of wealth, and its aid towards the solution of the social problem of the nineteenth century.

With land and agriculture the situation is somewhat different. The distribution of landed property has always depended largely on legal conditions; and since these conditions have—in this country at least—wrought for two centuries in favour of the aggregation of estates, their relaxation may reasonably be expected to operate to some extent in the contrary direction. Too much must not be built on this expectation, however, for the natural conditions are at present, at least, as partial to the large property as the legal. The abolition of entail and primogeniture, by emancipating the living proprietor from the preposterous tyranny of the dead, and by bringing to the burdened the privilege of sale, must necessarily throw greater quantities of land into the market than reach it now, but the redistribution of that land will as necessarily conform to the existing social and economic circumstances of the country; and England will never cease to be characterized by the large property, so long as its social system lends exceptional consideration to the possession of land, and its commercial system is continually creating an exceptional number of large fortunes. The market for the large estate is among the wealthy, who buy land as an instrument of enjoyment, of power, of social ambition; and what with the wealth made at home and the wealth made in the colonies, the number of this class is ever on the increase; the natural market for the small estate, on the other hand, is among the farming class, to whom land is a commercial investment, and the farmers of England, unlike those of other countries, unlike those of our own country in former days, are as a rule positively indisposed to purchase land, finding it more profitable to rent it. This aversion, however, is much more influential with large farmers than with small ones. It is commonly argued as if a small farmer who has saved money will be certain to employ it in taking a more extensive holding, but that is not so. On the contrary, he more usually leaves it in the bank; in some parts of Scotland many small farmers have deposits of from £500 to £1000 lying there at interest; they studiously conceal the fact, lest their landlords should hear of it, and raise their rent, and they submit to much inconvenience rather than withdraw any portion of it, once it is deposited. Their ruling object is security and not aggrandisement, and consequently if land were in the market in lots to suit them, they would be almost certain to become purchasers of land. In forecasting the possibility of the rise of a peasant proprietary in this country, it is often forgotten that, whether land is a profitable investment for the farmer or not, the class of farmers from whom such a proprietary would be generated is less anxious for a profitable investment than for a safe one, and that to many of them, as of other classes, independence will always possess much more than a commercial value.

But, however this may be, land is distributed by holdings as well as by estates, and in connection with our present subject the distribution by holdings is perhaps the more important thing of the two. "The magic of property" is no exclusive prerogative of the soil; ownership in stock will carry the same political effects as ownership in anything else; and a satisfactory system of tenant right may yield all the social and economic advantages of a peasant proprietary. In fact, tenant right, so far as it goes, is proprietorship, and it has before now developed into proprietorship even in name. The old lamented yeomanry of England were, the great majority of them, copyholders, and a copyholder was simply a tenant-at-will whose tenant right was consolidated by custom into a perpetual and hereditary property; and if the soil of England will ever again become distributed among as numerous a body of owners as held it in former ages, it will most likely occur through a similar process of consolidation of tenant right. But as it is—and though this is a truism, it is often overlooked in discussions on the subject—the tenants are owners as well as the landlords; their interests enlist them on the side of stability; they have a stake in the defence of property; and even though the prevailing tendency to the accumulation of estates continues unchecked, its peril to the State may be mitigated by the preservation and multiplication of small and comfortable holdings, which shall nourish a substantial and independent peasantry, and supply a hope and ambition to the rural labourers. This is so far well. We know that it is an axiom with Continental socialists that a revolution has no chance of success, however well supported it may be by the artisans of the towns, if the peasantry are contented and take no part in it; and the most serious feature in more than one of the great countries of Europe at this moment is the miserable condition into which their agricultural labourers have been suffered to fall, and their practical exclusion from all opportunities of raising themselves out of it. The stability of Europe may be said to rest on the number of its comfortable peasantry; the dam of the Revolution is the small farm. This is not less true of England than of the Continent, for although the agricultural population is vastly outnumbered by the industrial in this country, that consideration really increases rather than diminishes the political value of sustaining and multiplying a contented tenantry.

Now England is the classical country of the large farm as well as of the large estate. Its holdings have always been larger than those of other nations; they were so when half of them were owned by their occupiers, they are so still when they are rented from great landlords. The large farms have grown larger; a holding of 200 acres was counted a very large farm in the time of the Commonwealth; it would be considered a very moderate one in most English counties now. But yet the small farm has not gone the way of the small estate. The effects of consolidation have been balanced to such a degree by a simultaneous extension of the area of cultivation that the number of holdings in England is probably more considerable than it ever was before. If we may trust Gregory King's estimate, there were, 200 years ago, 310,000 occupiers of holdings in England, 160,000 owners, and 150,000 tenants; in 1880 there were, exclusive of allotments, which are now numerous, 295,313 holdings of 50 acres and under, and 414,804 holdings altogether. Moreover, the future of the small farm is much more hopeful than the future of the small estate or the small factory. All admit the small holding to be preferable to the large for dairy farming and market gardening; and dairy farms and market gardens are two classes of holdings that must continue to multiply with the growth of the great towns. But even with respect to corn crops, it is now coming to be well understood that the existing conditions of high farming would be better satisfied by a smaller size of holding than has been in most favour with agricultural reformers hitherto; because then, and then only, can the farmer be expected to bestow upon every rood of his ground that generous expenditure of capital, and that sedulous and minute care which are now necessary to make his business profitable. Without entering on the disputed question of the comparative productiveness of large and small farms, it ought to be remembered, in the first place, that the economic advantage of the large farm—the reason why the large farmer has been able to offer a higher rent than the smaller—is not so much because he produces more, as because he can afford to produce less; and, in the next place, that the small farmer has heretofore wrought, not only with worse appliances than the large—which perhaps he must always do—but also with less knowledge of the theory of his art, and worse conditions of tenure—in both of which respects we may look for improvement in the immediate future. Even as it is, we find small farmers equalling the highest production of the country. In the evidence before the Duke of Richmond's Commission, there is a case of a farmer of three acres producing 45 bushels per acre, or about twice the average of the season in those bad years that impoverished the larger farmers. The same body of evidence seems to prove that the small farmer has more staying power—a better capacity of weathering an agricultural crisis—than the large; for he has much less frequently petitioned for a reduction of rent—an advantage which landlords may be expected not to overlook. He enjoys, too, a monopoly of the superior efficiency of interested labour, and as the personal efficiency of the labourer—his skill, his knowledge, his watchfulness, his care—are becoming not less, but more important with the growth of scientific farming, whether in corn raising or cattle rearing, the small farm system will probably continue to hold, if not to enlarge, its place in modern agriculture; and if it is able to do so, it will constitute one of the best buttresses against the social revolution.

It remains to mark the spread of socialism in the various countries of Europe and America, and to describe its present position; but this I shall reserve for next chapter.

CHAPTER II. THE PROGRESS AND PRESENT POSITION OF SOCIALISM.

Socialism being now revolutionary social democracy, we should expect to find it most widely and most acutely developed in those countries where, 1st, the social condition of the lower classes is most precarious, or, in other words, where property and comfort are ill distributed; 2nd, where political democracy is already a matter of popular agitation; and, 3rd, where previous revolutions have left behind them an unquiet and revolutionary spirit—a "valetudinary habit," as Burke calls it, "of making the extreme medicine of the State its daily bread." That is very much what we do find. All these conditions are present in Germany—the country in which socialism has made the most remarkable and rapid advance. Dr. Engel, head of the Statistical Bureau of Prussia, states that in 1875 six million persons, representing, with their families, more than half the population of that State, had an income less than £21 a year each; and only 140,000 persons had incomes above £150. The number of landed proprietors is indeed comparatively large. In 1861 there were more than two millions of them out of a population of 23,000,000; and in a country where half the people are engaged in agriculture this would, at first sight, seem to offer some assurance of general comfort. But then the estates of most of them are much too small to keep them in regular employment or to furnish them with adequate maintenance. More than a million hold estates of less than three acres each, and averaging little over an acre, and the soil is poor. The consequence is that the small proprietor is almost always over head and ears in debt. His property can hardly be called his own, and he pays to the usurer a much larger sum annually as interest than he could rent the same land for in the open market. More than half of these small estates lie in the Rhine provinces alone, and the distressed condition of the peasantry there has been lately brought again before the attention of the legislature. But while thus in the west the agricultural population suffers seriously from the excessive subdivision of landed property, they are straitened in the eastern and northern provinces by their exclusion from it. Prince Bismarck, speaking of the spread of socialism in a purely agricultural district like Lauenburg, which had excited surprise, said that this would not seem remarkable to any one who reflected that, from the land legislation in that part of the country, the labourers could never hope to acquire the smallest spot of ground as their own possession, and were kept in a state of dependence on the gentry and the peasant proprietors. Half the land of Prussia is held by 31,000 persons; and emigration, which used to come chiefly from the eastern provinces, where subdivision had produced a large class of indigent proprietors, proceeds now predominantly from the quarters where large estates abound. The diminution of emigration from the Rhine provinces is indeed one cause of the increase of distress among the peasant proprietary; but why emigration has ceased, when there seems more motive for it, is not so clear. As yet, however, socialism has taken comparatively slight hold of the rural population of Germany, because they are too scattered in most parts to combine; but there exists in that country, as in others, a general conviction that the condition of the agricultural labourers is really a graver social question than the condition of the other industrial classes, and must be faced in most countries before long. Socialism has naturally made most way among the factory operatives of Germany, who enjoy greatest facilities for combination and mutual fermentation, and who besides, while better off in respect to wages than various other sections of workpeople, are yet the most improvident and discontented class in the community. Then, in considering the circumstances of the labouring classes in Germany, it must be remembered that, through customs and indirect taxation of different kinds, they pay a larger share of the public burdens than they do in some countries, and that the obligation of military service is felt to be so great a hardship that more than a third of the extensive emigration which now takes place every year from the German Empire is prompted by a desire to escape it. Before the establishment of the Empire, only about a tenth part of the emigrants left the country without an official permit; but the proportion has been rising every year since then, and sometimes comes to nearly a half.

Under these circumstances neither the strength nor the progress of the Social Democratic party in that country affords occasion for surprise. At the last general election, in February, 1890, this party polled more votes than any other single party in the Empire, and returned to the Imperial Diet a body of representatives strong enough, by skilful alliances, to exercise an effective influence on the course of affairs. The advance of the party may be seen in the increase of the socialist vote at the successive elections since the creation of the Empire.

The effect of the coercive laws of 1878, as shown by these figures, is very noteworthy. In consequence of the successive attempts made in that year on the life of the Emperor William by two socialists, Hoedel and Nobiling, Prince Bismarck determined to stamp out the whole agitation with which the two criminals were connected by obtaining from the Diet exceptional and temporary powers of repression. The first effect of these measures was, as was natural, to disorganize the socialist party for the time. Hundreds of its leaders were expelled from the country; hundreds were thrown into prison or placed under police restriction; its clubs and newspapers were suppressed; it was not allowed to hold meetings, to make speeches, or to circulate literature of any kind. In the course of the twelve years during which this exceptional legislation has subsisted, it was stated at the recent Socialist Congress at Halle, that 155 socialist journals and 1200 books or pamphlets had been prohibited; 900 members of the party had been banished without trial; 1500 had been apprehended and 300 punished for contraventions of the Anti-Socialist Laws. These measures paralyzed the old organization sufficiently to reduce the Socialist vote at the next election in 1881 by thirty per cent.; but the party presently recovered its ground. It adapted itself to the new conditions, and established a secret propaganda which was manifestly quite as effective for its purposes as the old, and charged with more danger to the State. Its vote increased immensely at each successive election thereafter; and now, as Rodbertus prophesied, the social question has really proved "the Russian campaign of Bismarck's fame," for his policy of repression has ended in tripling the strength of the party it was designed to crush, and placing it in possession of one-fifth of the whole voting power of the nation. It was high time, therefore, to abandon so ineffectual a policy, and the socialist coercive laws expired on the 30th September, 1890, and the socialists inaugurated a new epoch of open and constitutional agitation by a general congress at Halle in the beginning of October.

The strength of the party in Parliament has never corresponded with its strength at the polls. In 1871 it returned only 1 member to the Diet; in 1874, 9; in 1877, 12; in 1878, 9; in 1881, 12; in 1884, 24; in 1887, 11; and in 1890, with an electoral vote which, under a system of proportional representation, would have secured for it 80 members, it has carried only 37. The party has no leaders now, in Parliament or out of it, of the intellectual rank of Lassalle or Marx; but it is very efficiently led. Its two chiefs, Liebknecht and Bebel, are well skilled both in debate and in management, and have for many years maintained their authority in a party peculiarly subject to jealousy and intrigue, and have consolidated its organization under very adverse conditions. Liebknecht, who is a journalist of most respectable talents, character, and acquirements, is now the veteran of the movement, having been out in the '48 and passed twelve years of political exile in London in constant intercourse with Karl Marx. Bebel, a turner in Leipzig, is a much younger man, and, indeed, is one of Liebknecht's converts, for he opposed the movement when it was first started in Leipzig by Lassalle; but he has fought so long and so stout a battle for his cause that he too seems now one of its veterans. The other parliamentary leaders of the party are for the most part still under thirty. Von Volmar, a military officer who has left the service for agitation and journalism, seems to be the older leaders' chief lieutenant; and Frohme, a young littérateur of repute, may be mentioned because he heads a tendency to more moderate policy.

Owing to the paucity of its representatives, the party has hitherto made little attempt to initiate legislation. No bill can be introduced into the German Diet unless it is backed by fifteen members; and, except in the Parliament of 1884-7, the Socialist party never had fifteen members until last February. The work of its parliamentary representatives, therefore, has consisted mainly of criticism and opposition, and seizing every suitable occasion for the ventilation of their general ideas; but after the election of 1884, when they returned to the Diet twenty-four strong, they introduced first a bill for the prohibition of Sunday labour, which was stoutly opposed by Prince Bismarck, and defeated; and second, a Labourer's Protection Bill, proposing to create an elaborate organization for securing the general wellbeing of the working class. It was to create, first, a new Labour Department of State; second, a series of Workmen's Chambers, one for every district of 200,000 or 400,000 inhabitants, with the necessary number of local auxiliaries; third, Local Courts of Conciliation for the settlement of differences between labourers and employers, from whose decision there should be an appeal to the Workmen's Chamber of the District. Both the Court of Conciliation and the Workmen's Chamber were to be composed of an equal number of employers and employed. The connection between the Workmen's Chambers of the District and the Minister of Labour would be through District Councils of Labour, the members of which were to be chosen by the minister out of a list presented by the Workmen's Chamber of the District, and containing twice the number of names required to fill the places. It was to be the duty of these Councils of Labour to send a report every year to the Labour Department in Berlin on the condition of labour in their respective districts after an annual inspection of all the factories, workshops, and industrial establishments of any kind located there. The Workmen's Chambers were to have a wide rôle, and were the keystone of the system. Besides being the courts of final appeal in labour disputes, they were to bring to the knowledge of the competent authorities the existence of any disorders or grievances that occurred in industrial life; to give advice on the best laws and regulations for industry; to undertake inquiries into all matters affecting the conditions of labour, treaties of commerce, taxes, rates of wages, technical education, housing, prices of subsistence, etc.

In introducing the bill, its promoters said a chief object of the whole organization was to obtain for working men higher wages for a shorter day's work, and they proposed the immediate reduction of the day of labour to eight hours for miners and ten hours for all other trades, together with some further limitations on the work of women and children, the abolition of prison work at ordinary trades, and of Sunday work, and the requirement of the payment of wages weekly, and their payment in money. The bill was referred to a committee of the House, and rejected, after that committee brought up an unfavourable report in February, 1886, and nothing further has been done in the matter since; but the Minister of the Interior was so much struck with the unexpectedly moderate and practical character of its proposals that he said if these proposals expressed the whole mind of the members who proposed them, then those members might as well sit on the right side of the House as on the left. The effect of the bill, as far as it was workable, would merely be to give the working class a real and systematic, but not unequal, voice in settling the conditions of their own labour; and its rejection is to some extent an example of the way the socialist agitation impedes the cause of labour by creating in the public mind an unnecessary distrust even of reasonable reforms.

There are some questions of general policy on which the socialist deputies take up a position of their own. They always oppose the military budget, because, like socialists everywhere, they are opposed to all war and armaments. Wars are merely quarrels of rulers, for peoples would make for peace, and armaments only drain the people's pockets in order to perpetuate the people's oppression. Then they are opposed to national debts, because national debts enable rulers to carry on war. They are opposed to the new colonization policy of the Empire, because in their opinion it is a policy of aggrandisement and conquest undertaken under hypocritical pretences. They are opposed to protective duties, because they dislike indirect taxation, as bearing always unjustly on the labouring class. They are strong supporters of popular education, but they opposed the new insurance laws because they feared these laws would place people too much under the power of the Government, for their jealousy of the Government that exists corrects their general partiality for Government control, and tends to keep them back even from some of the minor excesses of State-socialism.

The moderate and apparently temporizing policy of the deputies is a constant source of dissatisfaction to the wilder and more inexperienced members of the party, who complain, as they did at the recent Halle Congress, that trying to improve the present system of things is not the best way of subverting it, and who will either have socialism cum revolution, or they will have nothing at all. But the older heads merely smile, and tell them the hour for socialism and revolution is not yet, that no man knows when it shall be, and that in the meantime it would be mere folly for socialists to refuse the real comforts they can get because they think they have ideally a right to a great deal more. "Why," said Bebel, when he was charged at Halle with countenancing armaments in violation of socialist principles by voting for a better uniform to the soldiers,—"why, there are numbers of Social Democrats in the Reserve, and was I to let them die through inadequate clothing merely because I object to armaments as a general principle?"

They of course think of this policy of accommodation as only a temporary necessity, till they become strong enough to be thoroughgoing; but there is perhaps better reason to believe it to be an abiding and growing necessity of their position, for they are finding themselves more and more obliged, if they are to become stronger at all, or even to keep the strength they have, to bid for the support of aggrieved classes by working for the immediate removal of their grievances, and thus to keep on reducing day by day as it rises the volume of that social discontent which is to turn the wheel of revolution. It is not unlikely that the socialist party, now that it is sufficiently powerful to do something in the legislature, but not sufficiently powerful to think of final social transformation, will occupy themselves much more completely with those miscellaneous social reforms in the immediate future; that they will thereby become every day better acquainted with the real conditions on which social improvement depends; that they will find more and more satisfying employment in the exercise of their power of securing palpable, practical benefits, than in agitating uncertain theoretical schemes; and, in short, that they will settle permanently into what they are for the present to some extent temporarily, a moderate labour party, working for the real remedy of real grievances by the means best adapted, under real conditions, national or political, for effecting the purpose.

The programme of the party, which was adopted at the Gotha Congress of 1875, after the union of the Marxist socialists and the Lassalleans, and has remained unaltered ever since, has always consisted of a deferred part and an actual. It contains, in fact, three programmes—the programme for to-day, the programme for to-morrow, and the programme for the day after to-morrow. The last is of course the socialist State of the future, at present beyond our horizon altogether. Before it appears there is to be a more or less prolonged period in which individual management of industry is to be gradually superseded by co-operative societies founded on State credit; but this intermediate state was only made an article of the programme to conciliate the Lassalleans, and one hears less of productive associations to-day from the German socialists than from the French. The Germans would apparently prefer to go from private property to public property direct rather than go viâ corporate property; but in any case their programme leaves the creation of productive societies to a future period, and their task for the present is to secure for working men factory and sanitary legislation, constitutional liberties, and an easier and more equitable system of taxation.

The programme is as follows:—

"I. Labour is the source of all wealth and civilization, and since productive labour as a whole is made possible only in and through society, the entire produce of labour belongs to society, that is, it belongs by an equal right to all its members, each according to his reasonable needs, upon condition of a universal obligation to labour.

"In existing society the instruments of labour are the monopoly of the capitalist class; the dependence of the labouring class which results therefrom is the cause of misery and servitude in all forms.

"The emancipation of labour requires the conversion of the instruments of labour into the common property of society, and the management of labour by association, and the application of the product with a view to the general good and an equitable distribution.

"The emancipation of labour must be the work of the labouring class, in relation to which all other classes are only a reactionary mass.

"II. Starting from these principles, the Socialistic Labour Party of Germany seeks by all lawful means to establish a free State and a socialistic society, to break asunder the iron law of wages by the abolition of the system of wage-labour, the suppression of every form of exploitation, and the correction of all political and social inequality.

"The Socialistic Labour Party of Germany, although at first working within national limits, is sensible of the international character of the labour movement, and resolved to fulfil all the duties thereby laid on working men, in order to realize the brotherhood of all men.

"The Socialistic Labour Party of Germany demands, in order to pave the way for the solution of the social question, the establishment by State help of socialistic productive associations under the democratic control of the workpeople. Productive associations for industry and agriculture should be created to such an extent that the socialistic organization of all labour may arise out of them.

"The Socialistic Labour Party of Germany demands, as the basis of the State, (1) Universal, equal, and direct suffrage, together with secret and obligatory voting, for all citizens over twenty years of age, in all elections in State and commune. The election day must be a Sunday or holiday. (2) Direct legislation by the people. Decision on peace or war by the people. (3) Universal liability to military service. Militia instead of standing army. (4) Abolition of all exceptional laws, especially laws interfering with liberty of the press, of association, and of meeting; in general, all laws restricting free expression of opinion, free thought, and free inquiry. (5) Administration of justice by the people. Gratuitous justice. (6) Universal, compulsory, gratuitous, and equal education of the people by the State. Religion to be declared a private affair.

"The Socialistic Labour Party of Germany demands within the conditions of existing society (1) The utmost possible extension of political rights and liberties in the sense of the above demands. (2) The replacement of all existing taxes, and especially of indirect taxes, which peculiarly burden the people, by a single progressive income tax for State and commune. (3) Unrestricted right of combination. (4) A normal working day corresponding to the needs of society. Prohibition of Sunday labour. (5) Prohibition of the labour of children, and of all labour for women that is injurious to health and morality. (6) Laws for protection of the life and health of workmen. Sanitary control of workmen's dwellings. Inspection of mines, factories, workshops, and home industry by officers chosen by working men. An effective employers' liability act. (7) Regulation of prison labour. (8) Entire freedom of management for all funds for the assistance and support of working men."

A committee was appointed at the recent Halle Congress to revise this programme and report to the Congress of 1891; but as the revision is merely intended to place the programme in greater conformity with the needs of the time, and keep it as it were up to date, only minor modifications may be expected, and those probably in the direction of a more practical and effectual dealing with existing grievances. Five years ago the party thought a ten hours' day corresponded with the needs of the time; they now ask for an eight hours' one. Instead of the prohibition of Sunday labour, they now prefer to demand, as a more workable equivalent, a period of thirty-six hours' continuous and uninterrupted rest every week, irrespective of any particular day; and they have sometimes taken up new working-class questions not especially mentioned in their programme, or included directly under any of its heads, like the abolition of payment of wages in kind. The whole spirit of the late Congress leads us to look for the contemplated modifications in this direction of meeting more effectually immediate working-class wants.

Many eyes were upon that Congress; for it was the first the German socialists had held since they had recovered their freedom and proved their strength. They were now clearly stronger than any socialist party the world had yet seen, and much stronger than most revolutionary parties who have made successful revolution. Would then the word now be revolution? people asked. It was not: the word was caution. The first effect of the victory in February had been otherwise, and in June, Herr Bebel was still calling, Steady. "The majority of his party colleagues," he said at a public meeting in Berlin on the 20th of that month, "had been intoxicated by the result of the elections of February 20th, and believed they could do what they liked with the middle class, as it was already on the point of going under." But before October steadier counsels prevailed, and the spirit of the Congress was moderation itself. Although the Congress did not agree to the motion to restore to the party programme the phrase "by lawful means," which had been deleted from the opening paragraph of the second part of it by the Wyden Congress of 1880, in consequence of the Anti-Socialist Laws no longer giving them any choice except recourse to unlawful means, the general and decided feeling of the Congress certainly was that only lawful means could now answer their purposes. The controversy was repeatedly raised by an extreme section of the party from Berlin, who complained that the work of their parliamentary representatives had hitherto entirely ignored the real aims of social democracy, and that a return should now be made to its socialism and its revolution. But the voice of the meeting was invariably against this Berlin movement. There was a time, said M. Fleischman—and his speech was applauded—when it was counted the right thing in the party to make revolutionary speeches, and point to the coming day of account when mankind were to be emancipated at one blow; but that was not a road they could make any progress by. And as for boycotting, which had been spoken of, he declared he was all for boycotting; but it was the boycotting of the military in such a way as to give them no occasion for the use of their weapons. Liebknecht, the chief leader of the party, followed, and was quite as emphatic in the same line. People spoke of revolution, he said; but they should remember that roast pigeons don't fly into one's mouth by themselves. It was easy enough to make bitter speeches, and any fool and donkey could throw bombs; but the misadventures of the anarchists showed plainly enough that nothing could be done in that way. The socialists had now 20 per cent. of the population; but what could 20 per cent. do against 80 per cent. by the use of force? No, it was not force; it was reason they must use if they would succeed. What, then, he asked, was the Social Democracy to do? They must avoid divisions among themselves, and go out and convert the still indifferent masses. The electoral suffrage was their best weapon of agitation, and their surest means of increasing the party. Prince Bismarck had been represented in a popular book as practising peasant-fishery and elector-fishery. "Peasant-fishery and elector-fishery—" said Liebknecht, amid much applause, "that is the word for the Social Democrats to-day."

Another suggestion of the extreme section was that the party should now assail the Church and religion, as socialist and revolutionary parties have so generally done; but this bit of their old traditional policy received scant regard from the Halle Congress. A strong feeling was expressed that the party had damaged itself in the past by its assaults on the Church, and that its present policy ought, in self-preservation, to be one of religious neutrality and toleration. "Instead," said Liebknecht, "of squandering our strength in a struggle with the Church and sacerdotalism, let us go to the root of the matter. We desire to overthrow the State of the classes. When we have done that, the Church and sacerdotalism will fall with it, and in this respect we are much more radical and much more definite in purpose than our opponents, for we like neither the priests nor the anti-priests." The old revolutionary policy of stirring up hatred against all existing institutions is thus relegated from the present to the distant future, after the present class-State is overthrown and the working-class or socialist State established in its place.

"Well, then," suggested another old-world socialist, "let us, at any rate, issue a pamphlet describing the glories of this socialist State, and get the people prepared to flock into it"; but this suggestion was also frowned down. "For," said Liebknecht, "who could say what the Zukunft Staat—the socialist State of the future—is to be? Who could foresee so much as the development of the existing German State for a single year?" In other words—I think I am not misinterpreting their meaning—the State of the future is the concern of the future; the business of a living party is within the needs and within the lines of the living present.

What, then, is to be the business of this formidable Social Democratic party? Peasant-catching is the word. The elections showed that while the party was very strong in the large towns, it was very weak in the rural districts, and among special populations like the Poles and Alsatians; and although previous revolutionists thought everything was gained if the large towns were gained, the Social Democrats generally admit that the social revolution is impossible without the adherence of the peasantry. The peasants, therefore, must be won over to the party. Once in the party, they may learn socialism and revolution, but they must first be brought in, and for that purpose there must be started a special peasants' cry—a cry, that is, for the redress of some immediate grievance of that class; and one suggestion made at the Congress was, that the cry for the peasantry should be the abolition of the German Gesinde (farm-servant) system. In the same spirit the Congress recommended the parliamentary party to take up the question of seamen's rights, and agitate for better regulations for securing the wellbeing of that class. The advance towards practicality is even more evident in their determination upon strikes. Hitherto, for the most part, socialists have either looked on strikes with lofty disdain as poor attempts to get a petty rise in wages instead of abolishing the present wages system altogether, or they have thrown themselves into strikes for the mere purpose of fomenting labour troubles, and breaking perchance the power of the large capitalist class; and this latter view was not unrepresented at the Halle Congress. The resolution of the Congress, however, declared (1st) that strikes and boycotting were often useful means of improving the social position of the labouring class; but (2nd) that they were to be resorted to even for that purpose with great circumspection. "Whereas, however, strikes and boycotting are double-edged weapons which, when used in unsuitable places and at an inopportune moment, are calculated to do more harm than good to the interests of the working class, this Congress recommends German working men carefully to weigh the circumstances under which they purpose to make use of those weapons." The revolutionary ideal seems thus to be retreating—perhaps insensibly—in the socialistic mind into an eschatological decoration, into a kind of future Advent which is to come and to be believed in; but the practical concerns of the present must be more and more treated in their own practical way.

Since the Congress, the party has issued a manifesto to the peasantry, in which, after promising a new and happy day that is coming for them, which is to restore to them the beautiful earth and the poetry of life, they declare against the patriarchal system, and the increase of brandy distilling; and then, confessing that few socialists know anything about agricultural questions, invite information and discussion for the enlightenment of the party. Here again they forget that they have a theory which is as applicable to agriculture as to manufactures, and they want to make practical investigations with a view to practical solutions.

Of course the movement will always generate revolutionary elements as occasions arise, and these sometimes of the wildest character. Most and Hasselman, and their following, who were expelled at the Congress of Wyden in 1880, were anarchists of a violent type, and Mosts and Hasselmans may arise again. But at present anarchism hardly exists in Germany, and the Social Democratic party is peacefully trying to make people as comfortable as possible till the fulness of time arrives.

It may be added that the present income of the party, as stated at the last Congress, is £19,525, and that since February, 1890, they have established nineteen daily newspapers and forty weekly, with a total circulation of 254,000.

The socialist movement in other countries may be disposed of much more briefly, for in no other country has it worn anything like the same importance, except in Russia, and of the Russian agitation I shall treat more fully in a subsequent chapter on "Russian Nihilism." I may observe here, however, that the Russian agitation has not been without its influence on the nations of Western Europe. It was Bakunin who first kindled the socialist movements of Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Holland, and the anarchist fermentations of the last six years have been due in no inconsiderable measure to the new leaven of Russian ideas introduced by men like Prince Krapotkin and the two hundred other Russian refugees that are scattered abroad in the free countries of Europe.

In France there is much animated socialist agitation, but no solid and coherent socialist party such as exists in Germany. The movement is disunited and fragmentary, and confined almost entirely to the large towns, where many circumstances conspire to favour its growth. The French working class are born to revolutionary traditions. The better portion of them, moreover, though they long since gave up all belief in the old native forms of socialism, never ceased to be imbued with socialist ideas and aspirations; and M. de Molinari said in 1869, from his experience of French working men's clubs, that out of every ten French working men who had any interest beyond eating and drinking, nine were Socialists. Then there is in France a larger proportion of the working class than in most countries, who are kept in constant poverty and discontent and commotion by their own improvident habits. A pamphlet called "Le Sublime," which attracted considerable attention some years ago, stated that only forty per cent. of the working men of Paris were out of debt; and Mr. Malet reported to the English Foreign Office that they were, as a body, so dissipated that none of them had grandchildren or grandfathers. But, on the other hand, France enjoys a solid security against the successful advance of socialism in her peasant proprietors. Half the French population belong to that class, and their industry, thrift, and comfort have long been held up to our admiration by economists. According to M. de Lavergne, they are not so well fed, so well clad, or so well lodged as the farm labourers of England; but, living in a different climate, they have fewer wants, and are undoubtedly more contented. Among people like these, passing their days in frugal comfort and fruitful industry, and looking with quiet hope and confidence to the future, socialism finds, of course, no open door. On the contrary, every man of them feels he has something to lose and nothing to gain by social revolution; the fear of socialism is, indeed, one of the chief influences guiding their political action; and as they are as numerous as all the other classes in the community put together, their worldly contentment is a bulwark of enormous value to the existing order of things. The impression of their substantial independence is so marked that even the Frenchmen who were members of the International Working Men's Association would not assent to the abolition of a peasant proprietary, but always insisted, contrary to the principles of the Association, on the continued maintenance of that system as a necessary counterpoise to the power of the Government.

The present socialist groups and sects of France are all believers in the so-called scientific socialism of Marx and Lassalle, and the most important of them work for a programme substantially identical with that of Gotha. Marx's ideas were introduced among the French by the International, and they were adopted by a section of the Revolutionary Committee of the Paris Commune, 1871; but after the suppression of the Commune, they made so little stir for some years that Thiers declared, in his last manifesto as President of the Republic, that socialism, which was then busy in Germany, was absolutely dead in France. Its recrudescence was chiefly due to the activity of the Communards. Some of them had escaped to London, where they got into closer communion with Marx and his friends; and in 1874, thirty-four of these refugees, all military or administrative officers of the Commune, and most of them not professed socialists before, issued a manifesto pronouncing entirely for socialism, and describing the Commune as "the militant form of the social revolution"; but it was not till after the amnesty of the Communards, and their return from New Caledonia and elsewhere in 1880, that the first sensible ripple of socialist agitation was felt in France since the downfall of the second Republic. Numbers of socialist journals began to appear, and a general congress of working men, held at Havre in 1880, adopted a programme modelled on the lines of that of the German Social Democrats, and made preparations for an active propaganda and organization.

The adoption of the socialistic programme, however, rent the Congress in three, and the two opposite wings, the Co-operationists and the Anarchists, withdrew and established separate organizations of their own. The co-operationists, believing that the amelioration of the working class would only come by the gradual execution of practicable and suitable measures, and that these could only be successfully carried by means of skilful alliances with existing political parties, declared the Havre programme to be a programme for the year 2000, and that the true policy of the working-class now was a policy of possibilities. This last word is said to supply the origin of the term Possibilist, which has now come to be applied not to this co-operationist party, but to one of the two divisions into which the third or centre party of the Havre Congress—the socialists—shortly afterwards split up.

The co-operationists formed themselves into a body known as the Republican Socialist Alliance, which, as the name indicates, aims at social reforms under the existing republican form of State. They have held several congresses, their membership includes many well-known and even eminent Radical politicians—M. Clemenceau, for example—and they were supported by leading Radical journals, like Le Justice and L'Intransigeant; but their activity and their numbers have both dwindled away, probably because their work was done sufficiently well already by other political or working-class organizations.

The anarchists set up not a single organization, but a number of little independent clubs, which agree with one another mainly in their dislike of all constituted authority. They want to have all things in common, somehow or other; but for master or superior of any sort they will have none, be it king or committee. Their ideas find ready favour in France, because they are near allied with the theory of the Revolutionary Commune cherished among the Communards; and although there is no means of calculating their numbers exactly, they are believed to be pretty strong—at least, in the South of France. At the time of the Lyons Anarchist trial, at which Prince Krapotkin was convicted, they claimed themselves to have 8,000 adherents in Lyons alone. In 1886 the authorities knew of twenty little anarchist clubs in Paris, which had between them, however, only a membership of 1,500; and of these a considerable proportion were foreign immigrants, especially Austrians and Russians, with a few Spaniards. Some of these clubs are mainly convivial, with a dash of treason for pungency; but others have an almost devouring passion for "deeds," and are ever concerting some new method of waging their strange guerilla against "princes, proprietors, and parsons." When a new method is discovered, a new club is sometimes formed to carry it out. For instance, the Anti-propriétaires, which is said to be one of the best organized of the anarchist clubs, bind their members (1) to pay no house-rent,—rent, of course, being theft, and theft being really restitution; and (2) if the landlord at length resorts to law against any of them for this default, to come to their brother's help and remove his furniture to safer quarters before the moment of execution. The group La Panthère, to which Louise Michel belongs, and which has 500 members, and the group Experimental Chemie, as their names indicate, prefer less jocular methods. The best known of the anarchists are old Communards like Louise Michel herself and Élisée Reclus, the geographer.

The third section of the Havre Congress contained the majority of the 119 delegates, and they formed themselves into the Socialist Revolutionary Party of France, with the programme already mentioned, which was carried on the motion of M. Jules Guesde.

This programme sets out with the declaration that all instruments of production must be transferred to the possession of the community, and that this can only result from an act of revolution on the part of the working class organized as an independent political party, and then it goes on to say that one of the best means of promoting this end at present was to take part in the elections with the following platform:—

A. Political.

1. Abolition of all laws restricting freedom of the press, of association, or of meeting, and particularly the law against the International Working Men's Association. Abolition of "work-books."

2. Abolition of the budget of public worship, and secularization of ecclesiastical property.

3. Abolition of national debt.

4. Universal military service on the part of the people.

5. Communal independence in police and local affairs.

B. Economic.

1. One day of rest in the week under legal regulation. Limitation of working day to eight hours for adults. Prohibition of the labour of children under fourteen, and limitation of work hours to six for young persons between fourteen and sixteen.

2. Legal fixing of minimum wages every year in accordance with the price of provisions.

3. Equality of wages of male and female labour.

4. Scientific and technical training for all children, as well as their support at the expense of society as represented by the State and the Communes.

5. Support of the aged and infirm by society.

6. Prohibition of all interference on the part of employers with the management of the relief and sustentation funds of the working classes, to whom the sole control of these funds should be left.

7. Employers' liability guaranteed by deposit by employers proportioned to number of workmen.

8. Participation of the workmen in drawing up factory regulations. Abolition of employer's claim to punish the labourer by fines and stoppages (according to resolution of the Commune of 27th April, 1871).

9. Revision of all agreements by which public property has been alienated (banks, railways, mines, etc.). The management of all State factories to be committed to the workmen employed in them.

10. Abolition of all indirect taxes, and change of all direct ones into a progressive income tax on all incomes above 3,000 francs.

11. Abolition of the right of inheritance, except in the line of direct descent, and of the latter in the case of fortunes above 20,000 francs.

At the congress of the party held at St. Etienne two years after this programme was adopted, M. Brousse, a medical practitioner in Paris, and a member of the Town Council, who had already shown signs of disputing the leadership of M. Guesde, carried by a vote of thirty-six to twenty-seven a motion for introducing some modifications, and the minority seceded and set up a separate organization. In spite of repeated efforts at reconciliation, the two sections of the French socialists have never united again or been able even to work together temporarily at an election. Besides personal jealousies, there are most important differences of tendency keeping them apart. The Guesdists accept the policy of Karl Marx as well as his economic doctrine: the universal revolution, and the centralized socialist State, as well as the theory of surplus value and the right to the full product of labour. The Broussists, on the other hand, believe in decentralization, and would prefer municipalizing industries to nationalizing them. They are for giving the commune control of its own police, its own soldiers, its own civil administration, its own judiciary; and they think the régime of collective property can be best brought in and best carried on by local bodies. They would have the towns take over their own gas, light, and water supply, their omnibus and tramway traffic; but they would have them take over also many of the common industries which never tend towards monopoly or even call for any special control. They would municipalize, for example, the bakehouses and the mealshops and the granaries, apparently as supplying the necessaries of life, and they would have various other branches of industry undertaken by the towns to a certain limited extent, in order to provide suitable work for the unemployed. Then in 1887 they added a fresh plank to their platform, and asked for the establishment by municipalities, on public money or credit, of productive associations to be owned—not, like the other undertakings, by the municipality, but—by the working men employed in them. This is a reappearance of the old policy of Lassalle, with the difference that the productive associations are to be founded on municipal and not on State credit; and the reappearance is not surprising in France, because co-operative production has, on the whole, been more successful in that country than in any other. Then another of their demands is, that all public contracts should be subjected to such conditions as to wages and hours of labour as the workmen's syndicates approve; and in Paris they have already succeeded in obtaining this concession from the Town Council so far as municipal contracts are concerned. These workmen's syndicates are trade unions, which aim only at bettering the position of their members without theoretical prepossessions, but are quite as bold in their demands on the public powers as the socialists, and apparently more successful. In 1885 their claims included, not only an eight hours' day and a normal rate of fair wages, but the fixing of all salaries under 500 francs, a credit to themselves of 500,000,000 francs, and the gratuitous use of empty houses by their members; and in 1886 they obtained from the Town Council of Paris a furnished room, with free lighting and firing, and a subvention of 20,000 francs, for the establishment of a Labour Bureau, to be a centre for all working-class deliberations and intelligence, and a registry for the unemployed.

The socialism of the Broussists is thus practically a municipal socialism: municipal industries, municipal credit for working men's productive associations, municipal concessions to trade unions; but all this seems to the Guesdists to be mere tinkering, to be no better than the possibilities of the Republican Socialist Alliance, and they have for that reason given their rivals the name of Possibilists, which for distinction's sake they still commonly bear. Neither section had any representative in the Chamber of Deputies till 1889, when the Broussists succeeded in returning M. Joffrin; but the Broussists have nine in the Town Council of Paris. The Guesdists have more men of culture among them; Guesde himself and Lafargue, Karl Marx's son-in-law, are both men of ability and public position; but they have a smaller following, and what they have is on the decline. Their sympathy with the principles of German Socialism, their alliance with the German Socialist party is against them, for the French working men have a very honest hatred of the Germans, both from recollections of the war and from the pressure of German industrial competition; and the feeling seems to be returned by the Germans, for it appeared even among the socialists at the recent congress at Halle, international and non-patriotic as socialists often claim to be. One of the personal accusations that disturbed the sittings of that congress was, that the leaders of the party had been discovered in secret conference with the delegates of the French socialists, MM. Guesde and Ferroul, who had been sent to greet their German comrades.

The Possibilists have no very eminent members, the most leading persons among them being Brousse himself and MM. Allemane and Joffrin. But they are not inconsiderable in number, and they are growing. They have 400 Circles of Social Studies all over the country, organized into six regions, each with its regular regional congress, and all working under a national executive committee and a general national congress, meeting once a year. The future of French socialism seems to be with the Possibilists rather than the Guesdists; and the future of the Possibilists, like the future of the German socialists, seems to lie in the direction of releasing their limbs from the dead clothes of socialist theory, in order to take freer and more practical action for the positive wellbeing of the working class. At the recent congress of the Possibilists at Châtellèrault in October, 1890, the chief questions discussed were the reform the system of poor relief and the eight hours' day. They want an international eight hours' day, but they would be willing to allow other four hours' overtime, to be paid for by double wages.

In 1885 the two divisions of socialists combined for electioneering purposes with one another and with a third revolutionary body called the Blanquists, and they actually formed together an organization known as the Revolutionary Union; but the three parties quarrelled again before the election, and the union was dissolved. The Blanquists are disciples of the veteran conspirator Blanqui, and include some well-known men, such as General Eudes, and MM. Vaillant and Roche. They are revolutionists pure and simple, and in some respects stand near the anarchists; only, being old birds, they move about more cautiously, and indeed are sometimes for that reason—and because they act as intermediaries between other revolutionaries—called the "diplomatists of lawlessness." With all their love for revolution, however, they have more than the usual democratic aversion to war, and their chief work at present is in connection with the league they have founded against permanent armies.

Although revolutionary socialism is so ill represented in the French Legislature, there is a special parliamentary party, known as the Socialist Group, which was founded by nineteen deputies in 1887, and returned thirty candidates to the Chamber at the election of 1889. They are for communal autonomy; for the transformation of industrial monopolies into public services, to be directed by the respective companies under the control of the public administration; and for the progressive nationalization of property, so as to make the individual employment of it accessible to free labourers; and they have no lack of other planks in their platform: international federation and arbitration; abolition of standing armies; abolition of capital punishment; universal suffrage; minority representation; sexual equality; free education, primary, secondary, and technical; suppression of the budget of public worship; separation of Church and State; absolute liberty to think, speak, write, meet, associate, and contract; abolition of indirect taxes and customs, and introduction of a progressive income tax, and a progressive succession duty; public crêches; establishment of superannuation, sick and accident insurance at public expense. Among the deputies who signed the programme in 1887 were the two Boulangists, MM. Laisant and Laur, and MM. Clovis Hughes, Basley, Bower, etc. The idea of the party seems to be what M. Laisant recommends in his "L'Anarchie Bourgeoise," published in the same year 1887, a Republican Socialist party, which, accepting the good works of socialism, without caring for its political or economic theory, shall do its best to abolish misery by any means open to it under the existing republican form of government. Republican socialism corresponds therefore to what is called State socialism in Germany—the abolition of poverty by means of the power of the present State; and the question between socialists and other reformers is narrowing in France, as elsewhere, into a question of the justice and the suitability of the individual measures proposed.

There is also a body of Christian Socialists in France, of whom, however, I shall have more to say in a subsequent chapter on the Christian Socialists.

Socialism crossed very early from Prussia into Austria and took quick root among the German-speaking population, but has never to this day made much way among any of the other nationalities in the Empire. The Magyars are, on the whole, fairly comfortable and contented in their worldly circumstances, and they have a strong national aversion to anything German, even a German utopia; so that they lent no ear to the socialist agitation till 1880, when a socialist congress of 119 delegates was held at Buda Pest and founded the Hungarian Labour Party. The agitation, however, has not assumed any important dimensions. The Poles of Austria, like the Poles of Russia and the Poles of Prussia, have all along been a source of much disappointment to socialist leaders, who expected they would leap into the arms of any revolutionary scheme, but find them too pre-occupied with their own nationalist cause to care for any other. The same observation applies to the Czechs. They are Czechs and Federalists first, and a social system under which they would cease to be Czechs and Federalists, and become mere atoms under a powerful centralized government, led possibly by Germans, is naturally not much to their fancy. But in the German-speaking part of the monarchy socialism has found a ready and general welcome, and has latterly grown most popular in the anarchist form. This development is due to various causes. The federalist ideas prevalent in the country would be a bridge to the general principles of anarchism, while the coercive laws in force since 1870 would naturally provoke a recourse to revolutionary methods and an impatience with the sober and Fabian policy of the Austrian Social Democrats. The Social Democrats of Austria were advised from the first by Von Schweitzer and Liebknecht, the leaders of German socialism at the time, to adopt this temporizing policy, as being on the whole the best for the party in the circumstances existing in their country. They were advised to give a general support at the elections to the Liberal party, because nothing could be done for socialism in Austria till the priestly and feudal ascendancy was abolished, and that could only be done by strengthening the hands of the Liberals. They have continued to observe this moderate course. Unlike their German comrades, they looked with favourable eyes on the labour legislation introduced by Government for improving the condition of the working classes; and though they have suffered from coercive legislation much longer and sometimes quite as severely, they have never struck the qualification "by legal means" out of their principles, but, on the contrary, have declared, when they were permitted to hold a meeting—as for example at Brünn in 1884—that they adhered entirely and exclusively to peaceful methods, and repudiated the deeds of the anarchists. But then they are apparently not prospering in number, while the anarchists are. For one thing they have never had good leaders, and though they sometimes invite Liebknecht or one of the German socialist leaders to come and rouse them, Government has always refused liberty for such addresses to be delivered in Austria. The anarchists, on the other hand, had an energetic and eloquent leader in Peukert, a house-painter, who is now a chief personage in anarchist circles in London, and from here no doubt still carries on relations with his old friends; and their propaganda seems to be spreading, if we judge from the political trials, and from the fresh measures of repression directed against it in 1884, when Vienna was put under siege, and again in the latter part of 1888. They have nine or ten newspapers, and the socialists six or seven. Neither faction has any representative in Parliament.

Both parties direct their chief attention to the peasantry, especially where any germ of an agrarian movement happens already to prevail. The Galician agitation against great landlords in 1886 was fomented by anarchist emissaries, and we occasionally hear of anarchist operations among the people of Northern Bohemia or Styria as well as in Upper Austria, where rural discontent has long been more or less acute. Austria is mainly an agricultural country; but greater part of the land is held in very large estates by the clergy and nobility, and the evils of the old feudal régime are only now being gradually removed. There are, it is true, as many as 1,700,000 peasant proprietors in the Cisleithanian half of the Empire alone; but then their properties are seriously encumbered by the debt of their redemption from feudal servitudes and by the severity of the public taxation. The land tax amounts to 26 per cent. of the proprietor's income, and the indirect taxes on articles of consumption are numerous and burdensome. But three-fourths of the rural population are merely farm servants or day labourers, and are worse off even than the same class elsewhere. The social question in Austria is largely agrarian, but the spontaneous movements of the Austrian peasantry seem rather unlikely to run in harness with social democracy. Unions of free peasants for example have sprung up of recent years in various provinces. Their great aim is to procure a reduction in the taxes paid by the peasantry; but then they add to their programme the principle of State-help to labour, the abolition of all feudal privileges and all rights of birth, gratuitous education, and cessation of the policy of contracting national debt, and they speak vaguely about instituting a peasant State, and requiring every minister and responsible official to serve an apprenticeship to peasant labour as a qualification for office, in order that he may understand the necessities and capacities of the peasantry. This idea of the peasant State is analogous to the idea of the labour State of the Social Democrats; but of course this is agreement which is really conflict. It is like the harmony between Sforza and Charles VIII.: "I and my cousin Charles are wonderfully at one; we both seek the same thing—Milan." The class interest of the landed peasant is contrary to the class interest of the working man, and would be invaded by social democracy. The peasantry are simply fighting for their own land, and as their votes are courted by both political parties they will probably be able to secure some mitigation of their grievances. Distress is certainly serious among them when, as happened a few years ago, in a parish of 135 houses as many as 35 executions were made in one day for failure to pay taxes, and in another of 250 houses as many as 72; but on the whole there seems to be little of that hopeless indigence which appears among the peasant proprietary in countries where the practice of unrestricted or compulsory subdivision of holdings exists, or has recently existed, to any considerable extent.

There is an influential Catholic Socialist movement in Austria, led by the clergy and nobility, and dealing in an earnest spirit with the social question as it appears in that country.

Socialism was introduced into Italy in 1868 by Bakunin, who, in spite of the opposition of Mazzini, gained wide acceptance for his ideas wherever he went, and founded many branches of the International in the country, which survived the extinction of the parent society, and continued to bear its name. They were, like Bakunin himself, anarchist in their social and political views, and were marked by an especial violence in their attacks on Church and State and family. They published a great number of journals of various sorts, and kept up an incessant and very successful propaganda; but no heed was paid them by the authorities till 1878, when an attempt on the life of the king led to a thorough examination being instituted into the whole agitation. The dimensions and ramifications of the movement were found to be so much more extensive than any one in power had anticipated, that it was determined to set a close watch thereafter on all its operations, and its meetings and congresses were then from time to time proclaimed. But after the passing of the Franchise Act of 1882, a new socialist movement came into being which looked to constitutional methods alone. The franchise was not reduced very low: it only gave a vote to one person in every fourteen, while in England one in six has a vote; but the reduction was accompanied with scrutin de liste and the ballot, and it was felt that something could now be done. Accordingly a new Socialist Labour Party was formed on the usual Marxist lines, under the leadership of a very capable man, an orator and a good organizer, Andrea Costa, who was formerly an anarchist. This party obtained 50,000 votes at the first subsequent election, and returned two candidates to the Legislature, one of them being Costa. In 1883 it formed a working alliance with the Italian Democratic Society—an active working-class body of which Costa was a leading member; and in 1884 it entered into an incorporating union with another working-class body, the Lombardy Labour Federation, which had a large number of local branches. With their help it had become, in 1886, an organization of 133 branches, and Government resolved to suppress it. Most of the branches in the north of Italy were dissolved, and their funds, flags, and libraries confiscated. But the party is still active over the country. They returned three members at the late election in November, 1890. The growth of this party was even more displeasing to the anarchists than to the Government, and in 1882 they called back Maletesta, one of their old leaders, from abroad, to conduct a regular campaign over the whole kingdom against Costa, and to denounce every man for a traitor to the socialist cause who should take any manner of part in parliamentary elections, or show the smallest sign of reconciliation to the existing order of things. His campaign ended in his arrest in May, 1883, and the condemnation of himself and 53 comrades to several years' imprisonment for inciting to disturbance of the public peace. Besides their contentions with the Socialist Labour Party, the Italian anarchists are much given to contending among themselves, and split up, even beyond other parties of the kind, upon trifles of doctrine or procedure. But however divided they may be, socialists and anarchists in Italy are all united in opposing the new social legislation of the Government. When the Employers' Liability Bill was introduced, Costa declared that legislation of that kind was utterly useless so long as the people were denied electoral rights, because till the franchise was reduced far enough to give the people a real voice in public affairs, there could be no security for the loyal and faithful execution of the provisions of such an act.

The Italian socialists and anarchists have always had a lively brood of journals, which, however, are generally shorter lived than even socialist organs elsewhere; but when one dies for want of funds to-day, another comes out in its place to-morrow. This remarkable fertility in journals seems to be due to the large literary proletariat that exists in Italy—the unemployed educated class who could live by their pen if they only had a paper to use it in. Through their presence among the socialists new journals are pushed forward without sufficient funds to carry them on, and as the people are too poor to subscribe to them, and the party too poor to subsidize them, they soon come to a natural termination.

The development of socialism in Italy is no matter of surprise. Though there is no great industry in the country, the whole population seems a proletariat. There is a distressed nobility, a distressed peasantry, a distressed working class, a distressed body of university men. Mr. Gallenga says that for six months of the year Italy is a national workshop; everybody is out of employment, and has to get work from the State; and he states as the reason for this, that the employing class wants enterprise and ability, and are apt to look to the Government for any profitable undertakings. The Government, however, are no better financiers than the rest, and the state of the public finances is one of the chief evils of the country. Taxation is very heavy, and yet property and life are not secure. "The peasants," says M. de Laveleye, "are reduced to extreme misery by rent and taxation, both alike excessive. Wages are completely inadequate. Agricultural labourers live huddled in bourgades, and obtain only intermittent employment. There is thus a rural proletariat more wretched than the industrial. Excluded from property by latifundia, it becomes the enemy of a social order that crushes it." The situation is scarcely better in parts of the country which are free from latifundia. In Sicily most of the agricultural population live on farms owned by themselves; but then these farms are too small to support them adequately, and their occupiers scorn the idea of working for hire. There are as many nobles in Sicily as in England, and Mr. Dawes (from whose report on Sicily to the Foreign Office in 1872 I draw these particulars states) that 25 per cent. of the lower orders are what he terms drones—idlers who are maintained by their wives and children. In Italy there is little working-class opinion distinct from the agricultural. There are few factories, and the artisans who work in towns have the habit of living in their native villages near by, and going and coming every day to their work. Two-thirds of the persons engaged in manufactures do so, or at least go to their rural homes from Saturday till Monday. Their habits and ways of thinking are those of agriculturists, and the social question of Italy is substantially the agricultural labourers' question. The students at the universities, too, are everywhere leavened with socialism. The advanced men among them seem to have ceased to cry for a republic, and to place their hope now in socialism. They have no desire to overturn a king who is as patriotic as the best president, and they count the form of government of minor importance as compared with the reconstitution of property. Bakunin thought Italy the most revolutionary country of Europe except Spain, because of its exceptionally numerous body of enthusiastic young men without career or prospects; and certainly revolutionary elements abound in the peninsula, but, as M. de Laveleye shrewdly remarks, a revolution is perhaps next to impossible for want of a revolutionary metropolis. "The malaria," he says, "which makes Rome uninhabitable for part of the year will long preserve her from the danger of becoming the seat of a new commune."

In Spain, as in Italy, socialism made its first appearance in 1868 through the agency of the International, and found an immediate and warm response among the people. In 1873 the International had an extensive Spanish organization with 300,000 members and 674 branches planted over the whole length and breadth of the country, from industrial centres like Barcelona to remote rural districts like the island of Majorca. M. de Laveleye was present at several sittings of these socialist clubs when he visited Spain in 1869, and he says: "They were usually held in churches erected for worship. From the pulpit the orators attacked all that had previously been exalted there—God, religion, the priests, the rich. The speeches were white hot, but the audience remained calm. Many women were seated on the ground, working, nursing their babes, and listening attentively as to a sermon. It was the very image of '93." He adds that their journals wrote with unparalleled violence, especially against religion and the Church.

On the division of the International in 1872 the Spanish members sided with Bakunin, supporting the anarchist view of the government of the future. This was natural for Spaniards, among whom their own central government had been long thoroughly detested, and their own communal organization regarded with general satisfaction. The Spanish people, even the humblest of them, are imbued beyond others with those sentiments of personal dignity and mutual equality which are at the bottom of democratic aspirations; and in their local communes, where every inhabitant who can read and write has a voice in public council, they have for ages been accustomed to manage their own affairs with harmony and advantage. The revolutionary tradition of Spain has accordingly always favoured communal autonomy, and the Federal rather than the Central Republic. Castelar declares the Federal Republic to be the most perfect form of State, though he thinks it for the present impracticable; and the revolution of 1873, in which the International played an active part, was excited for the purpose of establishing it. The Federal Republicans are not all socialists. Many of them are for making the agricultural labourers peasant proprietors, and even for dividing the communal property among them; but in a country like Spain, where communal property exists already to a large extent, the idea of making all other property communal property lies ever at hand as a ready resource of reformers. Nor, again, are all Spanish socialists federalists. There is a Social Democratic Labour party in Spain which broke off from the anarchists in 1882, and published a programme more on Marxist lines, demanding (1) the acquisition of political power; (2) the transformation of all private and corporate into the common property of the nation; and (3) the reorganization of society on the basis of industrial associations. This body is not very numerous, but at one of its recent congresses it had delegates from 152 different branches, and it has for the last four years had a party organ, El Socialista, in Madrid.

The bulk of Spanish socialism still belongs, however, to the anarchist wing. Little has been heard of the anarchists in Spain since the revolution of 1873 and the fall of the International. They have usually been blamed for the attempts on the life of the king in 1878, but they have certainly never resorted to those promiscuous outrages which have formed so much of the recent policy of the anarchists of other countries; and except for participation in a few demonstrations of the unemployed, they have maintained a surprisingly quiet and unobtrusive existence. In 1881 they reconstituted themselves as the Spanish Federation of the International Working Men's Association, which is said by the author of "Socialismus und Anarchismus, 1883-86," apparently on their own authority, to have 70,000 members in all Spain, who are distributed in 800 branches, and hold regular district and national congresses, but always under cover of secrecy. They have two journals in Madrid, and others in the larger towns elsewhere. They are sorely divided into parties and schools on very petty points, and fierce strife rages between the tweedledums and tweedledees. One party has broken away altogether and established a society of its own, under the name of the Autonomists. The anarchists are in close alliance with an agrarian organization called the Rural Labourers' Union, which has agitated since 1879 for the abolition of latifundia in Andalusia, but they always disclaim all connection with the more notorious Andalusian society, the Black Hand, which committed so many outrages in 1881 and 1882, and is often identified with the anarchists. The Black Hand is a separate organization from the anarchists, and has, it is said, 40,000 members, mostly peasants, in Andalusia and the neighbouring provinces; but their principles are undoubtedly socialistic. Their views are confined to the subject of land; but they declare that land, like all other property, has been made by labour, that it therefore cannot in right belong to the idle and rich class who at present own it, and that any means may be legitimately employed to deprive this class of usurpers of their possessions—the sword, fire, slander, perjury.

In Spain, unlike most other countries, the artisans of the towns show less inclination to socialistic views than the rural labourers. They have an active and even powerful labour movement of their own, carried on through an extensive organization of trade unions which has risen up rapidly within the last few years, especially in Catalonia, and they put their whole trust in combination, co-operation, and peaceful agitation for gradual reform under the present order of things, and will have nothing to say to socialism or anarchism; so much so, that they manifested the greatest reluctance to join in the eight hour demonstrations of May-day, 1890, because they did not wish to be confounded or in any way identified with the more extreme faction who were getting those demonstrations up; and they actually held a rival demonstration of their own on Sunday, the 4th of May, "in favour," as they stated in the public announcement of it, "of State socialism and of State legislation, both domestic and international, to improve the general condition of the working classes without any revolutionary or sudden change that could alarm the Sovereign and the governing classes."

Spain made a beginning in factory legislation in 1873, when an act was passed restricting the labour of children and young people; but the act remained dead-letter till 1884, when the renewal of agitation on the social question by the various parties led the cabinet to issue an order to have this law carried into effect, and a little later in the same year to appoint a royal commission to institute a thorough inquiry into the whole circumstances of the labouring classes, and the conditions of their improvement. This commission, which received nothing but abuse from the anarchists, who said the labour problem must be settled from below and not from above, was welcomed very heartily by the trade unionists, and with favour rather than otherwise even by the Social Democrats; but it has as yet had little or no result, and men who know the country express their opinion very freely that it will never lead to anything but an act or two that will remain dead-letter like their predecessors. The suffrage is high, only one person in seventeen having a vote; and working-class legislation will continue lukewarm till the working class acquires more real political power. A leading Spanish statesman said lately: "The day for social questions has not yet come in Spain, and we can afford to look on and see other countries make experiments which may be of use some day when our politicians and thinkers can find time to devote attention to these twentieth century problems."

There seems much truth in the view that socialism, spite of the alarm its spread caused to the Spanish Government in 1872, is really a disease of a more advanced stage of industrial development than yet exists in Spain, and therefore unlikely to grow immediately into anything very formidable there. The country has few large industrial centres. Two-thirds of the people are still engaged in agriculture; and though it is among the agricultural classes socialism has broken out, the outbreak has been local, and confined to provinces where the conditions of agricultural labour are decidedly bad. But these conditions vary much from province to province. In the southern provinces the cereal plains and also the lower pasturages are generally possessed by large proprietors, who work them by farmers on the metayer principle, with the help of bands of migratory labourers in harvest time; but in the mountainous parts of these provinces the estates belong for the most part to the communes. They are usually large, and as every member of the commune has an undivided right of using them, he is able to obtain from them the main part of his living without rent. Many of the inhabitants of such districts engage in the carrying trade, to which they conjoin a little cattle-dealing as opportunities offer; and as they are sober and industrious, they are usually comparatively well off. In the northern provinces the situation is in some respects better. Land is much subdivided, and though the condition of the labouring class is not as a rule unembarrassed, that result is due more to their own improvidence and indolence than to anything else. A man of frugal and industrious habits can always rise without much difficulty from the position of day labourer to that of metayer tenant, and from tenancy to proprietorship, and some of the small proprietors are able to amass a considerable competency. Besides, even the improvident are saved from the worst by the communal organization. They have always a right of pasturage on the commons, and a right to wood for fire, house and furniture, and they get their children's education and medical attendance in sickness gratuitously on condition of giving six days' labour at the roads of the commune. The most active and saving part of the population, north and south, is the class of migratory workmen, who stay at home only during seed-time and harvest, and go for the rest of the year to work in Castile, Andalusia, or Portugal, as masons or carpenters, or waiters, and always come back with a store of money. Sometimes they remain abroad for a year or two, and sometimes they go to Cuba or Mexico for twenty years, and return to settle on a property of their own in their native village. This class forms the personnel of the small property in Spain, and they give by their presence a healthy stimulus to the neighbourhoods they reside in. The small property is in Spain, as elsewhere, too often turned from a blessing to a curse by its subdivision, on the death of the proprietor, among the members of his family, who in Spain are usually numerous, though it is interesting to learn that in some of the Pyrenean valleys it has been preserved for five hundred years by the habit of integral transmission to the eldest child—son or daughter—coupled with the habit of voluntary celibacy on the part of many of the other children. The economic situation of Spain, then, is not free from defects; but there always exists a wide margin of hope in a country where, as Frere said, "God Almighty has so much of the land in His own holding," and its economic situation would not of itself be likely to precipitate social revolution.

From Spain, socialism passed into Portugal; but from the first it has worked very quietly there. Its adherents formed themselves into an association in 1872, and held congresses, published newspapers, started candidates, and actively promoted their views in every legitimate way. Their programme was anarchism, like that of their Spanish allies; but, unlike anarchists elsewhere, they repudiated all resort to violence, for, as M. de Laveleye says, they are naturally "less violent than the Spaniards, the economic situation of the country is better, and liberty being very great, prevents the explosion of popular fury, which is worse when exasperated by repression." Portugal is an agricultural country in a good climate, where the people have few wants, and find it easy to satisfy them fairly well. In the absence of any manner of acute discontent, socialism could never have been much better than an abstract speculation; and Portuguese socialism, if we may trust the complaints made by the party elsewhere, seems now to have lost even the savour it had. In March, 1888, one of the socialist newspapers of London reported that the Portuguese working men's movement had, in the course of the preceding ten years, given up the straightforward socialist character it once had; that its leaders had entered into compromises with other political parties, and threw themselves too much into experiments in co-operation; that the party press was very lukewarm in its socialism, and inclined more to mere Radicalism; and that one or two attempts that had been made to start more extreme journals had completely failed; but it announced with satisfaction, that at last, in January, 1888, a frankly anarchist paper was published at Oporto—A Revoluzao Social. About the same time the editor of a journal which had made some hostile remarks on anarchism was shot, and anarchists were blamed and arrested for the deed. There was a Socialist Congress at Lisbon in 1882, composed of twelve delegates representing eight societies, all in Lisbon or Oporto.

While the socialist cause has been thus rather retreating in the south of Europe, it has been making some advances in the north. Of the three Scandinavian countries, Denmark alone gave any early response to the socialist agitation; but there are now socialist organizations in Sweden and Norway, and the movement in Denmark has assumed considerable dimensions. Attempts were made to introduce socialism into Norway as far back as 1873 by Danish emissaries, and the International also founded a small society of thirty-seven members in Christiania; but the society seems to have died, and nothing more was heard of socialism there till the commotion in favour of a Republic in 1883. A Social Democratic Club was then established in Christiania, and a Social Democratic Congress was held at Arendal in 1887; but even yet Norwegian social democracy is of so mild a character that it would be counted conservatism by Social Democrats elsewhere, for this Congress issued a programme for a new labour party without a word of socialism in it, and merely asking for a normal working day, for factory legislation and reform of taxation. In Sweden there is more appearance of agitation, because there is one very active agitator in the country, Palm, a tailor, who keeps socialism en evidence by making stump speeches, or getting up street processions with the usual red flags, and sometimes—such was the easy indifference of the Government to his work at first—with a military band in full uniform at the head of them. The Swedish socialists had four newspapers in 1888, but three of them were confiscated by the Government in December of that year, and their editors arrested for offences against religion and the throne. In May, 1890, they held their first Congress at Stockholm, when delegates appeared from twenty-nine unions; but the movement is very unimportant in Sweden and Norway, and the chief conditions of success seem wanting to it in those countries. There is no class of labourers there without property; no town residuum, and no rural cottagers. There being few great manufacturers in the kingdom, only fifteen per cent. of the people altogether live in towns. The rest are spread sparsely over the rural districts on farms belonging to themselves, and in the absence of roads are obliged to make at home many of the ordinary articles of consumption. What with the produce of their small properties and their own general handiness, they are unusually independent and comfortable. M. de Laveleye considers them the happiest people in Europe.

The circumstances of Denmark are different. The operatives of the town are badly off. Mr. Strachey tells us in his report to the Foreign Office in 1870 that every fourth inhabitant of Copenhagen was in receipt of parochial relief in 1867, and he says that while the Danish operatives are sober, and well educated, they fail in industry and thrift. "No fact in my report," he states, "is more certain than that the Dane has yet to learn the meaning of the word work; of entireness and thoroughness he has seldom any adequate notion. This is why the Swedish artisan can so often take the bread from his mouth." In the rural districts, too, the economic situation, though in some respects highly favourable, is attended by a shadow. The land is, indeed, widely diffused. There are in all 280,000 families in the rural districts of Denmark, and of these 170,000 occupy independent freeholds, 30,000 farm hired land, and only 26,000 are agricultural labourers pure and simple. Seven-eighths of the whole country is held by peasant proprietors, and as a rule no class in Europe has improved more during the last half century than the Danish peasant or Bonde. Mr. Strachey says: "The Danish landlord was till recent times the scourge of the peasantry. Under his paternal care the Danish Bonde was a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water; his lot was no better than that of the most miserable ryot of Bengal. The Bonde is now the freest, the most politically wise, the best educated of European yeomen." But there is another side to the picture. In Denmark, as in other places where the small property abounds, the property is often too small for the proprietor's necessities, and there thus arises a kind of proprietor-proletariat, unwilling to part with their land and unable to extract a living out of it. This class, along with the rural labourers who have no property, constitute a sort of fourth estate in the country, and there as elsewhere their condition is preparing a serious social question for the future. Then, among the influences favourable to the acceptance of socialism in Denmark, must be counted the fact that one of the two great political parties of the country is democratic. Curiously enough that party consists of the peasantry, and the Conservatives of Denmark are the commercial classes of the towns, with the artisans in their wake, their Conservatism, however, being substantially identical with the Liberalism of the same classes in other countries. This democratic party seeks to make everything in the State conduce to the interests of the peasantry, and keeps alive in the country the idea that the State exists by the will of the people, and for their good alone.

The International was introduced into this exclusively Protestant country by two militant Roman Catholics—Pio, a retired military officer, who came to Denmark as religious tutor to a baroness who had joined the Church of Rome, and Geleff, who wrote for an Ultramontane journal. They pursued their new mission with great zeal and success. They opened branches of the association in most of the towns, started a party newspaper, held open-air meetings, were sent to imprisonment for sedition in 1873, and on their release in 1877 absconded to America with the whole of the party funds, and disputed bitterly there over the spoil. While they were in prison, the International was suppressed in Denmark; but the members merely reconstituted the organization under the name of the Socialist Labour Party, and the place of leader was taken for a time by an authoress, Jacquette Lilyenkrantz, for, as in other countries, women are in Denmark among the most active propagandists of socialism. They kept up communications with the socialist leaders in Germany, and the meeting of the German Socialist Congress at Copenhagen in 1883 gave the movement a new impetus. They were able to return two deputies, Holm and Hördun, to the Volkething in 1884, and they took part, 80,000 strong, in the Copenhagen procession of 1886, in commemoration of the fundamental law of the State. Their chief party organ, the Social Demokraten, has a circulation of 26,000 daily, one of the largest newspaper circulations in Denmark; and there are other four socialist journals in the kingdom.

They belong to the moderate wing of social democracy, being opposed to revolution and terrorism, and placing their confidence in constitutional agitation. Their programme is substantially that of Gotha—the right of the labourers to the full product of labour, State management of all industry, free education, universal suffrage, normal working day, abolition of class inequalities, single chamber in legislature, free justice, no standing army, State provision for sick and aged, religions to be a private affair. They turn their propaganda with most hope to the land proletariat; and a recent writer, P. Schmidt, in an interesting paper in the Arbeiterfreund for 1889, says they are succeeding in their mission, and that socialism is spreading more and more every day among the rural labourers. At their last Congress, held at Copenhagen, in June, 1890, and attended by seventy-one delegates from fifty-four different branches, their attention was chiefly occupied with questions about the land; provision of more land for the people by compulsory acquisition of ecclesiastical property and uncultivated ground; State advances of capital to agricultural labourers; agricultural schools; better housing for farm servants, etc. In 1887 they held a socialist exhibition in Copenhagen—an international exhibition of socialist pamphlets, newspapers, books, magazines, and pictures; and in 1890 they returned two members to the Landthing—the first time they secured representatives in the Upper Chamber.

Belgium has many of the conditions of soil most favourable for socialism—a dense population, large towns, an advanced productive system, and an industrial class at once very numerous, very ill paid, and very open, through their education, to new social ideas. For a time, accordingly, socialism spread remarkably in that country. The International had eight federations of branches in 1869, with 60,000 members and several newspapers. In the dispute between Marx and Bakunin, the Belgian Internationalists seem to have sided as a body with Bakunin; but they presently fell out among themselves, and, in spite of many repeated efforts at reconciliation, they have never since succeeded in composing their differences. The German socialist leaders tried to reorganize them in 1879 at a special Congress at Brussels, under the name of the Socialist Labour Party of Belgium, and with the Gotha programme; but they were rent again in 1881 by a division which had then entered into German socialism itself. The majority of the party adhered to Liebknecht and Bebel; but an active minority, composed chiefly of Walloons, followed the anarchist views of Most and Hasselman, withdrew from the party, and founded another called the Revolutionary Union. The anarchists have one journal—Ni Dieu, Ni Maître—violent, as the name indicates, but obscure and unimportant; but they believe most in the less intellectual propaganda of deed, and make themselves conspicuous from time to time by dynamite explosions and street fights with the police or the military, or their own socialist rivals. The Belgian socialists, on the other hand, look more to constitutional and parliamentary action, and usually work with the Liberals at the elections; but the Belgian voting qualification is high, and they have never succeeded in returning a candidate of their own. In 1887 their candidate for Brussels got 1,000 votes, while his successful rival had 3,000. They took an active part in the Republican agitation which was raised by the School Law in 1884. They have capable leaders, and they publish two journals, which, however, for want of funds, appear only at distant and uncertain intervals. They have lately begun to hold many open-air meetings, which the authorities had long forbidden, and they held an International Socialist Exhibition at Ghent in 1887 like that held in the same year at Copenhagen.

On the whole socialism, after twenty years' work, is making no way in Belgium, notwithstanding the favourable character of the soil, because the labour movement is choosing other directions and forms of organization. Trade unions and co-operative societies have been multiplying much during these twenty years, and in 1885 a strong Belgian Labour Party was formed, with 120 branches and 100,000 members, which aims at promoting the practical wellbeing of the working class by remedial legislation—by in some cases vicious State-socialistic legislation, it may be—but has no word of the right to the full product of labour, of the nationalization of all industry, or of the social revolution. One of the items of the programme is worded "collective property"; but whether it contemplates the universal State-property of collectivism or the corporate property of co-operation does not appear. The other items are universal suffrage, direct legislation by the people (presumably the referendum), free undenominational education, abolition of standing army, abolition of budget of worship, normal work day, normal wages, regulation of work of women and children, factory inspection, employers' liability, workmen's chambers, courts of conciliation, repeal of taxes on means of subsistence, increased income tax, international labour legislation. M. de Laveleye attributes the ill success of socialism in Belgium, and no doubt rightly, to the influence of discussion and free institutions. Government has left it to stand or fall on its own merits before public opinion. The socialists enjoy full liberty of the platform and press; they can hold meetings and congresses and form clubs in any town they please, and the result is that though the movement, like all new movements, made a certain impression and advance for a time at first, it got checked under the influence of discussion and the application of solid practical judgment. Then, though the Belgian Legislature has not yet done what it can and ought for ameliorating the condition of the labourers, philanthropy has been very active and useful in a number of ways in that kingdom. The Catholic Church has always intervened to keep up a high ideal of employers' responsibility—the old ideal of a patriarchal care; and there is a strong organization in Belgium of Catholic Working Men's Clubs, which were formed into one body in 1867, which were united with the Catholic Working Men's Clubs of Germany in 1869, and with those of France in 1870, and which now constitute with these the International Catholic Working Men's Association.

It ought perhaps to be mentioned that there is an old but small party of Land Nationalizers in Belgium, the Colinsian Socialists, whose principles have been warmly endorsed by Mr. Ruskin as "forming the most complete system of social and political reform yet put forward." They want the State to own all the soil, and let it out by auction; but they are opposed to nationalizing any of the other instruments of production.

In Holland, wealth is very unequally divided, wages are low, and taxation, being largely indirect, falls heavily on the working class; but the people are phlegmatic, domestic, religious, and contrive on small means to maintain a general appearance of comfort and decency. Above all, they enjoy free institutions; and, under freedom, socialism has run the same course in Holland as in Belgium. The International made rapid advances in 1869, founded branches in all the towns, and carried on, after the Paris Commune, so active and successful an agitation that the bourgeoisie took alarm, and Government imposed some restrictions on the disaffected press. But a general rise in wages happened about the time, a strong co-operative movement was promoted under the lead of the orthodox divines, a lively polemic against socialism broke out among the working men themselves, and all interest in the social revolution seemed to have died away, when, in 1878, it was revived again by D. Niewenhuis, a retired Protestant minister, a man of capacity and zeal, who has been unwearied in his advocacy of the cause ever since. He started in that year a journal, Recht Voor Allen, which is still, I believe, the only socialist organ in Holland, and appears now three times a week; and he founded the Social Democratic Union in 1884, which is strongest in the Hague and Amsterdam, but has branches in most of the other towns, and a membership by no means inconsiderable, though much below the old numbers of the Dutch International. After being imprisoned in 1887 for political reasons, Niewenhuis was returned to the Legislature in 1888—the first socialist who has sat there. The Dutch Socialists, to increase their numbers, enrol a class of "secret" members, timid spirits who will only come to them "by night, for fear of the Jews." There is also a handful of anarchists in Holland, who have a newspaper in Amsterdam, and are said to live harmoniously with the socialists, and, according to the reports of the American consuls, nobody in the country thinks any harm of either.

Switzerland has swarmed for a century with conspirators of all hues and nations; but the Swiss—thanks again to free institutions—have been steel against revolution. The "Young Germanys" and "Young Italys" whom she sheltered in the past sought only, it is true, to win for their own countries the political freedom which Switzerland already enjoyed; but the socialist and anarchist refugees of the last twenty years have had social principles to preach which were as new and as good for the Swiss as for their own countrymen; and, speaking as they did the languages of the Confederation, they have never ceased making active efforts for the conversion of the Swiss. The old Jurassian Federation of the International, still continues to exist in French-speaking Switzerland, and to bear witness for the extremest kind of anarchist communism—no force or authority whatever, and a collective consumption of products as well as a collective production; but this body is not increasing, and though Guesde, the French socialist, made a lecturing tour through that division of Switzerland in 1885, he had quite as little success for his branch of the revolutionary cause. There are numbers of Social Democratic Clubs in the German-speaking cantons, but they consist mainly of German refugees, and contain few native Swiss members. After the Anti-Socialist Laws of 1879, the German socialists settled largely in Switzerland. They transferred to Zurich their party organ, the Social Democrat, and along with it, to use their own phrase, the entire Olympus of the party, the body of writers and managers who moved the shuttle of its operations. These propagandists naturally did not neglect the country of their adoption, but used every opportunity to forward their agitation by addresses and even by extended missionary journeys, and a separate Swiss Social Democratic party was actually founded, with a separate organ, the Arbeiterstimme; but it collapsed in 1884 from internal dissensions. No attempt was made to revive it till 1888, when the action of the Federal Council in May against the foreign socialists resident in the Confederation led to the organization of a Swiss socialist party in October. The Federal Government had already, in 1884 and 1885, taken measures against the political refugees, especially the anarchists, who were thought to have abused the hospitality they received by planning and preparing in Switzerland the series of crimes which shocked all Europe in 1884, and even by trying to explode the Federal Palace at Berne itself. The Government instituted an inquiry, and finding the country absolutely riddled with anarchist clubs, determined to keep the eye of the police on them, and in the meantime expelled thirty or forty of their leading members from Switzerland altogether. These were almost without exception either Austrians or Germans, and included Neve, now a leading anarchist in London. The Russian anarchists were apparently not thought so dangerous, their great occupation being to invent new ways and means of smuggling newspapers into Russia; but they disliked the police supervision to which they were subjected, and very generally quitted Switzerland of their own accord for London or Paris. The anarchist organ, the Revolté, was removed at the same time to Paris, but its place in Geneva was taken by a new paper—L'Egalitaire. In 1888 the police were ordered to report all socialist meetings held in the country, and all arrivals or departures of "foreigners whose means of subsistence was unknown, and whose presence might, for other reasons, become dangerous to the safety of the country"; and as this further turn of the screw was believed to be made on the instigation of Germany, it provoked considerable opposition, one result of which was the formation of the new Swiss socialist party.

This party, however, is not an affair of any magnitude, and does not appear very likely to become so; for the working men of Switzerland have the public power in their own hands already, and they have their own organizations besides to look after their interests; and while they are by no means averse to the use of the powers of the State, they are disposed to move with inquiry and caution, and to see every step of their way before running into speculative schemes of foreign origin. Their political position satisfies them, because they know they are too strong for Government to neglect their wishes, because some labour laws have already been passed for their protection, and because the authorities always show themselves ready to entertain any new proposals for the same object, as, for example, they did in May, 1890, by summoning an International Congress at Berne to discuss the length of the working day and other conditions of labour.

Their economic position, moreover, is also comparatively satisfactory for various reasons, among which Mr. Bonar, in his report to the Foreign Office in 1870, gives a chief place to the general working of democratic institutions and the prevalence of benevolent and charitable associations. "In enumerating," he says, "the favourable circumstances in which the Swiss working man is placed, prominence must be given to the immense extension of the principle of democracy, which, whatever, may be its defects and dangers from a political point of view when pushed to extremes, serves in Switzerland in its economical effects to advance the cause of the operative by removing the barriers dividing class from class, and to establish among all grades the bonds of mutual sympathy and goodwill, further strengthened by a widely-spread network of associations organized with the object of securing the common interests and welfare of the people." Masters and workmen are socially more equal than in most European countries; they sit side by side at the board of the Communal Council, they belong to the same choral societies, they refresh themselves at the same cafés. In most cantons, too, operatives are either owners of, or hold from the communes, small pieces of land which they cultivate in their leisure hours, and which thus serve them when work gets slack or fails altogether. The favourable rural economy of the country is well known; its peasant proprietors rival those of France. The Swiss societies of beneficence are remarkable, and almost suggest the hope that the voluntary socialism of a more enlarged and widely organized system of charity may be found to furnish a substantial solution of the social question. Every canton of Switzerland has its society of public utility, whose aims take an extensive range; it gives the start to projects of improvement of every description, infant schools, schools of design, savings banks, schemes for the poor, the sick, the dumb, singing classes, halls for Sunday recreation, popular lectures, workmen's houses, protection of animals, even industrial undertakings which promise to be ultimately beneficial, though they may not pay at first. The society of Basle has 900 members and a capital of £6,000, and the Swiss Society of Public Utility is an organization for the whole Republic, which holds an annual congress at Zurich, and general meetings in the different cantons by turns. These meetings pass off with every mark of enthusiasm, and gather together men of all religious and political opinions in a common concern for the progress and prosperity of the masses. One of the institutions which these societies have largely promoted is what they call a hall of industry, or a bazaar, where loans may be received by workmen on the security of their wages, or of goods they may deposit. A labourer who has made any article which he cannot get immediately sold, may deposit it at one of these bazaars, and obtain an advance equal to a fixed proportion of its value, and if the article is sold at the bazaar, the proceeds are accounted for to the depositor, less the sum advanced and a small charge for expenses. These institutions, Mr. Bonar says, have had excellent effects, though he admits that the facilities of borrowing have led the working men in some places into debt; but they are at any rate a vast improvement on the pawnbroking system in vogue elsewhere. The condition of Switzerland shows us clearly enough that democracy under a régime of freedom lends no ear to socialism, but sets its face in entirely different directions.

The United States of America have done more for experimental socialism than any other country. Owenites, Fourierists, Icarians have all established communities there, but these communities have failed long ago, except one of the Icarian, and the only other socialist experiments now existing in America are seventy or eighty religious communities, Shakers and Rappists, whose success has been due to their religious discipline and their celibacy, and whose members amount to no more than 5,000 souls all told. There is indeed a Russian Commune in California, but it remains a solitary Russian Commune still, the "new formula of civilization," as Russian reformers used to call it, showing no sign of further adoption. Nor has the new or political socialism found any better success in the States. There are various indigenous forms of it—such as the agrarian socialism of Mr. Henry George, and the nationalism of Mr. E. Bellamy—but in point of following they are of little importance, and the socialism of the American socialist and revolutionary parties is a mere German import, with as yet a purely German consumption. It has been pushed vigorously in the American market for twenty years, but taken singularly little hold of the American taste. There is one revolutionary socialist body composed chiefly of English-speaking members, the International Workmen's Association, which was founded in 1881 in one of the western states; but Mr. Ely says its membership would be generously estimated at 15,000, and it considers the great work of the present should be popular education, so as to prepare the people for the revolution when it comes.

The Boston Anarchists, perhaps, ought not, strictly speaking, to be included in any account of socialism, for, unlike most contemporary anarchists, they are not socialist, but extremely individualist; but historically, it is worth noting, Boston Anarchism is the doctrine of a disenchanted socialist, Josiah Warren, who had lived with Robert Owen at New Harmony, and came to the conclusion that that experiment failed because the individual had been too much sunk in the community, and no room was left for the play of individual interests, individual rights, and individual responsibilities. From Owen's communism, Warren ran to the opposite extreme, and thought it impossible to individualize things too much. He would abolish the State, and have the work of police and defence done by private enterprise, like any other service. He issued some books, tried to carry out his views by practical experiment, and, though they failed, he has still a small band of believing disciples at Boston, who publish a newspaper called Liberty, but have no organization and no importance.

Henry George and his followers, too, perhaps ought not in strictness to be classified among socialists. He would certainly repudiate such a classification himself, and the United Labour Party, which he founded in 1886 to promote his views by political action, expelled the socialists from membership in 1887. His actual practical proposal is nothing more than a narrow and illusory plan of taxation; but he puts it forward so expressly as the keystone of a new social system, as the remedy prescribed by economic science itself for the complete regeneration of society and the simultaneous removal of all existing social evils, that he is not improperly placed among Utopian socialists. Does he not promise us a new heaven and a new earth? And if he believes the State can call the new heaven and the new earth into being by a mere turn in the incidence of taxation, while most other contemporary socialists think the State must first pull down all that now is and reconstruct the whole on a new plan, is he, on account of this greater credulity of his, to be considered a more, and not rather a less, sober and rational speculator than they? He wants to abolish landlordism, while they want to abolish landlordism and all other capitalism besides; and his views may fairly be called partial or agrarian socialism. The United Labour Party was founded mainly to promote Mr. George's panacea of the single tax on such land values as arise from the growth of society apart from individual exertion; but it includes other articles in its programme—the municipalization of the supply of water, light, and heat; the nationalization of all money, note issue, post, telegraphs, railways, and savings banks; reduction of the hours of labour, prohibition of child labour, suppression of the competition of prison labour with honest labour; sanitary inspection of houses, factories, and mines; simplification of legal procedure; secret ballot; payment of election expenses. The United Labour Party is not strong. When Mr. George stood for the Mayoralty of New York, he had 68,000 votes to his opponent's 90,000; but he had on that occasion the assistance of the Socialistic Labour Party, who are said by Mr. Ely to number about 25,000 in New York, and who certainly constituted a very considerable element in the United Labour Party, for they were expelled at the Party Convention only by a vote of 94 to 54. On the other hand, Mr. Ely's estimate of the strength of the socialists is possibly too high, for they ran a candidate for the Mayoralty of New York themselves in 1888, a leading man of the party, one Jones, and he only secured 2,000 votes. However that may be, the United Labour Party was certainly much weakened by the loss of the socialists, and they were disabled entirely in the following year by a division on the question of Free Trade and the secession of Father McGlynn and the Protectionist members.

Nationalism is the name of a new movement, the fruit of the remarkable and very popular novel of Mr. Edward Bellamy, "Looking Backward," which may be said to be the latest description of Utopia as it now stands with all the most modern improvements. Mr. Bellamy would have all industry organized and conducted by the nation on the basis of a common obligation of work and a general guarantee of livelihood, all men to get exactly the same wages, and to do exactly the same quantity of work, due allowance being made for differences in severity, and the State to enlarge indefinitely its free public provision of the means of common enjoyment and culture. Mr. Bellamy's charming pictures of the new country naturally engendered a general wish to be there, and many little societies have been established to hasten the hour; but as the movement has not been more than a year in being, little account can yet be given of its success. The Nationalists have quite recently issued an organ, The New Nation, which announces its programme to be (1) the nationalization of post, telegraphs, telephone, railways and coal mines; (2) municipalization of gas and water supply, and the like; and (3) the equalization of educational opportunities as between rich and poor, and the promotion of all reforms tending towards humaner, more fraternal, and more equal conditions. Nationalism out of Utopia, therefore, means merely a little State-socialism.

The strongest socialist organizations in the United States are the Socialistic Labour Party, corresponding to the Social Democrats of Europe, and the International Working People's Association, corresponding to the anarchists; but both are composed almost exclusively of Germans. There are more Germans in the North American Republic than in any State of Germany except Prussia; and as many of them have fled from their own country for political reasons—to escape the conscription, or to escape prosecution for sedition—they bear no goodwill to the old system of government, and harbour revolutionary ideas almost from the nature of things. A socialist propaganda began among them so far back as 1848, when Weitling, of whom more will be said presently, published a socialist newspaper; and a Socialist Gymnastic Union was established in New York in 1850, which succeeded in forming a kind of federal alliance, apparently for socialistic purposes, with a number of other local German gymnastic societies throughout the States; but though these societies still exist, they seem to have dropped their socialism. It was taken up again, however, in 1869, by the International, which transferred its General Council to New York in 1872, held congresses from time to time in the country, and eventually, at the Newark Convention of 1877, adopted the name of the Socialistic Labour Party, with a programme formed after the Gotha lines. The numbers of the party were strengthened in the years immediately following by the arrival of German refugees, expelled from their own land by the Socialist Laws; but the new members brought with them elements of dissension which speedily came to a head after the arrival of the incendiary spirit, John Most, in 1882, and led, in 1883, to the entire separation of the Anarchists from the Social Democrats. The latter held a separate Congress at Baltimore in the latter year, attended by 16 delegates, representing 23 branches and 10,000 members, and it reported that altogether 38 branches adhered to them. The anarchists held a Congress at Pittsburg, and formed themselves into the International Working People's Association, with the following principles:—

"What we would achieve is therefore plainly and simply—

"1st. Destruction of the existing class rule by all means; i.e., by energetic, relentless, revolutionary, and international action.

"2nd. Establishment of a free society based upon co-operative organization of production.

"3rd. Free exchange of equivalent products by and between the productive organizations without commerce and profit-mongery.

"4th. Organization of education on a secular, scientific, and equal basis for both sexes.

"5th. Equal rights for all without distinction of sex or race.

"6th. Regulation of all public affairs by free contracts between the autonomous (independent) communes and associations resting on a federalistic basis." (Ely's "Labour Movement in America," p. 231.)

They differ from the Socialistic Labour Party, as this programme shows, in their exclusive devotion to revolution, and their opposition to all central government.

The Socialistic Labour Party has several newspapers, the principal being the Sozialist and the Neu Yorker Volkszeitung of New York, and the Tageblatt of Philadelphia; and the anarchists have more, the best known being Most's notorious Freiheit. Mr. Ely mentions sixteen socialist newspapers and ten sympathizing with socialism, and says that the majority of these support the anarchist side. The anarchists, moreover, have one journal in English—the Alarm; the Socialistic Labour Party started one in 1883, but it died. With that exception the press of both parties is entirely German, and neither party seems to have done almost anything in the way of an English propaganda from the platform. Dr. and Mrs. Aveling state that before they made their lecturing tour on the subject through the States in 1886, the American public had never heard socialism preached to them in their own tongue; yet books like Mr. Gronlund's "Co-operative Commonwealth," giving a very effective exposition of socialism, had already appeared from the American press. Dr. and Mrs. Aveling say, moreover, they met with more hostility to their mission from the anarchists than from any other source in America. The American people, while firmly stamping out the dynamite policy of the anarchists, have naturally nothing to say against an academic propaganda of any system of doctrine.

The trend of the labour movement in America seems away from socialism. That movement is in many respects more powerful there than in any European country. There are some five hundred labour newspapers in the United States, and an immense number of trade organizations of all kinds. Political power, moreover, both in the States and in the Union, is in the hands of the working class; and that class has now very nearly the same grievances there as it has in Europe, and the same aspirations after a better order of things. But their tendencies are not nearer socialism, but further from it. They simply cannot understand people who tell them they have no power to work out their own salvation under the system that is, and that nothing can be done, as Marx assures them, until every capital in Europe is ready for a simultaneous revolution with New York and Chicago. The trade unions accordingly ignore socialism. The Knights of Labour expressly repudiate it, and in the course of a very long programme they hardly make a demand which has a taint even of State-socialism. This "Noble Order of the Knights of Labour" is a general association of working men to promote the cause of labour, partly by their own efforts and partly through the Government. By their own efforts they are to promote co-operation till, if possible, it supersedes the present wages system entirely; equality of wages for men and women for equal work; a general eight hours day through a general strike; and a system of arbitration in trade quarrels. From the Union Legislature they want merely a few general reforms, none bearing directly on the situation of labour, except the abolition of foreign contract labour. The others are, reform of the currency, nationalization of telegraphs and railways, and the institution of banking facilities of various kinds in connection with the Post Office. From the State Legislatures they ask the reservation of public lands to actual settlers, the simplification of the administration of justice, factory legislation, graduated income tax, and the following provisions for labour: weekly payment of wages in money, mechanic's lien on the product of his labour for his wages, compulsory arbitration in trade disputes, prohibition of labour of children under fifteen. In 1886 they were 702,884 strong, but they have declined sorely since then. Their great weapon was to be an extension of strikes and boycotting beyond what was possible to single trades; but it was found that this policy was double-edged, and caused more hurt to some sections of the working class than any good it could do to others; and people lost faith in the principle of such huge miscellaneous organizations. Dr. Aveling contends that the Knights of Labour, in spite of Mr. Powderly's disclaimer, are really, though it may be unconsciously, socialists, because they want to supersede the wages system, if they can, by establishing co-operative institutions without State aid; and this, he holds, "is pure and unadulterated socialism." Indeed! then where is the man who is not a pure and unadulterated socialist? and what need for any mission to the States to preach the socialist message to the Americans for the first time in their own tongue?

England was the country last reached by the present wave of revolutionary socialism, although the system has been largely conceived upon a study of English circumstances, and is claimed to be peculiarly adapted to them. England is alternately the hope and the despair of Continental socialists. Every requisite of revolution is there, and yet the people will not rise. The yeomanry are gone. The land has come into the hands of a few. Industry is carried on by great centralized capital. The large system of production has almost finished its work. The mass of the people is a proletariat; they are thronged in large towns; every tenth person is a pauper; and the great mansions of the rich cast an evil shadow into the crowded dens of the wretched. "The English," says Eugène Dupont, a leading member of the old International, "possess all the materials necessary for the social revolution; but they lack the generalizing spirit and the revolutionary passion." Any proletariat movement in which the English proletariat takes no part, said Karl Marx, is "no better than a storm in a glass of water"; yet, though Marx himself resided in England for most of his life, no organized attempt was made to gain over the English proletariat to socialism till 1883—the year he died. There was before that, indeed, a small English section in a foreign socialist club in Soho; and, after the fall of the Paris Commune, hopes were for a time entertained of starting a serious socialist movement in our larger towns; but these hopes proved so delusive that Karl Marx said more than once to Mr. Hyndman, as we are told by the latter, that he despaired "of any great movement in England, unless in response to some violent impetus from without." But in 1883 a socialist movement seemed to break out spontaneously in England, the air hummed for a season with a multifarious social agitation, and we soon had a fairly complete equipment of socialist organizations—social democratic, anarchist, dilettante—which have ever since kept up a busy movement with newspapers, lectures, debates, speeches, and demonstrations in the streets.

In 1883 the Democratic Federation, which had been established two years before to promote measures of Radical reform, including, among other things, the nationalization of the land, adopted the socialistic principles of Karl Marx, and changed its name to the Social Democratic Federation. Its programme is long, and includes, besides the nationalization of land and all means of production, direct legislation by the people, direct election of all functionaries by adult suffrage, gratuitous justice, gratuitous, compulsory, and equal education, abolition of standing armies, Home Rule for Ireland, an eight hours day, State erection of workmen's dwellings, to be let at bare cost, progressive income tax, proportional representation, abolition of House of Lords, separation of Church and State, etc. Its principal founders were Mr. William Morris, an artist, a great poet, and a manufacturer exceptionally excellent in his arrangements with his workpeople; Mr. H. M. Hyndman, a journalist of standing and ability; Mr. J. Stuart Glennie, and Mr. Belfort Bax, both authors of repute; Dr. Aveling, a popular lecturer on science, and son-in-law of Karl Marx; Miss Helen Taylor, step-daughter of John Stuart Mill; and the Rev. Stewart Headlam. In January, 1884, they started a weekly newspaper, Justice, and a monthly magazine, To-Day, both of which still appear, and began the active work of lecturing and founding branches. But before the year was out, the old enemy of socialists, the spirit of division, entered among them, and Mr. Morris, with Dr. Aveling and Mr. Bax, seceded and set up an independent organization called the Socialist League, with a separate weekly organ, The Commonweal. The difference seems to have arisen out of the common socialist trouble about the propriety of mixing in current politics. The same disruptive tendency has persisted in the two parts, and in the end of 1890, Mr. William Morris seceded from the Socialist League with his local following at Hammersmith.

Neither of these revolutionary bodies has a complete organization like those of continental countries. They have never held a Congress, either national or provincial. They consist of a central committee in London, and detached local groups in the provinces, and their membership is not accurately known, but it is not extensive. It is in both cases declining, and it has always been variable, young men joining for a year or two, and then leaving. Their chief success has been among the miners of the North of England, and they have returned three members to the School Board of Newcastle. There is one socialist member in Parliament, Mr. Cunningham Graham, but he has not been returned on socialist principles or by a socialist vote; and hitherto the party has failed to obtain any serious support at the elections. At the election of 1885, Mr. John Burns, socialist candidate for Nottingham, had only 598 votes out of a total poll of 11,064, and Mr. J. Williams, the socialist candidate for Hampstead, had only 27 out of a total of 4,722. Mr. Burns, however, has since been returned to the London County Council, and will not improbably succeed in being returned to Parliament at next election. He is a working engineer, but is much the strongest leader English socialism has produced, an orator of great power, an excellent organizer, and the head and representative of a new labour movement which is likely to play a considerable part in the immediate future, and which is certainly fermented with a good measure of socialistic leaven. The New Unionism, as this movement is sometimes called, represents mainly the opinion of the new trade unions of unskilled labour—dockers and others—which have sprung into existence recently, and it was strong enough at the Trade Union Congress in 1890 to carry the day against the old unionism of the skilled trades by a considerable majority in favour of the compulsory and universal eight hours day. But, as Mr. T. Burt, M.P., the miners' parliamentary representative, said in his speech to the Eighty Club two months afterwards, the New Unionism is, after all, only the young and inexperienced unionism, and must needs run now through the same kind of errors which the older trade unions have gone through before, but will, like the older unions, learn, by discussion and experiment, to keep within the lines of practicable and beneficial action. However that may be, for the moment, at any rate, the fortunes of English socialism seem to lie with Mr. John Burns and his labour movement, and not with the two socialist organizations which appear to have already reached their height, and to be now on the decline.

A well-informed German writer lately warned us that anarchism had brought its headquarters to London, that it was coming into relations with the English population through its clubs and newspapers, and he ventured to prophesy that we should certainly have soon an anarchist fire to extinguish on our own hearth much more serious than Germany or Austria has had to encounter. So far, however, there is little to support such a prophecy. There are four small anarchist clubs in London—three of them German clubs, which live at strife with one another, and the fourth a Russian or Polish club, whose members have few or no dealings with the Germans. The German anarchists publish two weekly newspapers in German, which it is their great business to smuggle into the Fatherland, and the Russian or Polish anarchists publish one in Yedish—the German-Hebrew patois of the Polish Jews—which is printed for the entertainment of the Polish tailors of the East End. Some of the principal anarchist leaders, it is true, live amongst us—for example, Prince Krapotkin and Victor Dave—and under their influence a group of English anarchists has grown up during the last few years; but this group has already, after the manner of modern revolutionists, split on a point of doctrine into two opposite camps, which,—if we may judge from their respective organs, The Anarchist and Freedom—expend a considerable share of their destructive energies upon one another. The English anarchists have no permanent organization of any kind, and the one group are for socialist anarchism, and the other for individualist anarchism. On the whole the conversion of the English by the anarchist refugees is not an idea worthy of serious consideration; a better and more likely result would be that they would themselves, like Alexander Herzen, the leading anarchist of the past generation, be converted in England to more rational ideas of politics. Our safety lies, however, not so much in the practical character of our people, as in their habits of free and open discussion. What is called practicality is no safeguard against delusive ideas outside one's own immediate field of activity, and there is perhaps no country, except the still more practical country of America, where more favour is shown than here to fanaticism of any kind, if there seems to be heart in it. Besides, when we hear it said, We have indeed an enormous proletariat, but they are too practical to think of insurrection, we ought to reflect that, to the miserable, the practical test of a scheme will not be, Shall we be any the better for the change? but Shall we be any the worse for it? But under free institutions grievances always come to be ventilated; ventilation leads to more or less remedial measures, and discontent is removed altogether, or, at any rate, appeased for the time; and although under free institutions ill-considered schemes which inflate that discontent with delusive hopes may raise for a season a boom of earnest discussion, the discussion eventually kills them. So it seems to be with the fortunes of revolutionary socialism in England to-day. It has been much discussed for six years, but the height of the tide has been reached already, and the movement is now apparently on the ebb.

Besides these manifestations of revolutionary socialism, we have various societies representing an amateur and appreciative interest in socialism. There is the Christian Socialist Society, a small body of less than 150 adherents, including many clergymen and other members of the learned professions. They must not be confounded with the Christian Socialists of forty years ago, Maurice, Kingsley, and their allies, for the survivors of this earlier movement, such as Judge Thomas Hughes, Mr. Vansittart Neale, and Mr. J. M. Ludlow, do not belong to the present Christian Socialist Society, and would repudiate its principles. They wanted to promote co-operation without State interference, and they take a leading part in the co-operative movement still; but the Christian Socialist Society of the present day is all for State interference, and the articles of its organ, the Christian Socialist, strongly support the doctrines of Karl Marx, and declare that "the command, 'Thou shalt not steal,' if impartially applied, must absolutely prohibit the capitalist, as such, from deriving any revenue whatever from the labourer's toil." But with all their will to believe with the Marxists, the latter are not sure of them, and the socialist organs, Justice and To-Day, twit them one day for not being Christians, and the next for not being socialists. They are not men of the same mark as the earlier body of English Christian socialists, Canon Shuttleworth and Mr. Stewart Headlam being the two best known of them. The Guild of St. Matthew, which is composed to some extent of the same personnel as the Christian Socialist Society, has published a compendium of Christian socialism, and strives, among other branches of its activity, to cultivate good relations between socialists and the Church.

The Fabian Society, again, is a debating club of mixed socialism. It contains socialists of all feathers—revolutionary socialists and philosophical socialists, Christian socialists and un-Christian socialists—who meet together under its auspices and exchange their views, without having any recognised end beyond the discussion. They intervened lately, however, in the eight hours day controversy, and drafted a bill for a compulsory measure on the subject which attracted some public attention. Among the principal members are Mr. Sidney Webb, a well-known writer and lecturer on economic subjects, Mr. G. Bernard Shaw, journalist, Mrs. Besant, and Mr. W. Clarke. They have published a volume of Fabian Essays, which has had a large sale.

No account of English socialism would be complete that made no mention of the writings of Mr. Ruskin, which have probably done more than any other single influence to imbue English minds with sentiments and principles of a socialistic character. But they have produced nothing in the nature of a school or party more than perhaps some detached local group; such, for example, as the Sheffield Socialists, a small body formed under Ruskinian inspiration, and the leadership of Mr. E. Carpenter.

The outburst of socialist agitation in England in 1883 and 1884 was immediately preceded by a revival of popular interest in an old and favourite subject of English speculation, the nationalization of the land. Mr. Henry George had published his "Progress and Poverty" in 1881, and in the same year the Democratic Federation was established in London with land nationalization for one of its principles, and Mr. A. R. Wallace, the eminent naturalist, founded the Land Nationalization Society. In 1882, Mr. Wallace contributed still further to awaken discussion of the question by publishing his work on "Land Nationalization," and the discussion was spread everywhere in 1883 by the appearance of a sixpenny edition of Mr. George's remarkable work. Land nationalization in the hands of Mr. Wallace has little in common with any form of contemporary socialism. He does not contemplate any interference with the present system of agricultural production; that is still to be conducted by capitalists and hired labourers, as it is now. He merely proposes to abolish what is called landlordism by the compulsory conversion of the present tenant farmers into a body of yeomanry or occupying owners, and his scheme differs from the more ordinary proposals for the creation of peasant proprietors merely in two points: 1st—which is a very good proposal—that he would leave part of the price of the property to be paid in the form of a permanent annual quitrent to the State; and 2nd—which is a more doubtful proposal—that this part should represent, as nearly as it is possible now to calculate it, the original value of the soil apart from improvements of any kind—or, in other words, the unearned part of the present value of the property—and that it should be subject to periodical revision, with a view to recovering from the holder any further unearned increments of value that may accrue to his holding from time to time. Mr. Wallace, like Mr. George, has very utopian expectations from his scheme; but he would honestly buy up the rights of the existing landlords, while Mr. George would merely confiscate them by exceptional taxation. This difference broke up the Land Nationalization Society in 1883, and the partisans of Mr. George's view seceded and formed themselves into the English Land Restoration League, which has established branches in most of the larger towns, and has now probably a more numerous membership than the original society. It is especially strong in Scotland, and ran three candidates for Glasgow at the last general election; but the three only got 2,222 votes between them, out of a total of 23,800 polled in the three divisions they contested. The ideas of the League have a certain vogue among the Highland crofters, where they blend very readily with the universal peasant doctrines that the earth is the Lord's, and that all other lords should be abolished.

In Scotland there are a good many branches of the two regular socialist organizations. The Scottish Emancipation League joined the Social Democratic Federation, and the Scottish Land and Labour League joined the Socialist League; but it is remarkable that there is no socialism in Ireland, except in a small branch of the Socialist League in Dublin, called the Dublin Socialist Club, although it seems a miracle for a country seething for centuries with political and economic discontent to escape such a visitation. Probably, as with the Poles, the minds of the discontented are already too much pre-occupied with other political and social solutions. The land nationalization views of Mr. George are, of course, spread widely through the influence of Mr. Michael Davitt in the agrarian movement of Ireland.

But while the recent wave of socialism has passed over discontented Ireland, and left it, like Gideon's fleece, quite dry, much more susceptibility has been shown by those parts of the Empire where the lot of labour is, perhaps in all the world, the happiest—the Australian colonies. Here, too, the susceptibility has been created to some extent by the land questions of the country. Mr. George, in his recent lecturing tour through these colonies, met with a warm welcome in almost all the towns he visited, made many converts to his ideas, and gave rise to a considerable agitation. In South Australia three of his disciples were returned to the Legislature in 1887, and their views are supported by several newspapers in Adelaide. In a new colony the argument for keeping the land in the hands of the State has in some respects more point and force than in an old. Mr. George's disciples in Sydney publish a paper called the Land Nationalizer, and his views are advocated by one of the most influential papers in the colony, the Bulletin of Sydney. In New Zealand a bill has actually been brought in for the purpose of nationalizing the land. But apart from Mr. George altogether, there is a flourishing Australian Socialist League in Sydney, established in 1887, and with a membership of 7,000 in 1888. It has a journal called the Radical, and keeps up a busy agitation with lectures and discussions. As a method of temporary policy it promotes associations of labourers for the purpose of undertaking Government and municipal contracts. In Melbourne, again, people are more advanced. They have no socialist organization, but they have an anarchist club, established in 1886 for the purpose of aiding social reform on the lines of liberty, equality, and fraternity. It circulates the works of Proudhon, Tucker, the Boston anarchist, Bakunin, and Mr. Auberon Herbert; and it publishes a newspaper called Honesty, which appeared at first once a month, and latterly once in two months. The ideas of the party are not easy to ascertain exactly from the pages of their journal. The State is, of course, the enemy, and land monopoly is one of the State's worst creations; but some of the writers advocate land nationalization, while others propound a scheme of what they call "constructive anarchy," under which every man is to own the land he occupies. They have started a new form of co-operative store, a kind of mutual production society, whose members bind themselves to produce for one another, and exchange their products for the bare cost of production; and they have started a co-operative home, in which the members get better and cheaper accommodation through their combination. Melbourne anarchism, however, has no harm in it: it is a mere spark of eccentric speculation. The working class of Melbourne is probably the most powerful and the best organized working class in the world. In their Trades Hall they have had for thirty years a workmen's chamber of their own creating like what German socialists are vainly asking from the State, and much more effective, because more independent. They have secured the eight hours day to fifty-two different trades without receiving a finger's help from the law, and without losing a shilling of wages. They have, moreover, the voting power in their own hands. In fact, they are, as nearly as any working class can be, in the precise condition socialists require for revolutionary action. They are entirely dependent on a handful of capitalists for their employment, and they have the whole power of the State substantially under their own control; so that they might, if they chose, march to the Parliament House with a red flag, and instal the socialist State to-morrow. But they do not choose. They propose no change in the present industrial system, and make surprisingly few demands of any sort upon the State. The world goes very well with them as it is, and they will not risk the comforts they really enjoy to try any sweeping and problematical solutions. While the socialist movement, in the countries where it is most advanced and powerful, seems settling into a practical labour movement, the labour movement, in the countries where it is most advanced and powerful, is steering furthest and clearest from socialism.

CHAPTER III. FERDINAND LASSALLE.

German socialism is—it is hardly too much to say—the creation of Ferdinand Lassalle. Of course there were socialists in Germany before Lassalle. There are socialists everywhere. A certain rudimentary socialism is always in latent circulation in what may be called the "natural heart" of society. The secret clubs of China—"the fraternal leagues of heaven and earth"—who argue that the world is iniquitously arranged, that the rich are too rich, and the poor too poor, and that the wealth of the great has all accrued from the sweat of the masses, only give a formal expression to ideas that are probably never far from any one of us who have to work hard and earn little, and they merely formulate them less systematically than Marx and his disciples do in their theories of the exploitation of labour by capital. Socialism is thus so much in the common air we all breathe, that there is force in the view that the thing to account for is not so much the presence of socialism, at any time, as its absence. Accordingly it had frequently appeared in Germany under various forms before Lassalle. Fichte—to go no farther back—had taught it from the standpoint of the speculative philosopher and philanthropist. Schleiermacher, it may be remembered, was brought up in a religious community that practised it. Weitling, with some allies, preached it in a pithless and hazy way as a gospel to the poor, and, finding little encouragement, went to America, to work it out experimentally there. The Young Hegelians made it part of their philosophic creed. The Silesian weavers, superseded by machinery, and perishing for want of work, raised it as a wild inarticulate cry for bread, and dignified it with the sanction of tears and blood. And Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in 1848, summoned the proletariat of the whole world to make it the aim and instrument of a universal revolution. But it was Lassalle who first really brought it from the clouds and made it a living historical force in the common politics of the day. The late eminent Professor Lorenz von Stein, of Vienna, said, in 1842, in his acute and thoughtful work on French Communism, that Germany, unlike France, and particularly England, had nothing to fear from socialism, because Germany had no proletariat to speak of. Yet, in twenty years, we find Germany become suddenly the theatre of the most important and formidable embodiment of socialism that has anywhere appeared. Important and formidable, for two reasons: it founds its doctrines, as socialism has never done before, on a thoroughly scientific investigation of the facts, and criticism of the principles, of the present industrial régime, and it seeks to carry them out by means of a political organization, growing singularly in strength, and based on the class interests of the great majority of the people.

There were, of course, predisposing conditions for this outburst. A German proletariat had come into being since Stein wrote, and though still much smaller, in the aggregate, than the English, it was perhaps really at this time the more plethoric and distressed of the two. For the condition of the English working-classes had been greatly relieved by emigration, by factory legislation, by trades unions, whereas in some of these directions nothing at all, and in others only the faintest beginnings, had as yet been effected in Germany. Then, the stir of big political movement and anticipation was on men's minds. The future of the German nation, its unity, its freedom, its development, were practical questions of the hour. The nationality principle is essentially democratic, and the aspirations for German unity carried with them in every one of the States strong movements for the extension of popular freedom and power. This long spasmodic battle for liberty in Germany, which began with the century, and remains still unsettled, this long series of revolts and concessions and overridings, and hopes flattered and again deferred, this long uncertain babble of Gross-Deutsch and Klein-Deutsch, and Centralist and Federalist and Particularist, of "Gotha ideas" and "new eras" and "blood and iron," had prepared the public ear for bold political solutions, and has entered from the first as an active and not unimportant factor in the socialist agitation. Then again, the general political habits and training of the people must be taken into account. Socialistic ideas would find a readier vogue in Germany than in this country, because the people are less rigidly practical, because they have been less used to the sifting exercise of free discussion, and because they have always seen the State doing a great deal for them which they could do better for themselves, and are consequently apt to visit the State with blame and claims for which it ought not to be made responsible. Then the decline of religious belief in Germany, which the Church herself did much to produce when she was rationalistic, without being able to undo it since she has become orthodox, must certainly have impaired the patience with which the poor endured the miseries of their lot, when they still entertained the hope of exchanging it in a few short years for a happier and an everlasting one hereafter.

All these circumstances undoubtedly favoured the success of the socialistic agitation at the period it started; but, when everything is said, it is still doubtful whether German socialism would ever have come into being but for Lassalle. Its fermenting principle has been less want than positive ideas. This is shown by the fact that it was at first received among the German working classes with an apathy that almost disheartened Lassalle; and that it is now zealously propagated by them as a cause, as an evangel, even after they have emigrated to America, where their circumstances are comparatively comfortable. The ideas it contains Lassalle found for the most part ready to his hand. The germs of them may be discovered in the writings of Proudhon, in the projects of Louis Blanc. Some of them he acknowledges he owes to Rodbertus, others to Karl Marx, but it was in passing through his mind they first acquired the stamp and ring that made them current coin. Contentions about the priority of publishing this bit or that bit of an idea, especially if the idea be false, need not concern us; and indeed Lassalle makes no claim to originality in the economical field. He was not so much an inventive as a critical thinker, and a critical thinker of almost the first rank, with a dialectic power, and a clear, vivid exposition that have seldom been excelled. Any originality that is claimed for him lies in the region of interpretation of previous thought, and that in the departments of metaphysics and jurisprudence, not of economics.

The peculiarity of his mind was that it hungered with almost equal intensity for profound study and for exciting action, and that he had the gifts as well as the impulses for both. As he said of Heraclitus the Dark, whom he spent some of his best years in expounding, "there was storm in his nature." Heine, who knew and loved him well as a young man in Paris, and indeed found his society so delightful during his last years of haggard suffering, that he said, "No one has ever done so much for me, and when I receive letters from you, courage rises in me, and I feel better,"—Heine characterizes him very truly in a letter to Varnhagen von Ense. He says he was struck with astonishment at the combination of qualities Lassalle displayed—the union of so much intellectual power, deep learning, rich exposition on the one hand, with so much energy of will and capacity for action on the other. With all this admiration, however, he seems unable to regard him without misgiving, for his audacious confidence, checked by no thought of renunciation or tremor of modesty, amazed him as much as his ability. In this respect he says Lassalle is a genuine son of the modern time, to which Varnhagen and himself had acted in a way as the midwives, but on which they could only look like the hen that hatched duck's eggs and shuddered to see how her brood took to the water and swam about delighted. Heine here puts his finger on the secret of his young friend's failure. Lassalle would have been a great man if he had more of the ordinary restraining perceptions, but he had neither fear nor awe, nor even—in spite of his vein of satire—a wholesome sense of the ridiculous,—in this last respect resembling, if we believe Carlyle, all Jews. Chivalrous, susceptible, with a genuine feeling for the poor man's case, and a genuine enthusiasm for social reform, a warm friend, a vindictive enemy, full of ambition both of the nobler and the more vulgar type, beset with an importunate vanity and given to primitive lusts; generous qualities and churlish throve and strove in him side by side, and governed or misgoverned a will to which opposition was almost a native and necessary element, and which yet—or perhaps rather, therefore—brooked no check. "Ferdinand Lassalle, thinker and fighter," is the simple epitaph Professor Boeckh put on his tomb. Thinking and fighting were the craving of his nature; thinking and fighting were the warp and woof of his actual career, mingled indeed with threads of more spurious fibre. The philosophical thinker and the political agitator are parts rarely combined in one person, but to these Lassalle added yet a third, which seems to agree with neither. He was a fashionable dandy, noted for his dress, for his dinners, and, it must be added, for his addiction to pleasure—a man apparently with little of that solidarity in his own being which he sought to introduce into society at large, and yet his public career possesses an undoubted unity. It is a mistake to represent him, as Mr. L. Montefiore has done, as a savan who turned politician as if by accident and against his will, for the stir of politics was as essential to him as the absorption of study. It is a greater mistake, though a more common one, to represent him as having become a revolutionary agitator because no other political career was open to him. He felt himself, it is said, like a Cæsar out of employ, disqualified for all legitimate politics by his previous life, and he determined, if he could not bend the gods, that he would move Acheron. But so early as 1848, when yet but a lad of twenty-three, he was tried for sedition, and he then declared boldly in his defence that he was a socialist democrat, and that he was "revolutionary on principle." This he remained throughout. He laughs at those who cannot hear the word revolution without a shudder. "Revolution," he says, "means merely transformation, and is accomplished when an entirely new principle is—either with force or without it—put in the place of an existing state of things. Reform, on the other hand, is when the principle of the existing state of things is continued, and only developed to more logical or just consequences. The means do not signify. A reform may be carried out by bloodshed, and a revolution in the profoundest tranquillity. The Peasants' War was an attempt to introduce reform by arms, the invention of the spinning-jenny wrought a peaceful revolution." In this sense he was "revolutionary on principle." His thought was revolutionary, and it was the lessons he learnt as a philosopher that he applied and pled for an agitator. His thinking and his fighting belonged together like powder and shot. His Hegelianism, which he adopted as a youth at college, is from first to last the continuous source both of impetus and direction over his public career. Young Germany was Hegelian and revolutionary at the time he went to the University (1842), and with the impressionable Lassalle, then a youth of seventeen, Hegelianism became a passion. He wrote articles on it in University magazines, preached it right and left in the cafés and taverns, and resolved to make philosophy his profession and establish himself as a privat Docent at Berlin University. It was the first sovereign intellectual influence he came under, and it ruled his spirit to the end. In adopting it, his intellectual manhood may be said to have opened with a revolution, for his family were strict Jews, and he was brought up in their religion.

Lassalle was born in 1825 at Breslau, where his father was a wholesale dealer. He was educated at the Universities of Breslau and Berlin, and at the latter city saw, through the Mendelssohns, a good deal of the best literary society there, and made the acquaintance, among others, of Alexander von Humboldt, who used to call him a Wunderkind. On finishing his curriculum, he went for a time to Paris, and formed there a close friendship with H. Heine, who was an old acquaintance of his family. He meant to qualify himself as privat Docent when he returned, but was diverted from his purpose by the task of redressing a woman's wrongs, into which he flew with the romantic enterprise of a knight-errant, and which he carried, through years of patient and zealous labour, to a successful issue. The Countess Hatzfeldt had been married when a girl of sixteen to a cousin of her own, one of the great nobles of Germany; but the marriage turned out most unhappily after a few years, and she was obliged, on account of the maltreatment she suffered, to live apart from her husband. His persecution followed her into her separation. He took child after child from her, and was now seeking to take the last she had left, her youngest son. He allowed her very scanty and irregular support, while he lavished his money on mistresses, and was, at this very moment, settling on one of them an annuity of £1,000. This state of things had continued for twenty years, and the Countess's own relations had, for family reasons, always declined to take up her case. Lassalle, who had made her acquaintance in Berlin, was profoundly touched by her story, and felt that she was suffering an intolerable wrong, which society permitted only because she was a woman, and her husband a lord. Though not a lawyer, he resolved to undertake her case, and after carrying the suit before thirty-six different courts, during a period of eight years, he at length procured for her a divorce in 1851, and a princely fortune in 1854, from which she rewarded him with a considerable annuity for his exertions. Lassalle's connection with this case not unnaturally gave rise to sinister construction. It was supposed he must have been in love with the Countess, and wanted to marry her, but this was disproved by the event. Darker insinuations were made, but had there been truth in them, it could not have escaped the spies the Count sent to watch him, and the servants the Count bribed to inform on him. Chivalry, vanity, and temerity at the season of life when all three qualities are at their height, account sufficiently for his whole conduct, and I see no reason to doubt the explanation he himself gives of it. "Her family," he states, "were silent, but it is said when men keep silence the stones will speak. When every human right is violated, when even the voice of blood is mute, and helpless man is forsaken by his born protectors, there then rises with right man's first and last relation—man. You have all read with emotion the monstrous history of the unhappy Duchess of Praslin. Who is there among you that would not have gone to the death to defend her? Well, gentlemen, I said to myself, here is Praslin ten times over. What is the sharp death-agony of an hour compared with the pangs of death protracted over twenty years? What are the wounds a knife inflicts compared with the slow murder dispensed with refined cruelty throughout a being's whole existence? What are they compared with the immense woe of this woman, every right of whose life has been trampled under foot, day after day, for twenty years, and whom they have first tried to cover with contempt, that they might then the more securely overwhelm her with punishment?... The difficulties, the sacrifices, the dangers did not deter me. I determined to meet false appearances with the truth, to meet rank with right, to meet the power of money with the power of mind. But if I had known what infamous calumnies I should have to encounter, how people turned the purest motives into their contraries, and what ready credence they gave to the most wretched lies—well, I hope my purpose would not have been changed, but it would have cost me a severe and bitter struggle." There seems almost something unmodern in the whole circumstances of this case, both in the oppression the victim endured, and in the manner of her rescue.

In the course of this suit occurred the robbery of Baroness von Meyerdorff's cassette, on which so much has been said. The Baroness was the person already mentioned on whom Count Hatzfeldt bestowed the annuity of £1,000. The Countess, on hearing of this settlement, went straight to her husband, accompanied by a clergyman, and insisted upon him cancelling it, in justice to his youngest son, whom it would have impoverished. The Count at first promised to do so, but after her departure, refused, and the Baroness set out for Aix to get her bond effectually secured. Lassalle suspected the object of her journey, and said to the Countess, in the presence of two young friends, Could we not obtain possession of this bond? No sooner said than done. The two young men started for Cologne, and one of them stole the Baroness's cassette, containing the veritable deed, in her hotel, and gave it to the other. They and Lassalle were all three successively tried for their part in this crime. Oppenheim, who actually stole the cassette, was acquitted; Mendelssohn, who only received it, was sent to prison; and Lassalle, who certainly suggested the deed, was found guilty by the jury, but acquitted by the judges. Moral complicity of some sort was clear, but it did not amount to a legal crime. Our interest with the transaction is merely to discover the light it reflects on the character of the man. It was a rash, foolish, and lawless freak, but of course the ordinary motives of the robber were absent. The theft of the cassette, however, was a transaction which his enemies never suffered to be forgotten.

The theft of the cassette occurred in 1846; Lassalle was tried for it in 1848, and was no sooner released than he fell into the hands of justice on a much more serious charge. The dissolution of the first Prussian National Assembly in 1848, and the gift of a Constitution by direct royal decree, had excited bitter disappointment and opposition over the whole country. There was a general agitation for combining to stop supplies by refusing to pay taxes, in order thus "to meet force with force," and this agitation was particularly active in the Rhine provinces, where democratic views had found much favour. Lassalle even planned an insurrection, and urged the citizens of Dusseldorf to armed resistance; but the Prussian Government promptly intervened, placed the town under a state of siege, and threw Lassalle into jail. He was tried in 1849 for treason, and acquitted by the jury, but was immediately afterwards brought before a correctional tribunal on the minor charge of resisting officers of the police, and sent to prison for six months. It was in his speech at the former of these trials that he declared himself a partisan of the Socialist Democratic Republic, and claimed for every citizen the right and duty of active resistance to the State when necessary. He had nothing but scorn to pour on the passive resistance policy of the Parliament. "Passive resistance is a contradiction in itself. It is like Lichtenberg's knife, without blade, and without handle, or like the fleece which one must wash without wetting. It is mere inward ill-will without the outward deed. The Crown confiscates the people's freedom; and the Prussian National Assembly, for the people's protection, declares ill-will; it would be unintelligible how the commonest logic should have allowed a legislative assembly to cover itself with such incomparable ridicule if it were not too intelligible." These are bold words. He felt himself standing on a principle and representing a cause; and so he went into prison, he tells us, with as light a heart as he would have gone to a ball; and when he heard that his sister had petitioned for his pardon, he wrote instantly and publicly disclaimed her letter.

All these trials had brought Lassalle into considerable notoriety, not unmingled with a due recognition of his undoubted verve, eloquence, and brilliancy. One effect of them was that he was forbidden to come to Berlin. This prohibition was founded, of course, on his seditious work at Dusseldorf, but is believed to have been instigated and kept up by the influence of the Hatzfeldt family. Lassalle felt it a sore privation, for his ambitions and hopes all centred in Berlin. After various ineffectual attempts to obtain permission, he arrived in the capital one day in 1857 disguised as a waggoner, and through the personal intercession of Alexander von Humboldt with the king, was at length suffered to remain. His "Heraclitus" had just appeared, and at once secured him a position in literary circles. One of his first productions after his return to Berlin was a pamphlet on "The Italian War and the Mission of Prussia; a Voice from the Democracy," which shows that his political prosecutions had not soured him against Prussia. His argument is that freedom and democracy must in Germany, as in Italy, be first preceded by unity, and that the only power capable of giving unity to Germany was Prussia, as to Italy, Piedmont. He had more of the political mind than most revolutionaries and doctrinaires, and knew that the better might be made the enemy of the good, and that ideals could only be carried out gradually, and by temporary compromises. He was monarchical for the present, therefore, no doubt because he thought the monarchy to be for the time the best and shortest road to the democratic republic. His friend Rodbertus said there was an esoteric and an exoteric Lassalle. That may be said of all politicians. Compromise is of the essence of their work.

During the next few years Lassalle's literary activity was considerable. Besides a tragedy of no merit ("Franz von Sickingen," 1859) and various pamphlets or lectures on Fichte, on Lessing, on the Constitution, on Might and Right, he published in 1861 the most important work he has left us, his "System of Acquired Rights," and in 1862 a satirical commentary on Julian Schmidt's "History of German Literature," which excited much attention and amusement at the time. His "System of Acquired Rights" already contains the germs of his socialist views, and his pamphlet on the Constitution, which appeared when the "new era" ended and the era of Bismarck began, is written to disparage the Constitutionalism of modern Liberals. A paper constitution was a thing of no consequence; it was merely declarative, not creative; the thing of real account was the distribution of power as it existed in actual fact. The king and army were powers, the court and nobility were powers, the populace was a power. Society was governed by the relative strength of these powers, as it existed in reality and not by the paper constitution that merely chronicled it. Right is regarded as merely declarative of might. It is thus easy to see why he should have more sympathy with the policy of Bismarck than with the Liberals; and later in the same year he expounded his own political position very completely in a lecture he delivered to a Working Men's Society in Berlin, on "The Connection between the Present Epoch of History and the Idea of the Working Class." This lecture, to which I shall again revert, was an epoch in his own career. It led to a second Government prosecution, and a second imprisonment for political reasons; and it and the prosecution together led to his receiving an invitation to address a General Working Men's Congress at Leipzig, in February, 1863, to which he responded by a letter, sketching the political programme of the working class, which was certainly the first step in the socialist movement.

Attention was already being engaged on the work of industrial amelioration. The Progressist party, then including the present National Liberals, had, under the lead of Schultze-Delitzsch, been promoting trades unions and co-operation in an experimental way, and the working classes themselves were beginning to think of taking more concerted action for their own improvement. The Leipzig Congress was projected by a circle of working men, who considered the Schultze-Delitzsch schemes inadequate to meet the case. This was exactly Lassalle's view. He begins his letter by telling the working men that if all they wanted was to mitigate some of the positive evils of their lot, then the Schultze-Delitzsch unions, savings banks, and sick funds were quite sufficient, and there was no need of thinking of anything more. But if their aim was to elevate the normal condition of their class, then more drastic remedies were requisite; and, in the first instance, a political agitation was indispensable. The Leipzig working men had discussed the question of their relation to politics at a previous congress a few months before, and had been divided between abstaining from politics altogether, and supporting the Progressist party. Lassalle disapproved of both these courses. They could never achieve the elevation they desired till they got universal suffrage, and they would never get universal suffrage by backing the Progressists who were opposed to it. He then explains to them how their normal condition is permanently depressed at present by the essential laws of the existing economic régime, especially by "the iron and cruel law of necessary wages." The only real cure was co-operative production, the substitution of associated labour for wage labour; for it was only so the operation of this tyrannical law of wages could be escaped. Now co-operative production, to be of any effective extent, must be introduced by State help and on State credit. The State gave advances to start railways, to develop agriculture, to promote manufactures, and nobody called it socialism to do so. Why, then, should people cry socialism if the State did a similar service to the great working class, who were, in fact, not a class, but the State itself. 96½ per cent. of the population were ground down by "the iron law," and could not possibly lift themselves above it by their own power. They must ask the State to help them, for they were themselves the State, and the help of the State was no more a superseding of their own self-help than reaching a man a ladder superseded his own climbing. State help was but self-help's means. Now these State advances could not be expected till the working class acquired political power by universal suffrage. Their first duty was therefore to organize themselves and agitate for universal suffrage; for universal suffrage was a question of the stomach.

The reception his letter met with at first was most discouraging. The newspapers with one consent condemned it, except a Feudalist organ here and there who saw in it an instrument for damaging the Liberals. What seemed more ominous was the opposition of the working men themselves. The Leipzig Committee to whom it was addressed did indeed approve of it, and individual voices were raised in its favour elsewhere, but in Berlin the working men's clubs rejected it with decided warmth, and all over the country one working men's club after another declared against it. Leipzig was the only place in which his words seemed to find any echo, and he went there two months later and addressed a meeting at which only 7 out of 1,300 voted against him. With this encouragement he resolved to go forward, and founded, on the 23rd of May, 1863, the General Working Men's Association for the promotion of universal suffrage by peaceful agitation, after the model of the English Anti-Corn Law League. He immediately threw himself with unsparing energy into the development of this organization. He passed from place to place, delivering speeches, establishing branches; he started newspapers, wrote pamphlets, and even larger works, published tracts by Rodbertus, songs by Herwegh, romances by Von Schweitzer. But it was uphill work. South Germany was evidently dead to his ideas, and even among those who followed him in the North there were but few who really understood his doctrines or concurred in his methods. Some were for more "heroic" procedure, for raising fighting corps to free Poland, to free Schleswig-Holstein, to free oppressed nationalities anywhere. Many were perfectly impracticable persons who knew neither why exactly they had come together, nor where exactly they would like to go. There were constant quarrels and rivalries and jealousies among them, and he is said to have shown remarkable tact and patience, and a genuine governing faculty in dealing with them. Lassalle's hope was to obtain a membership of 100,000: with a smaller number nothing could be done, but with 100,000 the movement would be a power. In August, 1863, he had only enrolled 1,000 after three months' energetic labour, which, he said, "would have produced colossal results among a people like the French." He was intensely disappointed, and asked, "When will this foolish people cast aside their lethargy?" but meanwhile repelled the suggestion of the secretary of the organization that it should be at once dissolved. In August, 1864, another year's strenuous work had raised their numbers only to 4,610, and Lassalle was completely disenchanted, and wrote Countess Hatzfeldt from Switzerland, shortly before his death, that he was continuing President of the Association much against his will, for he was now tired of politics, which was mere child's play if one had not power. He seems to have been convinced that the movement was a failure, and would never become a force in the State. Yet he was wrong; his words had really taken fire among the working classes, and kindled a movement which, in its curious history, has shown the remarkable power of spreading faster with the checks it encounters. It seems to have profited, not merely from political measures of repression, but even from the internal dissensions and divisions of its own adherents, and some persons tell us that it was first stimulated into decided vigour by the fatal event which might have been expected to crush it—the sudden and tragical death of its chief.

In the end of July, 1864, Lassalle went to Switzerland ostensibly for the Righi whey cure, but really to make the acquaintance of Herr von Dönnigsen, Bavarian Envoy at Berne, whose daughter he had known in Berlin, and wished to obtain in marriage. It is one of the fatalities that entangled this man's life in strange contradictions, that exactly he, a persona ingratissima to Court circles, their very arch-enemy, as they believed, should have become bound by deep mutual attachment with the daughter of exactly a German diplomatist, the courtliest of the courtly, a Conservative seven times refined. They certainly cherished for one another a sincere, and latterly a passionate affection, and they seem to have been well fitted for each other. Helena von Dönnigsen was a bright, keen-witted, eccentric, adventurous young woman of twenty-five, and so like Lassalle, even in appearance, that when she was acting a man's part, years afterwards (in 1874), in some amateur performance in the theatre of Breslau, Lassalle's native town, many of the audience said, here was Lassalle again as he was when a boy. Learning from a common friend in Berlin that Lassalle was at the Righi, she made a visit to some friends in Berne, and soon after accompanied them on an excursion to that "popular" mountain. She inquired for Lassalle at the hotel, and he joined the party to the summit. She knew her parents would be opposed to the match, but felt certain that her lover, with his gifts and charms, would be able to win them over, and it was accordingly agreed that when she returned to Geneva, Lassalle should go there too, and press his suit in person. The parents, however, were inexorable, and refused to see him; and the young lady in despair fled from her father's house to her lover's lodging, and urged him to elope with her. Lassalle calmly led her back to her father's roof, with a control which some writers think quite inexplicable in him, but which was probably due to his still believing that he would be able to talk the parents round if he got the chance, and to his desire to try constitutional means before resorting to revolutionary. Helena was locked in her room for days alone with her excited brain and panting heart. For days, father, mother, sister, brother, all came and laid before her what ruin she was bringing on the family for a mere selfish whim of her own. If she married a man so objectionable to people in power, her father would be obliged to resign his post, her brother could never look for one, and her sister, who had just been engaged to a Count, would, of course, have to give up her engagement. She was in despair, but ultimately submitted passively to write to Lassalle, desiring him to consider the matter ended, and submitted equally passively (for she informs us herself) to accept the hand of Herr von Racowitza, a young Wallachian Boyar, whom she had indeed been previously engaged to, and sincerely liked and respected, without in the eminent sense loving him. Lassalle had meanwhile wrought himself into a fury of excitement. Enraged by her parents' opposition, enraged still more by their refusal even to treat with him, enraged above all by his belief that their daughter was being illegitimately constrained, he wrote here, wrote there, tried to get the foreign minister at Munich to interfere, to get Bishop Ketteler to use his influence, promised even to turn Catholic to please the Dönnigsens, forgetting that they were Protestants. All in vain. At last two of his friends waited by appointment on Herr von Dönnigsen, and heard from Helena's own lips that she was to be married to the Boyar, and wished the subject no more mentioned. She now tells us that she did this in sheer weariness of mind, and with a confused hope that somehow or other the present storm would blow past, and she might have her Lassalle after all. Lassalle, however, was overcome with chagrin; and though he always held that a democrat should not fight duels, and had got Robespierre's stick, which he usually carried, as a present for having declined one, he now sent a challenge both to the father and the bridegroom. The latter accepted. The duel was fought. Lassalle was fatally wounded, and died two days after, on the 31st August, 1864, at the age of 39. Helena married Herr von Racowitza shortly afterwards, but he was already seized with consumption, and she says she found great comfort, after the tumult and excitement of the Lassalle episode, in nursing him during the few months he lived after their marriage.

The body was sent back to Germany, after funeral orations from revolutionists of all countries and colours, and the Countess Hatzfeldt had made arrangements for similar funeral celebrations at every halting place along the route to Berlin, where she meant it to be buried, but at Cologne it was intercepted by the police on behalf of the Lassalle family, and carried quietly to Breslau, where, after life's fitful fever, he was laid silently with his fathers in the Jewish burying-ground of his native place. Fate, however, had not even yet done with him. It followed him beyond the tomb to throw one more element of the bizarre into his strangely compounded history. Lest the death of the leader should prove fatal to the cause, the Committee of the General Working Men's Association determined to turn it, if possible, into a source of strength, as B. Becker, his successor in the president's chair, informs us, "by carrying it into the domain of faith." Lassalle was not dead, but only translated to a higher and surer leadership. A Lassalle cultus was instituted, and Becker says that many a German working man believed that he died for them, and that he was yet to come again to save them. This singular apotheosis, which is neither creditable to the honesty of the leaders of the socialist movement, nor to the intelligence of its rank and file, was kept up by periodical celebrations among those of the German socialists who are generally known as the orthodox Lassalleans, down, at least, to the time of the Anti-Socialist Law of 1878.

Lassalle's doctrines are mainly contained in his lecture on "The Present Age and the Idea of the Working Class," which he delivered in 1862, and published in 1863, under the title of the "Working Men's Programme," and in his "Herr Bastiat-Schultze von Delitzsch, der Oekonomische Julian; oder Capital und Arbeit," Berlin, 1864.

In the "Working Men's Programme," the question of the emancipation of the working class is approached and contemplated from the standpoint of the Hegelian philosophy of history. There are, it declares, three successive stages of evolution in modern history. First, the period before 1789, the feudal period, when all public power was vested in, exercised by, and employed for the benefit of, the landed class. It was a period of privileges and exemptions, which were enjoyed by the landed interests exclusively, and there prevailed a strong social contempt for all labour and employment not connected with the land. Second, the period 1789-1848, the bourgeois period, in which personal estate received equal rights and recognition with real, but in which political power was still based on property qualifications, and legislation was governed by the interests of the bourgeoisie. Third, the period since 1848, the age of the working class, which is, however, only yet struggling to the birth and to legal recognition. The characteristic of this new period is, that it will for the first time give labour its rights, and that it will be dominated by the ideas, aspirations, and interests of the great labouring class. Their time has already come, and the bourgeois age is already past in fact, though it still lingers in law. It is always so. The feudal period had in reality come to an end before the Revolution. A revolution is always declarative and never creative. It takes place first in the heart of society, and is only sealed and ratified by the outbreak. "It is impossible to make a revolution, it is possible only to give external legal sanction and effect to a revolution already contained in the actual circumstances of society.... To seek to make a revolution is the folly of immature men who have no consideration for the laws of history; and for the same reason it is immature and puerile to try to stem a revolution that has already completed itself in the interior of society. If a revolution exists in fact, it cannot possibly be prevented from ultimately existing in law." It is idle, too, to reproach those who desire to effect this transition with being revolutionary. They are merely midwives who assist in bringing to the birth a future with which society is already pregnant. Now, it is this midwife service that Lassalle believed the working class at present required. He says of the fourth estate what Sieyès said of the third, What is the fourth estate? Nothing? What ought the fourth estate to be? Everything. And it ought to be so in law, because it is so already in fact. The bourgeoisie, in overthrowing the privileges of the feudal class, had almost immediately become a privileged class itself. At so early a period of the revolution as the 3rd of September, 1791, a distinction was introduced between active and passive citizens. The active citizen was the citizen who paid direct taxes, and had therefore a right to vote; the passive citizen was he who paid no direct taxes, and had no right to vote. The effect of this distinction was to exclude the whole labouring classes from the franchise; and under the July Monarchy, while the real nation consisted of some thirty millions, the legal nation (pays légal), the people legally possessed of political rights, amounted to no more than 200,000, whom the Government found it only too easy to manage and corrupt. The revolution of 1848 was simply a revolt against this injustice. It was a revolt of the fourth estate against the privileges of the third, as the first revolution was a revolt of the third against the privileges of the other two. Nor were the privileges which the bourgeoisie had contrived to acquire confined to political rights alone; they included also fiscal exemptions. According to the latest statistical returns, it appeared that five-sixths of the revenue of Prussia came from indirect taxation, and indirect taxes were always taken disproportionately out of the pockets of the working class. A man might be twenty times richer than another, but he did not therefore consume twenty times the amount of bread, salt, or beer. Taxation ought to be in ratio of means, and indirect taxation—so much favoured by the bourgeoisie—was simply an expedient for saving the rich at the expense of the poor.

Now, the revolution of 1848 was a fight for the emancipation of the working class from this unequal distribution of political rights and burdens. The working class was really not a class at all, but was the nation; and the aim of the State should be their amelioration. "What is the State?" asks Lassalle. "You are the State," he replies. "You are ninety-six per cent. of the population. All political power ought to be of you, and through you, and for you; and your good and amelioration ought to be the aim of the State. It ought to be so, because your good is not a class interest, but is the national interest." The fourth estate differs from the feudal interest, and differs from the bourgeoisie, not merely in that it is not a privileged class, but in that it cannot possibly become one. It cannot degenerate, as the bourgeoisie had done, into a privileged and exclusive caste; because, consisting as it does of the great body of the people, its class interest and the common good are identical, or at least harmonious. "Your affair is the affair of mankind; your personal interest moves and beats with the pulse of history, with the living principle of moral development."

Such then is the idea of the working class, which is, or is destined to be, the ruling principle of society in the present era of the world. Its supremacy will have important consequences, both ethical and political. Ethically, the working class is less selfish than the classes above it, simply because it has no exclusive privileges to maintain. The necessity of maintaining privileges always develops an assertion of personal interest in exact proportion to the amount of privilege to be defended, and that is why the selfishness of a class constantly exceeds the individual selfishness of the members that compose it. Now under the happier régime of the idea of labour, there would be no exclusive interests or privileges, and therefore less selfishness. Adam would delve and Eve would spin, and, consciously or unconsciously, each would work more for the whole, and the whole would work more for each. Politically, too, the change would be remarkable and beneficial. The working class has a quite different idea of the State and its aim from the bourgeoisie. The latter see no other use in the State but to protect personal freedom and property. The State is a mere night-watchman, and, if there were no thieves and robbers, would be a superfluity; its occupation would be gone. Its whole duty is exhausted when it guarantees to every individual the unimpeded exercise of his activity as far as consistent with the like right of his neighbours. Even from its own point of view this bourgeois theory of the State fails to effect its purpose. Instead of securing equality of freedom, it only secures equality of right to freedom. If all men were equal in fact, this might answer well enough, but since they are not, the result is simply to place the weak at the mercy of the powerful. Now the working class have an entirely different view of the State's mission from this. They say the protection of an equality of right to freedom is an insufficient aim for the State in a morally ordered community. It ought to be supplemented by the securing of solidarity of interests and community and reciprocity of development. History all along is an incessant struggle with Nature, a victory over misery, ignorance, poverty, powerlessness—i.e., over unfreedom, thraldom, restrictions of all kinds. The perpetual conquest over these restrictions is the development of freedom, is the growth of culture. Now this is never effected by each man for himself. It is the function of the State to do it. The State is the union of individuals into a moral whole which multiplies a millionfold the aggregate of the powers of each. The end and function of the State is not merely to guard freedom, but to develop it; to put the individuals who compose it in a position to attain and maintain such objects, such levels of existence, such stages of culture, power, and freedom, as they would have been incapable of reaching by their own individual efforts alone. The State is the great agency for guiding and training the human race to positive and progressive development; in other words, for bringing human destiny (i.e., the culture of which man as man is susceptible) to real shape and form in actual existence. Not freedom, but development is now the keynote. The State must take a positive part, proportioned to its immense capacity, in the great work which, as he has said, constitutes history, and must forward man's progressive conquest over misery, ignorance, poverty, and restrictions of every sort. This is the purpose, the essence, the moral nature of the State, which she can never entirely abrogate, without ceasing to be, and which she has indeed always been obliged, by the very force of things, more or less to fulfil, often without her conscious consent, and sometimes in spite of the opposition of her leaders. In a word, the State must, by the union of all, help each to his full development. This was the earnest and noble idea of 1848. It is the idea of the new age, the age of labour, and it cannot fail to have a most important and beneficial bearing on the course of politics and legislation whenever it is permitted to have free operation in that sphere by means of universal and direct suffrage.

This exposition of Lassalle's teaching in his "Working Men's Programme" already furnishes us with the transition to his economic views. Every age of the world, he held, has its own ruling idea. The idea of the working class is the ruling idea of the new epoch we have now entered on, and that idea implies that every man is entitled to a menschenwürdiges Dasein, to an existence worthy of his moral destiny, and that the State is bound to make this a governing consideration in its legislative and executive work. Man's destiny is to progressive civilization, and a condition of society which makes progressive civilization the exclusive property of the few, and practically debars the vast mass of the people from participation in it, stands in the present age self-condemned. It no longer corresponds to its own idea. Society has long since declared no man shall be enslaved; society has more recently declared no man shall be ignorant; society now declares no man shall be without property. He cannot be really free without property any more than he can be really free without knowledge. He has been released successively from a state of legal dependence and from a state of intellectual dependence; he must now be released from a state of economic dependence. This is his final emancipation, which is necessary to enable him to reap any fruits from the other two, and it cannot take place without a complete transformation of present industrial arrangements. It is a common mistake, he said, to think that socialists take their stand on equality. They really take their stand on freedom. They argue that the positive side of freedom is development, and if every man has a right to freedom, then every man has a right to the possibility of development. From this right, however, they allege the existing industrial system absolutely excludes the great majority. The freeman cannot realize his freedom, the individual cannot realize his individuality, without a certain external economic basis of work and enjoyment, and the best way to furnish him with this is to clothe him in various ways with collective property.

Lassalle's argument, however, is still more specific than this. In the beginning of his "Herr Bastiat-Schultze," he quotes a passage from his previous work on "The System of Acquired Rights," which he informs us he had intended to expand into a systematic treatise on "The Principles of Scientific National Economy." This intention he was actually preparing to fulfil when the Leipzig invitation and letter diverted him at once into practical agitation. He regrets that circumstances had thus not permitted the practical agitation to be preceded by the theoretical codex which should be the basis for it, but adds that the substance of his theory is contained in this polemic against Schultze-Delitzsch, though the form of its exposition is considerably modified by his plan of following the ideas of Schultze's "Working Men's Catechism," and by his purpose of answering Schultze's misplaced taunt of "half knowledge" by trying to extinguish the economic pretensions of the latter as completely as he had done the literary pretensions of Julian Schmidt. "Every line I write," says Lassalle, with a characteristic finality of self-confidence, "I write armed with the whole culture of my century"; and at any rate Schultze-Delitzsch was far his inferior in economic as in other knowledge. In the passage to which I have referred, Lassalle says, "The world is now face to face with a new social question, the question whether, since there is no longer any property in the immediate use of another man, there should still exist property in his mediate exploitation—i.e., whether the free realization and development of one's power and labour should be the exclusive private property of the owner of the instruments and advances necessary for labour—i.e., of capital; and whether the employer as such, and apart from the remuneration of his own intellectual labour of management, should be permitted to have property in the value of other people's labour—i.e., whether he ought to receive what is known as the premium or profit of capital, consisting of the difference between the selling price of the product and the sum of the wages and salaries of all kinds of labour, manual and mental, that have contributed to its production."

His standing-point here, again, as always, belongs to the philosophy of history—to the idea of historical evolution with which his Hegelianism had early penetrated him. The course of legal history has been one of gradual but steady contraction of the sphere of private property in the interests of personal freedom and development. The ancient system of slavery, under which the labourer was the absolute and complete property of his master, was followed by the feudal system of servitudes, under which he was still only partially proprietor of himself, but was bound by law to a particular lord by one or more of a most manifold series of specific services. These systems have been successively abolished. There is no longer property in man or in the use of man. No man can now be either inherited or sold in whole or in part. He is his own, and his power of labour is his own. But he is still far from being in full possession of himself or of his labour. He cannot work without materials to work on and instruments to work with, and for these the modern labourer is more dependent than ever labourer was before on the private owners in whose hands they have accumulated. And the consequence is that under existing industrial arrangements the modern labourer has no more individual property in his labour than the ancient slave had. He is obliged to part with the whole value of his labour, and content himself with bare subsistence in return. It is in this sense that socialist writers maintain property to be theft—not that subjectively the proprietors are thieves, but that objectively, under the exigencies of a system of competition, they cannot help offering workmen, and workmen cannot help accepting, wages far under the true value of their labour. Labour is the source of all wealth, for the value of anything—that which makes it wealth—is, on the economists' own showing, only another name for the amount of labour put into the making of it; and labour is the only ground on which modern opponents of socialism—Thiers and Bastiat, for example—think the right of individual property can be established. Yet on the methods of distribution of wealth that now exist, individual property is not founded on this its only justifiable basis, and the aim of socialists is to emancipate the system of distribution from the influence of certain unconscious forces which, as they allege, at present disturb it, and to bring back individual property for the first time to its natural and rightful foundation—labour. Their aim is not to abolish private property, but to purify it, by means of some systematic social regulation which shall give each man a share more conformable with his personal merit and contribution. Even if no question is raised about the past, it is plain that labour is every day engaged in making more new property. Millions of labouring men are, day after day, converting their own brain, muscle, and sinew into useful commodities, into value, into wealth. Now, the problem of the age, according to Lassalle, is this, whether this unmade property of the future should not become genuine labour property, and its value remain greatly more than at present in the hands that actually produced it.

This, he holds, can only be done by a fundamental reconstruction of the present industrial system, and by new methods of determining the remuneration of the labouring class. For there is a profound contradiction in the present system. It is unprecedentedly communistic in production, and unprecedentedly individualistic in distribution. Now there ought to be as real a joint participation in the product, as there is already a joint participation in the work. Capital must become the servant of labour instead of its master, profits must disappear, industry must be conducted more on the mutual instead of the proprietary principle, and the instruments of production be taken out of private hands and turned into collective or even, it may be, national property. In the old epoch, before 1789, industrial society was governed by the principle of solidarity without freedom; in the period since 1789, by freedom without solidarity, which has been even worse; in the epoch now opening, the principle must be solidarity in freedom.

Partisans of the present system object to any social interference with the distribution of wealth, but they forget how much—how entirely—that distribution is even now effected by social methods. The present arrangement of property, says Lassalle, is, in fact, nothing but an anarchic and unjust socialism. How do you define socialism? he asks. Socialism is a distribution of property by social channels. Now this is the condition of things that exists to-day. There exists, under the guise of individual production, a distribution of property by means of purely objective movements of society. For there is a certain natural solidarity in things as they are, only being under no rational control, it operates as a wild natural force, as a kind of fate destroying all rational freedom and all rational responsibility in economic affairs. In a sense, there never was more solidarity than there is now; there never was so much interdependence. Under the large system of production, masses of workmen are simply so many component parts of a single great machine driven by the judgment or recklessness of an individual capitalist. With modern facilities of inter-communication, too, the trade of the world is one and indivisible. A deficient cotton harvest in America carries distress into thousands of households in Lyons, in Elberfeld, in Manchester. A discovery of gold in Australia raises all prices in Europe. A simple telegram stating that rape prospects are good in Holland instantly deprives the oilworkers of Prussia of half their wages. So far from there being any truth in the contention of Schultze-Delitzsch, that the existing system is the only sound one, because it is founded on the principle of making every man responsible for his own doings, the very opposite is the case. The present system makes every man responsible for what he does not do. In consequence of the unprecedented interconnection of modern industry, the sum of conditions needed to be known for its successful guidance have so immensely increased that rational calculation is scarcely possible, and men are enriched without any merit, and impoverished without any fault. According to Lassalle, in the absence as yet of an adequate system of commercial statistics, the number of known conditions is always much smaller than the number of unknown, and the consequence is, that trade is very much a game of chance. Everything in modern industrial economy is ruled by social connections, by favourable or unfavourable situations and opportunities. Conjunctur is its great Orphic chain. Chance is its Providence—Chance and his sole and equally blind counsellor, Speculation. Every age and condition of society, says Lassalle, tends to develop some phenomenon that more particularly expresses its type and spirit, and the purest type of capitalistic society is the financial speculator. Capital, he maintains, is a historical and not a logical category, and the capitalist is a modern product. He is the development, not of the ancient Crœsus or the mediæval lord, but of the usurer, who has taken their place, but was in their lifetime hardly a respectable person. Crœsus was a very rich man, but he was not a capitalist, for he could do anything with his wealth except capitalize it. The idea of money making money and of capital being self-productive, which Lassalle takes to be the governing idea of the present order of things, was, he says, quite foreign to earlier periods. Industry is now entirely under the control of capitalists speculating for profit. No one now makes things first of all for his own use—as mythologizing economists relate—and then exchanges what is over for the like redundant work of his neighbours. Men make everything first of all, and last of all, for other people's use, and they make it at the direction and expense of a capitalist who is speculating for money, and, in the absence of systematic statistics, is speculating in the dark. Chance and social connections make him rich, chance and social connections bring him to ruin. Capital is not the result of saving, it is the result of Conjunctur; and so are the vicissitudes and crises that have so immensely increased in modern times. What you have now, therefore, says Lassalle, is a system of socialism; wealth is at present distributed by social means, and by nothing else; and all he contends for is, as he says, to substitute a regulated and rational socialism for this anarchic and natural socialism that now exists.

His charge against the present system, however, is more than that it is anarchic; he maintains it to be unjust—organically and hopelessly unjust. The labourer's back is the green table on which the whole game is played, and all losses are in the end sustained by him. A slightly unfavourable turn of things sends him at once into want, while even a considerably favourable one brings him no corresponding advantage, for, according to all economists, wages are always the last thing to rise with a reviving trade. The present system is, in fact, incapable of doing the labourer justice, and would not suffer employers to do so even if they wished. Injustice is bred in its very bone and blood. In this contention Lassalle builds his whole argument on premises drawn from the accepted economic authorities. Socialist economics, he says, is nothing but a battle against Ricardo, whom he describes as the last and most representative development of bourgeois economics; and it fights the battle with Ricardo's own weapons, and on Ricardo's own ground. There are two principles in particular of which it makes much use—Ricardo's law of value and Ricardo's law of natural or necessary wages.

Ricardo's law of value is that the value of a commodity, or the quantity of any other commodity for which it will exchange, depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production, and not on the greater or less compensation which is paid for that labour. Value is thus resolved into so much labour, or what is the same thing, so much time consumed in labour, mental and manual, upon the commodity. This reduction of value to quantity of time is reckoned by Lassalle the one great merit of Ricardo and the English economists. Ricardo, however, strictly limited his law to commodities that admitted of indefinite multiplication, the value of other commodities being, he held, regulated by their scarcity; and he confined it to the normal value of the commodities only, the fluctuations of their market-price depending on other considerations. But Lassalle seeks to make it cover these cases also by means of a distinction he draws between individual time of labour, and socially necessary time of labour. According to this distinction, what constitutes the value of a product is not the time actually taken or required by the person who made it; for he may have been indolent or slow, or may not have used the means and appliances which the age he lived in afforded him. What constitutes value is the average time of labour socially necessary, the time required by labour of average efficiency using the methods the age supplies. If the commodity can be produced in an hour, an hour's work will be its value, though you have taken ten to produce it by slower methods. So far there is nothing very remarkable, but Lassalle goes on to argue that you may waste your time not merely by using methods that society has superseded, but by producing commodities that society no longer wants. You go on making shoe-buckles after they have gone out of fashion, and you can get nothing for them. They have no value. And why? Because, while they indeed represent labour, they do not represent socially necessary labour. So again with over-production: you may produce a greater amount of a commodity than society requires at the time. The value of the commodity falls. Why? Because while it has cost as much actual labour as before, it has not cost so much socially necessary labour. In fact, the labour it has taken has been socially unnecessary, for there was no demand for the product. On the other hand—and we are entitled to make this expansion of Lassalle's argument—take the case of under-production, of deficient supply. Prices rise. What is usually known as a scarcity value is conferred on commodities. But this scarcity value Lassalle converts into a labour value; the commodity is produced by the same individual labour, but the labour is more socially necessary. In plain English, there is more demand for the product.

Lassalle's distinction is thus an ingenious invention for expressing rarity value in terms of labour value. It has no theoretical importance, but is of some practical service in the socialistic argument. That argument is not that value is constituted by labour pure and simple, but by labour modified by certain general conditions of society; only it holds that these conditions—conditions of productivity, of rarity, of demand—have been created by nobody in particular, that, therefore, nobody in particular should profit by them, and that so far as the problem of the distribution of value goes, the one factor in the constitution of value which needs to be taken into account in settling that problem, is labour. All value comes from labour, represents so much time of labour, is, in fact, so much "labour-jelly," so much preserved labour.

While one accepted economic law thus declares that all value is conferred by the labourer, and is simply his sweat, brain, and sinew incorporated in the product, another economic law declares that he gains no advantage from the productivity of his own work, and that whatever value he produces, he earns only the same wages—bare customary subsistence. In that lies the alleged injustice of the present system. Von Thuenen, the famous Feudalist landowner and economic experimentalist, said, many years ago, that when the modern working class once began to ask the question, What is natural wages? a revolution might arise which would reduce Europe to barbarism. This is the question Lassalle asked, and by which mainly he stirred up socialism. The effect of the previous argument was to raise the question, What is the labourer entitled to get? and to suggest the answer, he is entitled to get everything. The next question is, What, then, does the labourer actually get? and the answer is, that on the economists' own showing, he gets just enough to keep soul and body together, and on the present system can never get any more. Ricardo, in common with other economists, had taught that the value of labour, like the value of everything else, was determined by the cost of its production, and that the cost of the production of labour meant the cost of the labourer's subsistence according to the standard of living customary among his class at the time. Wages might rise for a season above this level, or fall for a season below it, but they always tended to return to it again, and would not permanently settle anywhere else. When they rose higher, the labouring class were encouraged by their increased prosperity to marry, and eventually their numbers were thus multiplied to such a degree that by the force of ordinary competition the rate of wages was brought down again; when they fell lower, marriages diminished and mortality increased among the working class, and the result was such a reduction of their numbers as to raise the rate of wages again to its old level. This is the economic law of natural or necessary wages—"the iron and cruel law" which Lassalle declared absolutely precluded the wage-labourers—i.e., 96 per cent. of the population—from all possibility of ever improving their condition or benefiting in the least from the growing productivity of their own work. This law converted industrial freedom into an aggravated slavery. The labourer was unmanned, taken out of a relationship which, with all its faults, was still a human and personal one, put under an impersonal and remorseless economic law, sent like a commodity to be bought in the cheapest market, and there dispossessed by main force of competition of the value of the property which his own hands had made. Das Eigenthum ist Fremdthum geworden.

It is no wonder that teaching like this should move the minds of working men to an intolerable sense of despair and wrong. Nor was there any possibility of hope except in a revolution. For the injustice complained of lay in the essence of the existing economic system, and could not be removed, except with the complete abolition of the system. The only solution of the question, therefore, was a socialistic reconstruction which should make the instruments of production collective property, and subordinate capital to labour, but such a solution would of course be the work of generations, and meanwhile, the easiest method of transition from the old order of things to the new, lay in establishing productive associations of working men on State credit. These would form the living seed-corn of the new era. This was just Louis Blanc's scheme, with two differences—viz., that the associations were to be formed gradually, and that they were to be formed voluntarily. The State was not asked to introduce a new organization of labour by force all at once, but merely to lend capital at interest to one sound and likely association after another, as they successively claimed its aid. This loan was not to be gratuitous, as the French socialists used to demand in 1848, and since there would be eventually only one association of the same trade in each town, and since, besides, they would also establish a system of mutual assurance against loss, trade by trade, the State, it was urged, would really incur no risk. Lassalle, speaking of State help, said he did not want a hand from the State, but only a little finger, and he actually sought, in the first instance at least, no more than Mr. Gladstone gave in the Irish Land Act. The scheme was mainly urged, of course, in the interests of a sounder distribution of wealth; but Lassalle contended that it would also increase production; and it is important to remember that he says it would not otherwise be economically justifiable, because "an increase of production is an indispensable condition of every improvement of our social state." This increase would be effected by a saving of cost, in abolishing local competition, doing away with middle-men and private capitalists, and adapting production better to needs. The business books of the association would form the basis of a sound and trustworthy system of commercial statistics, so much required for the purpose of avoiding over-production. The change would, he thought, also introduce favourable alterations in consumption, and in the direction of production; inasmuch as the taste of the working class for the substantial and the beautiful, would more and more supplant the taste of the bourgeoisie for the cheap and nasty.

After the death of Lassalle, the movement he began departed somewhat from the lines on which he launched it. 1st, His plan of replacing capitalistic industry by productive associations of labourers, founded on State credit, had always seemed a mockery, or, at least, a makeshift, to many of the socialists of Germany. It would not destroy competition, for one association would still of necessity compete with another; and it would not secure to every man the right to the full product of his labour, for the members of the stronger productive associations would be able to exploit the members of the weaker as the ordinary result of their inter-competition. In other words, Lassalle's plan would not in their eyes realize the socialist claim, as that claim had been taught to them by Marx. Their claim could only be realized by the conversion of all industrial instruments into public property, and the systematic conduct of all industry by the public authority; and why not aim straight for that result, they asked, instead of first bringing in a merely transitional period of productive associations, which would, on Lassalle's own calculations, take two hundred years to create, and which might not prove transitional to the socialist state after all? Rodbertus even had gone against Lassalle on this point, because he wanted to see individual property converted into national property, and thought converting it first into joint stock property was really to prevent rather than promote the main end he had in view.

Then, 2nd, Lassalle was a national, not an international socialist. He held that every country should solve its own social question for itself, and that the working-class movement was not, and should not be made, cosmopolitan. He was even—as Prince Bismarck said in Parliament, when taxed with having personal relations with him—patriotic. At least he was an intense believer in Prussia; less, however, because he was a Prussian than because Prussia was a strong State, and because he thought that strong States alone could do the world's work in Germany or elsewhere. By nationality in itself he set but little store; a nationality had a right to separate existence if it could assert it, but if it were weak and struggling, its only duty was to submit with thankfulness to annexation by a stronger power. He wished his followers, therefore, to keep aloof from the doings of other nations, and to concentrate their whole exertions upon victory at the elections in their own country and the gradual development of productive associations on national loans. This restriction of the range of the movement had from the first dissatisfied some of its adherents, especially a certain active section who hated Prussia as much as Lassalle believed in her, and after the influence of the International began to make itself felt upon the agitation in Germany, this difference of opinion gathered gradually to a head. In 1868 a motion was brought before the general meeting of the League in favour of establishing relations with the International and accepting its programme. The chief promoters of this motion were the two present leaders of the Social Democratic party in the Reichstag, Liebknecht and Bebel, and it was strongly opposed by the president of the League, Dr. von Schweitzer, an advocate in Frankfort, and a strong champion of Prussia, who was elected to the presidency in 1866, just at the time the extension of the suffrage gave a fresh impetus to the movement, and whose energy and gifts of management contributed greatly to the development of the organization. The motion was carried by a substantial majority, but before next year Von Schweitzer had succeeded in turning the tables on his opponents, and at the general meeting in 1869, Liebknecht and Bebel were expelled from the League, as traitors to the labourers' cause. After their expulsion they called together in the same year a congress of working men at Eisenach, which was attended mainly by delegates from Austria and South Germany, and founded an independent organization on the principles of the International, and under the name of the Social Democratic Labour Party of Germany. The two organizations existed side by side till 1874, when a union was effected between them at a general meeting at Gotha, and they became henceforth the Socialist Labour Party. This was the burial of the national socialism of Lassalle, for though in deference to his followers, the new programme promised in the meantime to work within national limits, it expressly recognised that the labourers' movement was international, and that the great aim to be striven after was a state of society in which every man should be obliged to share in the general labour according to his powers, and have a right to receive from the aggregate product of labour according to what was termed his rational requirements. Some "orthodox Lassalleans," as they called themselves, held aloof from this compromise, but they are too few to be of any importance. They still remain apart from the main body of German socialism, and live in such good odour with the Government, whether on account of their unimportance or of their supposed loyalty, that they were never molested by any application of the Socialist Laws which were enforced for twelve years strenuously against all other socialists.

Among the causes which brought the others to so much unanimity was undoubtedly the establishment of the German Empire in 1871, which was viewed with universal aversion by socialists of every shade. On the outbreak of the war, Schweitzer and the members of the original League gave their sympathies warmly to the arms of their country, and the Social Democratic party was nearly equally divided on the subject; but after the foundation of the French Republic, they all with one consent declared that the war ought now to cease, and the socialist deputies, no matter which organization they belonged to, voted without exception against granting supplies for its continuance. They were likewise opposed to the recognition of the title of Emperor and to the constitution of the Empire, and indeed as republicans they could not be anything else. From a recollection mainly of these votes Prince Bismarck considered the movement to be unpatriotic and hostile to the Empire, and accordingly suppressed its propaganda in 1878, when its growth seemed likely to prove a serious danger to an Empire whose stability was still far from being assured by any experience of its advantages. The socialists retorted upon this policy at their congress at Wyden, Switzerland, in 1880, by striking out of their programme the limitation of proceeding by legal means, on the ground that the action of the Government having made legal means impracticable, no resource was left but to meet force by force. They thus threw aside the last shred of the practical policy of Lassalle, and stood out thenceforth as a party of international revolution.

The movement could, however, hardly help becoming international; not, as some allege, because this is a peculiarity of revolutionary parties; on the contrary, other parties may also exhibit it. What, for example, was the Holy Alliance but an international league of the monarchical and aristocratic parties against the advance of popular rights? Nor is it a peculiarity of the present time only. No doubt the increased inter-communication and inter-dependence between countries now facilitates its development. There are no longer nations in Europe, said Heine, but only parties. But in reality it has always been nearly as much so as now. Any party founded on a definite general principle or interest may in any age become international, and even what may seem unpatriotic. The Protestants of France in the 16th century sought help from England, and the Jacobites of England in the 18th sought help from France; just as the German socialists of 1870 sided with the French after Sedan, and the French communists of 1871 preferred to see their country occupied by the Germans rather than governed by the "Versaillais." In all these cases the party principles were naturally international, and the party bias overcame the patriotic.

Besides, the socialist is, almost by necessity of his position and principles, predisposed to discourage and condemn patriotism. Others, indeed, condemn it as well as he. Most of the great writers who revived German literature towards the beginning of this century—Lessing, Herder, Wieland, Goethe—have all disparaged it. They looked on it as a narrow and obsolete virtue, useful enough perhaps in rude times, but a hindrance to rational progress now; the modern virtue was humanity, the idea of which had just freshly burst upon their age like a new power. This consideration may no doubt to some extent weigh with socialists also, for their whole thinking is leavened with the notion of humanity, but their most immediate objection to patriotism is one of a practical nature. Their complaint used always to be that the proletarian had no country, because he was excluded from political rights. He was not a citizen, and why should he have the feelings of one? But now he has got political rights, and they still complain. He is in the country, they say, but not yet of it. He is practically excluded from its civilization, from all that makes the country worth living or fighting for. He has no country, for he is denied a man's share in the life that is going in any. Edmund Ludlow wrote over his door in exile—

"Every land is my fatherland,

For all lands are my Father's."

The modern socialist says, No land is my fatherland, for in none am I a son. He believes himself to be equally neglected in all, and that is precisely the severest strain that can try the patriotic sentiment. The proletarian is taught that in every country he is a slave, and that patriotism and religion only reconcile him to remaining so. Moreover, as Rodbertus has remarked, the social question itself is, in a sense, international because it is social.

CHAPTER IV. KARL MARX.

In opening the present chapter in the previous edition of this book, I said it was not a little remarkable that the works of Karl Marx, which had then excited considerable commotion in other European countries, were still absolutely unknown in England, though England was the country where they were written, and to whose circumstances they were, in their author's judgment, pre-eminently applicable. His principal work, "Das Kapital," is a criticism of modern industrial development as explained by English economists and exemplified in English society. It shows a rare knowledge of English economic literature, even of the most obscure writers; it goes very fully into the conditions of English labour as described in our parliamentary reports; and out of four hundred odd books it quotes, more than three hundred are English books. Its illustrations are drawn from English industrial life, and its very money allusions are stated in terms of English coin. Its chief doctrine, moreover, was an old English doctrine, familiar among the disciples of Owen; and to crown all, if the author's belief was true, England was the country ripest for its reception, for the socialist revolution, he thought, would inevitably come when the working class sunk into the condition of a proletariat, and the working class of England had been a proletariat for many years already. Yet Marx's work was not at that time (1884) translated into English, though it had been into most other European languages, and had enjoyed a very large sale even in Russia, to whose circumstances it had admittedly very little adaptation. An English translation appeared at length, however, in 1887, twenty years after the publication of the original, and a considerable edition was disposed of within a year, though the price was high. We have therefore grown more familiar of late with the name and importance of Karl Marx.

Born at Trèves in 1818, the son of a Christian Jew who had a high post in the civil service, Marx was sent to the University of Bonn, towards the end of the '30s, won a considerable reputation there in philosophy and jurisprudence, determined, like Lassalle, to devote himself to the academic profession, and seemed destined for an eminently successful career, in which his subsequent marriage with the sister of the Prussian Minister of State, Von Westphalen, would certainly have facilitated his advancement. But at the University he came under the spell of Hegel, and passed, step by step, with the Extreme Left of the Hegelian school, into the philosophical, religious, and political Radicalism which finally concentrated into the Humanism of Feuerbach. Just as he had finished his curriculum, the accession of Frederick William IV. in 1840 stirred a rustle of most misplaced expectation among the Liberals of Germany, who thought the day of freedom was at length to break, and who rose with generous eagerness to the tasks to which it was to summon them. Under the influence of these hopes and feelings, Marx abandoned the professorial for an editorial life, and committed himself at the very outset of his days to a political position which compromised him hopelessly with German governments, and forced him, step by step, into a long career of revolutionary agitation and organization. He joined the staff of the Rhenish Gazette, which was founded at that time in Cologne by the leading Liberals of the Rhine country, including Camphausen and Hansemann, and which was the organ of the Young Hegelian, or Philosophical Radical Party, and he made so great an impression by his bold and vigorous criticism of the proceedings of the Rhenish Landtag that he was appointed editor of the newspaper in 1842. In this post he continued his attacks on the Government, and they were at once so effective and so carefully worded that a special censor was sent from Berlin to Cologne to take supervision of his articles, and when this agency proved ineffectual, the journal was suppressed by order of the Prussian Ministry in 1843. From Cologne Marx went to Paris to be a joint editor of the Deutsche Französische Jahrbücher with Arnold Ruge, a leader of the Hegelian Extreme Left, who had been deprived of his professorship at the University of Halle by the Prussian Government, and whose magazine, the Deutsche Jahrbücher, published latterly at Leipzig to escape the Prussian authority, had just been suppressed by the Saxon. The Deutsche Französische Jahrbücher were published by the well-known Julius Froebel, who had some time before given up his professorship at Zürich to edit a democratic newspaper, and open a shop for the sale of democratic literature; who professed himself a communist in Switzerland, and had written some able works, with very radical and socialistic leanings, but who seems to have gone on a different tack at the time of the Lassallean movement, for he was—as Meding shows us in his "Memoiren zur Zeitgeschichte"—the prime promoter of the ill-fated Congress of Princes at Frankfort in 1865. The new magazine was intended to be a continuation of the suppressed Deutsche Jahrbücher, on a more extended plan, embracing French as well as German contributors, and supplying in some sort a means of uniting the Extreme Left of both nations; but no French contribution ever appeared in it, and it ceased altogether in a year's time, probably for commercial reasons, though there is no unlikelihood in the allegation sometimes made, that it was stopped in consequence of a difference between the editors as to the treatment of the question of communism.

The Young Hegelians had already begun to take the keenest interest in that question, but were, for a time, curiously perplexed as to the attitude they should assume towards it. They seem to have been fascinated and repelled by turns by the system, and to have been equally unable to cast it aside or to commit themselves fairly to it. Karl Grün, himself a Young Hegelian, says that at first they feared socialism, and points, for striking evidence of this, to the fact that the Rhenish Gazette bestowed an enthusiastic welcome on Stein's book on French communism, although that book condemned the system from a theologically orthodox and politically reactionary point of view. But he adds that the Young Hegelians contributed to the spread of socialism against their will, that it was through the interest they took in its speculations and experiments that socialism acquired credit and support in public opinion in Germany, and that the earliest traces of avowed socialism are to be found in the Rhenish Gazette. If we may judge by the extracts from some of Marx's articles in that journal which are given in Bruno Bauer's "Vollständige Geschichte der Parthei-Kämpfe in Deutschland während der Jahre 1842-46," we should say that Marx was even at this early period a decided socialist, for he often complains of the great wrong "the poor dumb millions" suffer in being excluded by their poverty from the possibility of a free development of their powers, "and from any participation in the fruits of civilization," and maintains that the State had far other duty towards them than to come in contact with them only through the police. When Ruge visited Cabet in Paris, he said that he and his friends (meaning, he explained, the philosophical and political opposition) stood so far aloof from the question of communism that they had never yet so much as raised it, and that, while there were communists in Germany, there was no communistic party. This statement is probably equivalent to saying that he and his school took as yet a purely theoretical and Platonic interest in socialism, and had not come to adopt it as part of their practical programme. Most of them were already communists by conviction, and the others felt their general philosophical and political principles forcing them towards communism, and the reason of their hesitation in accepting it is probably expressed by Ruge, when he says (in an article in Heinzen's "Die Opposition," p. 103), that the element of truth in communism was its sense of the necessity of political emancipation, but that there was a great danger of communists forgetting the political question in their zeal for the social. It was chiefly under the influence of the Humanism into which Feuerbach had transformed the Idealism of Hegel, that the Hegelian Left passed into communism. Humanist and communist became nearly convertible terms. Friedrich Engels mentions in his book on the condition of the English working classes, published in 1845, that all the German communists of that day were followers of Feuerbach, and most of the followers of Feuerbach in Germany (Ruge seems to have remained an exception) were communists. Lassalle was one of Feuerbach's correspondents, and after he started the present socialist movement in Germany, he wrote Feuerbach on 21st October, 1863, saying that the Progressists were political rationalists of the feeblest type, and that it was the same battle which Feuerbach was waging in the theological, and he himself now in the political and economic sphere. Stein attributed French socialism greatly to the prevailing sensualistic character of French philosophy, which conceived enjoyment to be man's only good, and never rose to what he calls the great German conception, the logical conception of the Ego, the idea of knowing for the sake of knowing. The inference this contrast suggests is that the metaphysics of Germany had been her protector, her national guard, against socialism, but as we see, at the very time he was writing the guard was turning traitor, and a native socialism was springing up by natural generation out of the idealistic philosophy. The fact, however, rather confirms the force of Stein's remark, for the Hegelian idealism first bred the more sensualistic system of humanism, and then humanism bred socialism.

Hegel had transformed the transcendental world of current opinion, with its personal Deity and personal immortality, into a world of reason; and Feuerbach went a step further, and abolished what he counted the transcendency of reason itself. Heaven and God, he entirely admitted, were nothing but subjective illusions, fantastic projections of man's own being and his own real world into external spheres. But mind, an abstract entity, and reason, a universal and single principle, were, in his opinion, illusions too. There was nothing real but man—the concrete flesh and blood man who thinks and feels. "God," says Feuerbach, speaking of his mental development, "was my first thought, Reason my second, Man my third and last." He passed, as Lange points out, through Comte's three epochs. Theology was swept away, and then metaphysics, and in its room came a positive and materialistic anthropology which declared that the senses were the sole sources of real knowledge, that the body was not only part of man's being, but its totality and essence, and, in short, that man is what he eats—Der Mensch ist was er isst. Man, therefore, had no other God before man, and the promotion of man's happiness and culture in this earthly life—which was his only life—was the sole natural object of his political or religious interest. This system was popularized by Feuerbach's brother Friedrich, in a little work called the "Religion of the Future," which enjoyed a high authority among the German communists, and formed a kind of lectionary they read and commented on at their stated meetings. The object of the new religion is thus described in it:—"Man alone is our God, our father, our judge, our redeemer, our true home, our law and rule, the alpha and omega of our political, moral, public, and domestic life and work. There is no salvation but by man." And the cardinal articles of the faith are that human nature is holy, that the impulse to pleasure is holy, that everything which gratifies it is holy, that every man is destined and entitled to be happy, and for the attainment of this end has the right to claim the greatest possible assistance from others, and the duty to afford the same to them in turn.

Now the tendency of this metaphysical and moral teaching was strongly democratic and socialistic. There was said to be in the existing political system a false transcendency identical with that of the current religious system. King and council hovered high and away above the real life of society in a world of their own, looking on political power as a kind of private property, and careless of mankind, from whom it sprang, to whom it belonged, and by whom and for whom it should be administered. "The princes are gods," says Feuerbach, "and they must share the same fate. The dissolution of theology into anthropology in the field of thought is the dissolution of monarchy into republic in the field of politics. Dualism, separation is the essence of theology; dualism, separation is the essence of monarchy. There we have the antithesis of God and world; here we have the antithesis of State and people." This dualism must be abolished. The State must be humanized—must be made an instrument in the hands of all for the welfare of all; and its inhabitants must be politized, for they, all of them, constitute the polis. Man must no longer be a means, but must be everywhere and always an end. There was nobody above man; there was neither superhuman person, nor consecrated, person; neither deity, nor divine right. And, on the other hand, as there is no person who in being or right is more than man, so there must be no person who is less. There must be no unmenschen, no slaves, no heretics, no outcasts, no outlaws, but every being who wears human flesh must be placed in the enjoyment of the full rights and privileges of man. The will of man be done, hallowed be his name.

These principles already bring us to the threshold of socialism, and now Feuerbach's peculiar ethical principle carries us into its courts. That principle has been well termed Tuism, to distinguish it from Egoism. The human unit is not the individual, but man in converse with man, the sensual Ego with the sensual Tu. The isolated man is incomplete, both as a moral and as a thinking being. "The nature of man is contained only in the community, in the unity of man with man. Isolation is finitude and limitation, community is freedom and infinity. Man by himself is but man; man with man, the unity of I and Thou, is God." Feuerbach personally never became a communist, for he says his principle was neither egoism nor communism, but the combination of both. They were equally true, for they were inseparable, and to condemn self-love would be, he declared, to condemn love to others at the same time, for love to others was nothing but a recognition that their self-love was justifiable. But it is easy to perceive the natural tendency of the teaching that the social man was the true human unit and essence, and was to the individual as a God. With most of his disciples Humanism meant making the individual disappear in the community, making egoism disappear in love, and making private property disappear in collective. Hess flatly declared that "the species was the end, and the individuals were only means." Ruge disputed this doctrine, and contended that the empirical individual was the true human unit and the true end; but even he said that socialism was the humanism of common life. Grün passes into socialism by simply applying to property Feuerbach's method of dealing with theology and monarchy. He argues that if the true essence of man is the social man, then, just as theology is anthropology, so is anthropology socialism, for property is at present entirely alienated, externalized from the social man. There is a false transcendency in it, like that of divinity and monarchy. "Deal, therefore," he says, "with the practical God, money, as Feuerbach dealt with the theoretical"; humanize it. Make property an inalienable possession of manhood, of every man as man. For property is a necessary material for his social activity, and therefore ought to belong as inalienably and essentially to him as everything which he otherwise possesses of means or materials for his activity in life; as inalienably, for example, as his body or his personal acquirements. If man is the social man, some social possession is then necessary to his manhood, and might be called an essential part of it; but existing property is something outside, as separate from him as heaven or the sovereign power. Grün accordingly says that Feuerbach's "Essence of Christianity" supplies the theoretical basis for Proudhon's social system, because the latter only applies to practical life the principles which the former applied to religion and metaphysics, but he admits that neither Feuerbach nor Proudhon would acknowledge the connection.

We thus see how theoretical humanism—a philosophy and a religion—led easily over into the two important articles of practical humanism, a democratic transformation of the State and a communistic transformation of society. This was the ideal of the humanists, and it contains ample and wide-reaching positive features; but when it came to practical action they preferred for the present to take up an attitude of simple but implacable negation to the existing order of things. No doubt variety of opinion existed among them; but if they are to be judged by what seemed their dominant interest, they were revolutionaries and nothing else. They repudiated with one consent the socialist utopias of France, and refrained on principle from committing themselves to, or even discussing, any positive scheme of reconstruction whatsoever. They held it premature to think of positive proposals, which would, moreover, be sure to sow divisions among themselves. Their first great business was not to build up, but to destroy, and their work in the meantime was therefore to develop the revolutionary spirit to its utmost possible energy, by exciting hatred against all existing institutions; in short, to create an immense reservoir of revolutionary energy which might be turned to account when its opportunity arrived. Their position is singularly like the phase of Russian nihilism described by Baron Fircks, and presented to us in Turgenieff's novels. It is expressed very plainly by W. Marr, himself an active humanist, who carried Feuerbach's "Essence of Christianity" as his constant companion, and founded a secret society for promoting humanistic views. In his interesting book on Secret Societies in Switzerland, he says, "The masses can only be gathered under the flag of negation. When you present detailed plans, you excite controversies and sow divisions; you repeat the mistake of the French socialists, who have scattered their redoubtable forces because they tried to carry formulated systems. We are content to lay down the foundation of the revolution. We shall have deserved well of it if we stir hatred and contempt against all existing institutions. We make war against all prevailing ideas, of religion, of the State, of country, of patriotism. The idea of God is the keystone of a perverted civilization. It must be destroyed. The true root of liberty, of equality, of culture, is Atheism. Nothing must restrain the spontaneity of the human mind." All this work of annihilation could neither be done by reform, nor by conspiracy, but only by revolution, and "a revolution is never made; it makes itself." While the revolution was making, Marr founded an association in Switzerland, "Young Germany," which should prepare society for taking effective action when the hour came. There was a "Young Germany" in Switzerland when he arrived there; part of a federation of secret societies established by Mazzini in 1834, under the general name of "Young Europe," and comprising three series of societies:—"Young Italy," composed of Italians; "Young Poland," of Poles; and "Young Germany," of Germans. But this organization was not at all to Marr's mind, because it concerned itself with nothing but politics, and because its method was conspiracy. "Great transformations," he said, "are never prepared by conspiracies," and it was a very great transformation indeed that he contemplated. He therefore formed a "Young Germany" of his own. His plan was to plant a lodge, or "family," wherever there existed a German working men's association. The members of this family became members of the association, and formed a leaven which influenced all around them, and, through the wandering habits of the German working class, was carried to much wider circles. The family met for political discussion once a week, read Friedrich Feuerbach together on the Sundays with fresh recruits, who, when they had mastered him, were said to have put off the old man; and their very password was humanity, a brother being recognised by using the half-word human—? interrogatively, and the other replying by the remaining half—ität. The members were all ardent democrats, but, as a rule, so national in their sympathies that the leaders made it one great object of their disciplina arcani to stifle the sentiment of patriotism by subjecting it to constant ridicule.

Their relations to communism are not quite easy to determine. Marr himself sometimes expresses disapproval of the system. He says, "Communism is the expression of impotence of will. The communists lack confidence in themselves. They suffer under social oppression, and look around for consolation instead of seeking for weapons to emancipate themselves with. It is only a world-weariness desiring illusion as the condition of its life." He says the belief in the absolute dependence of man on matter is the shortest and most pregnant definition of communism, and that it starts from the principle that man is a slave and incapable of emancipating himself. But, on the other hand, he complains that the members of "Young Germany" did not sufficiently appreciate the social question, being disgusted with the fanaticism of the communists. By the communists, he here means the followers of Weitling and Albrecht, who were at that time creating a party movement in Switzerland. The prophet Albrecht, as he is called, was simply a crazy mystic with proclivities to sedition which brought him at length to prison for six years, and which took there an eschatological turn from his having, it is said, nothing to read but the Bible, so that on his release he went about prophesying that Jehovah had prepared a way in the desert, which was Switzerland, for bringing into Europe a reign of peace, in which people should hold all things in common and enjoy complete sensuous happiness, sitting under their common vine and fig-tree, with neither king nor priest to make them any more afraid. Weitling was not quite so unimportant, but the attention he excited at the time is certainly not justified by any of the writings he has left us. He was a tailor from Magdeburg, who was above his work, believing himself to be a poet and a man of letters, condemned by hard fate and iniquitous social arrangements to a dull and cruel lot. Having gone to Paris when socialism was the rage there, he eagerly embraced that new gospel, and went to Switzerland to carry its message of hope to his own German countrymen. There he forsook the needle altogether, and lived as the paid apostle of the dignity of manual labour, for which he had himself little mind. His ideas are crude, confused, and arbitrary. His ideal of society was a community of labourers, with no State, no Church, no individual property, no distinction of rank or position, no nationality, no fatherland. All were to have equal rights and duties, and each was to be put in a position to develop his capacity and gratify his bents as far as possible. He was moved more by the desire for abstract equality than German socialists of the humanist or contemporary type, for they do not build on the justice of a more equal distribution of wealth so much as on the necessity of the possession of property for the free development of the human personality. He is entirely German, however, in his idea of the government of the new society. It was to be governed by the three greatest philosophers of the age, assisted by a board of trade, a board of health, and a board of education. In Switzerland he founded, to promote his views, a secret society, the "Alliance of the Just," which had branches in most of the Swiss towns. Its members were chiefly Germans from Germany, for very few of the communists in Switzerland were born Swiss, and according to Marr, who was present at some of their meetings, they were three-fourths of them tailors. "I felt," says Marr, "when I entered one of these clubs, that I was with the mother of tailors. The tailor sitting and chatting at his work is always extreme in his opinions. Tailor and communist are synonymous terms." It was to some of the leaders of this alliance that Weitling unfolded his wild scheme of a proletariat raid, according to which an army of 20,000 brigands was to be raised among the proletariat of the large towns, to go with torch and sword into all the countries of Europe, and terrify the bourgeoisie into a recognition of universal community of goods. It is only fair to add that his proposal met with no favour. Letters were found in his possession, and subsequently published in Bluntschli's official report, which show that some of Weitling's correspondents regarded his scheme with horror, and others treated it with ridicule. One of them said it was trying to found the kingdom of heaven with the furies of hell. The relations between "Young Germany" and Weitling's allies were apparently not cordial, though they had so much in common that, on the one hand, Weitling's correspondents urge him to keep on good terms with "Young Germany," and, on the other, Marr says he actually tried to get a common standing ground with the communists, and thought he had found it in the negation of the present system of things—the negation of religion, the negation of patriotism, the negation of subjection to authority.

Now the importance of this excursus on the Young Hegelians lies in the fact that Karl Marx was a humanist, and looked on humanism as the vital and creative principle in the renovation of political and industrial society. In the Deutsche Französische Jahrbücher he published an article on the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, in which he says: "The new revolution will be introduced by philosophy. The revolutionary tradition of Germany is theoretical. The Reformation was the work of a monk; the Revolution will be the work of a philosopher." The particular philosophy that was to do the work is that of the German critics, whose critique of religion had ended in the dogma that man is the highest being for man, and in the categorical imperative, "to destroy everything in the present order of things that makes a man a degraded, insulted, forsaken, and despised being." But philosophy cannot work a revolution without material weapons; and it will find its material weapon in the proletariat, which he owns, however, was at the time he wrote only beginning to be formed in Germany. But when it rises in its strength, it will be irresistible, and the revolution which it will accomplish will be the only one known to history that is not utopian. Other revolutions have been partial, wrought by a class in the interests of a class; but this one will be a universal and uniform revolution, effected in the name of all society, for the proletariat is a class which possesses a universal character because it dissolves all other separate classes into itself. It is the only class that takes its stand on a human and not a historical title. Its very sorrows and grievances have nothing special or relative in them; they are the broad sorrows and grievances of humanity. And its claims are like them; for it asks no special privileges or special prerogatives; it asks nothing but what all the world will share along with it. The history of the world is the judgment of the world, and the duration of an order of things founded on the ascendancy of a limited class possessing money and culture, is practically condemned and foredoomed by the rapid multiplication of a large class outside which possess neither. The growth of this latter body not merely tends to produce, but actually is, the dissolution of the existing system of things. For the existing system is founded on the assertion of private property, but the proletariat is forced by society to take the opposite principle of the negation of private property for the principle of its own life, and will naturally carry that principle into all society when it gains the power, as it is rapidly and inevitably doing. Marx sums up: "The only practical emancipation for Germany is an emancipation proceeding from the standpoint of the theory which explains man to be the highest being for man. In Germany the emancipation from the middle ages is only possible as at the same time an emancipation from the partial conquests of the middle ages. In Germany one kind of bond cannot be broken without all other bonds being broken too. Germany is by nature too thorough to be able to revolutionize without revolutionizing from a fundamental principle, and following that principle to its utmost limits; and therefore the emancipation of Germany will be the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy; its heart is the proletariat." He adds that when things are ripe, "when all the inner conditions have been completed, the German resurrection day will be heralded by the crowing of the Gallic cock."

In this essay we mark already Marx's overmastering belief in natural historical evolution, which he had learnt from Hegel, and which prevented him from having any sympathy with the utopian projects of the French socialists. They vainly imagined, he held, that they could create a new world right off, whereas it was only possible to do so by observing a rigorous conformity to the laws of the development already in progress, by making use of the forces already at work, and proceeding in the direction towards which the stream of things was itself slowly but mightily moving. Hegel sought the principle of organic development in the State, but Marx sought it rather in civil society, and believed he had discovered it in that most mighty though unconscious product of the large system of industry, the modern proletariat, which was born to revolution as the sparks fly upward; and in the simultaneous decline of the middle classes, that is, of the conservative element which could resist the change. The process which was, as he held, now converting society into an aggregate of beggars and millionaires was bound eventually to overleap itself and land in a communism. I shall not discuss the truth of this conception at present, but it contributes, along with the sentiments of justice and humanity that animate—rightly or wrongly—the ideal of the socialists, to lend something of a religious force to their movement, for they feel that they are fellow-workers with the nature of things.

We left Marx in Paris, and on returning to him, we find him engaged—as indeed we usually do when his history comes into notice—in a threefold warfare. Besides his general war against the arrangements of modern society, he is always carrying on a bitter and implacable war against the Prussian Government, and is often engaged in controversy—sometimes very personal—with foes of his own philosophical or revolutionary household. After the cessation of the Deutsche Französische Jahrbücher, Marx edited a paper called Vorwärts, and in this and other journals open to him, he attacked the Prussian administration so strongly that that administration complained to Guizot, who gave him orders to quit France. His more personal controversy at this time arose out of one of the schisms of the Young Hegelians, and he and his friend Friedrich Engels wrote a pamphlet—"Die Heilige Familie"—against the Hegelian Idealism, and especially against Bruno Bauer, who had offended him—says Erdmann, in his "History of Philosophy"—at once as Jew, as Radical, and as journalist. When expelled from France, he went to Brussels, where he was allowed to continue his war upon the Prussian Government without interference, till the revolution of 1848. During this period he devoted his attention more particularly than hitherto to commercial subjects, and published in 1846 his "Discours sur le Libre-échange," and in 1847 his "Misère de la Philosophie," a reply to Proudhon's "Philosophie de la Misère"—both in French.

While in Brussels, Marx received an invitation from the London Central Committee of the Communist League to join that society. This league had been founded in Paris in 1836, for the purpose of propagating communist opinions among the working men of Germany. Its organization was analogous to that of the International and other societies of the same kind. A certain number of members constituted a Gemeinde, the several Gemeinden in the same town constituted a Kreis, a number of Kreise were grouped into a leading Kreis, and at the head of the whole was the Central Committee, which was chosen at a general congress of deputies from all the Kreise, and which had since 1840 had its seat in London. The method of the league was to establish, as a sphere of operation, German working men's improvement associations everywhere. The travelling custom of German working men greatly facilitated this work, and numbers of these associations were soon founded in Switzerland, England, Belgium, and the United States. The reason its committee applied to Marx was that he had just published a series of pamphlets in Brussels, in which, as he tells us, he "submitted to a merciless criticism the medley of French-English socialism and communism and of German philosophy, which then constituted the secret doctrine of the League," and insisted that "their work could have no tenable theoretical basis except that of a scientific insight into the economic structure of society, and that this ought to be put into a popular form, not with the view of carrying out any utopian system, but of promoting among the working classes and other classes a self-conscious participation in the process of historical transformation of society that was taking place under their eyes." This is always with Marx the distinctive and ruling feature of his system. The French schemes were impracticable utopias, because they ignored the laws of history and the real structure of economic society; and he claims that his own proposals are not only practicable but inevitable, because they strictly observe the line of the actual industrial evolution, and are thus, at worst, plans for accelerating the day after to-morrow. But, besides this difference of principle, Marx thought the League should also change its method and tactics. Its work, being that of social revolution, was different from the work of the old political conspirators and secret societies, and therefore needed different weapons; the times, too, were changed, and offered new instruments. Street insurrections, surprises, intrigues, pronunciamentos might overturn a dynasty, or oust a government, or bring them to reason, but were of no avail in the world for introducing collective property or abolishing wage labour. People would just begin again the day after to work for hire and rent their farms as they did before. A social revolution needed other and larger preparation; it needed to have the whole population first thoroughly leavened with its principles; nay, it needed to possess an international character, depending not on detached local outbreaks, but on steady concert in revolutionary action on the part of the labouring classes everywhere. The cause was not political, or even national, but social; and society—which was indeed already pregnant with the change—must be aroused to a conscious consent to the delivery. What was first to be done, therefore, was to educate and move public opinion, and in this work the ordinary secret society went but a little way. A secret propaganda might still be carried on, but a public and open propaganda was more effectual and more suitable to the times. There never existed greater facilities for such a movement, and they ought to make use of all the abundant means of popular agitation and intercommunication which modern society allowed. No more secret societies in holes and corners, no more small risings and petty plots, but a great broad organization working in open day, and working restlessly by tongue and pen to stir the masses of all European countries to a common international revolution. Marx sought, in short, to introduce the large system of production into the art of conspiracy.

Finding his views well received by the Central Committee of the Communist League, he acceded to their request to attend their General Congress at London in 1847, and then, after several weeks of keen discussion, he prevailed upon the Congress to adopt "the Manifesto of the Communist party," which was composed by himself and Engels, and which was afterwards translated from the German into English, French, Danish, and Italian, and sown broadcast everywhere just before the Revolution of 1848. This Communist League may be said to be the first organization—and this Communist Manifesto the first public declaration—of the International Socialist Democracy that now is. The Manifesto begins by describing the revolutionary situation into which the course of industrial development has brought modern society. Classes were dying out; the yeomanry, the nobility, the small tradesmen, would soon be no more; and society was drawn up in two widely separated hostile camps, the large capitalist class or bourgeoisie, who had all the property and power in the country, and the labouring class, the proletariat, who had nothing of either. The bourgeoisie had played a most revolutionary part in history. They had overturned feudalism, and now they had created proletarianism, which would soon swamp themselves. They had collected the masses in great towns; they had kept the course of industry in perpetual flux and insecurity by rapid successive transformations of the instruments and processes of production, and by continual recurrences of commercial crises; and while they had reduced all other classes to a proletariat, they had made the life of the proletariat one of privation, of uncertainty, of discontent, of incipient revolution. They exploited the labourer of political power; they exploited him of property, for they treated him as a ware, buying him in the cheapest market for the cost of his production, that is to say, the cost of his living, and taking from him the whole surplus of his work, after deducting the value of his subsistence. Under the system of wage labour, it could not be otherwise. Wages could never, by economic laws, rise above subsistence. While wage labour created property, it created it always for the capitalist, and never for the labourer; and, in fact, the latter only lived at all, so far as it was for the interests of the governing class, the bourgeoisie, to permit him. Class rule and wage labour must be swept away, for they were radically unjust, and a new reign must be inaugurated which would be politically democratic and socially communistic, and in which the free development of each should be the condition for the free development of all.

The Manifesto went on to say that communism was not the subversion of existing principles, but their universalization. Communism did not seek to abolish the State, but only the bourgeois State, in which the bourgeois exclusively hold and wield political power. Communism did not seek to abolish property, but only the bourgeois system of property, under which private property is really already abolished for nine-tenths of society, and maintained merely for one-tenth. Communism did not seek to abolish marriage and the family, but only the bourgeois system of things under which marriage and the family, in any true sense of those terms, were virtually class institutions, for the proletariat could not have any family life worthy of the name, so long as their wages were so low that they were forced to huddle up their whole family regardless of all decency, in a single room, so long as their wives and daughters were victims of the seduction of the bourgeoisie, and so long as their children were taken away prematurely to labour in mills for bourgeois manufacturers, who yet held up their hands in horror at the thought of any violation of the institution of the family. Communism did not tend to abolish fatherland and nationality—that was abolished already for the proletariat, and was being abolished for the bourgeoisie, too, by the extensions of their trade.

As to the way of emancipation, the proletariat must strive to obtain political power, and use it to deprive the bourgeoisie of all capital and means of production, and to place them in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat itself organized as a governing body. Now, for this, immediate and various measures interfering with property, and condemned by our current economics, were requisite. Those measures would naturally be different for different countries, but for the most advanced countries the following were demanded: (1) Expropriation of landed property and application of rent to State expenditure; (2) abolition of inheritance; (3) confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels; (4) centralization of credit in the hands of the State by means of a national bank, with State capital and exclusive monopoly; (5) centralization of all means of transport in hands of State; (6) institution of national factories, and improvement of lands on a common plan; (7) compulsory obligation of labour upon all equally, and establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture; (8) joint prosecution of agriculture and mechanical arts, and gradual abolition of the distinction of town and country; (9) public and gratuitous education for all children, abolition of children's labour in factories, etc. The Manifesto ends by saying:—"The communists do not seek to conceal their views and aims. They declare openly that their purpose can only be obtained by a violent overthrow of all existing arrangements of society. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletariat have nothing to lose in it but their chains; they have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries, unite!"

When the French Revolution of February, 1848, broke out, Marx was expelled without circumstance from Brussels, and received an invitation from the Provisional Government of Paris to return to France. He accepted this invitation, but was only a few weeks in Paris when the German revolution of March occurred, and he hastened to the theatre of affairs. With his friends, Freiligrath, Wolff, Engels, and others, he established on June 1st in Cologne the New Rhenish Gazette, which was the soul of the Rhenish revolutionary movement, the most important one of the year in Germany, and that in which, as we have seen, the young Lassalle first emerged on the troubled surface of revolutionary politics. After the coup d'état of November, dissolving the Prussian Parliament, the New Rhenish Gazette strongly urged the people to stop paying their taxes, and thus meet force by force. It inserted an admonition to that effect in a prominent place in every successive number, and Marx was twice tried for sedition on account of this admonition, but each time acquitted. The newspaper, however, was finally suppressed by civil authority after the Dresden insurrection of May, 1849, its last number appearing on June 19th in red type, and containing Freiligrath's well-known "Farewell of the New Rhenish Gazette"—spiritedly translated for us by Ernest Jones—which declared that the journal went down with "rebellion" on its lips, but would reappear when the last of the German Crowns was overturned.

Farewell, but not for ever farewell!

They cannot kill the spirit, my brother;

In thunder I'll rise on the field where I fell,

More boldly to fight out another.

When the last of Crowns, like glass, shall break

On the scene our sorrows have haunted,

And the people its last dread "Guilty" shall speak,

By your side you shall find me undaunted.

On Rhine or on Danube, in war and deed,

You shall witness, true to his vow,

On the wrecks of thrones, in the midst of the field,

The rebel who greets you now.

This vow is no mere Parthian flourish of poetical defiance. Freiligrath and his friends undoubtedly believed at this time that the political movements of 1848 and 1849 were but preliminary ripples, and would be presently succeeded by a great flood-wave of revolution which they heard already sounding along in their dangerously expectant ear. His poem on the Revolution remains as evidence to us that in 1850 he still clung to that hope, and it would not have been out of tune with his sanguine beliefs of the year before if he promised, not merely that the spirit of the journal would rise again, but that its next number would be published, after the Deluge.

Meanwhile Marx went to London, where he remained for the rest of his life. Finding that the revolutionary spirit did not revive, and that historical societies, which have not lost their moral and economic vitality, had a greater readjusting power against political disturbance than he previously believed, he gave up for the next ten or twelve years the active work of revolutionizing. The Communist League, which had got disorganized in the revolutionary year, and was rent in two by a bitter schism in 1850, was, with his concurrence, dissolved in 1852, on the ground that its propaganda was no longer opportune; and the story of the Brimstone League, with its iron discipline and ogrish desires, of which Mehring says Marx was, during his London residence, the head-centre, is simply a fairy tale of Karl Vogt's, whose baselessness Marx has himself completely exposed. Before leaving the Communist League, two circumstances may be mentioned, because they repeat themselves constantly in this revolutionary history. The one is that this schism took place not on a point of doctrine, but of opportunity; the extremer members thought the conflict in Germany on the Hessian question offered a good chance for a fresh revolutionary outbreak, and they left the League because their views were not adopted. The other is that in one of its last reports (quoted by Mehring) the League definitely justifies, and even recommends, assassination and incendiarism—"the so-called excesses, the inflictions of popular vengeance on hated individuals, or on public buildings which revive hateful associations." For the next ten years Marx lived quietly in London, writing for the New York Tribune and other journals, and studying modern industry on this its "classical soil." He read much in the British Museum Library, gaining his remarkable acquaintance with the English economic writers, and it was probably in this period he elaborated his famous doctrine of surplus value, with its corollary of the right of the labourer to the full product of his labour. There can be no doubt that the original suggestion of this doctrine came from English sources, for it was taught more than a generation before among the English socialists, notably by William Thompson in his "Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth," which was published as early as 1824, and is actually quoted by Marx in his work on Capital. Marx built up the doctrine, however, into a more systematic form, and it is through him and not through the Owenites it has come into the present socialist movement in which it plays so conspicuous a part. During this period of reading and rumination, Marx published a pamphlet against Louis Napoleon; another against Lord Palmerston, which was widely circulated by David Urquhart; a third of a personal and bitter character against his fellow-socialist, Karl Vogt; and a more solid and important work, the "Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie" (1859), the first fruits of his new economic studies. But a revolutionist never permanently gives up revolutionizing, and after his prolonged abstinence from that excitement, Marx returned to it again in 1864, on the foundation of the famous International Working Men's Association.

The International was simply the Communist League raised again from the dead. Their principles were the same; their constitution was the same; and Marx began his inaugural address to the International in 1864 with the very words that concluded his Communistic Manifesto of 1847, "Proletarians of all nations, unite!" When the representatives of the English working men first suggested the formation of an international working men's association, in the address they presented in the Freemasons' Tavern to the French working men who were sent over at the instance of Napoleon III. to the London Exhibition of 1862, they certainly never dreamt of founding an organization of revolutionary socialist democracy which in a few years to come was to wear a name at which the world turned pale. Their address was most moderate and sensible. They said that some permanent medium of interchanging thoughts and observations between the working men of different countries was likely to throw light on the economic secrets of societies, and to help onwards the solution of the great labour problem. For they declared that that solution had not yet been discovered, and that the socialist systems which had hitherto professed to propound it were nothing but magnificent dreams. Moreover, if the system of competition were to continue, then some arrangement of concord between employer and labourer must be devised, and in order to assert the views of the labouring class effectively in that arrangement, a firm and organized union must be established among working men, not merely in each country, but in all countries, for their interests, both as citizens and as labourers, were everywhere identical. Those ideas would constitute the basis of a very rational and moderate programme. But when, in the following year, after a meeting in favour of the Polish insurrection, which was held in St. Martin's Hall under the presidency of Professor Beesly, and at which some of the French delegates of 1862 were present, a committee was appointed to follow up the suggestion, this committee asked Marx to prepare a programme and statutes for the proposed association, and he impressed upon it at its birth the stamp of his own revolutionary socialism. He never had a higher official position in the International than corresponding secretary for Germany, for it was determined, probably with the view of securing a better hold of the great English working class and their extensive trade organizations, that the president and secretary should be English working men, and then, after a time, the office of president was abolished altogether because it had a monarchical savour. But Marx had the ablest, the best informed, and probably the most made-up mind in the council; he governed without reigning; and, with his faithful German following, he exercised an almost paramount influence on its action from first to last, in spite of occasional revolts and intrigues against an authority which democratic jealousy resented as dictatorial, or—worse still—monarchical. The statutes of the association, which were adopted at the Geneva Congress of 1866, declared that "the economic subjection of the labourer to the possessor of the means of labour, i.e. of the sources of life, is the first cause of his political, moral, and material servitude, and that the economic emancipation of labour is consequently the great aim to which every political movement ought to be subordinated." Now no doubt the "economic emancipation of labour" meant different things to different sections of the Association's members. To the English trades unionists it meant practically better wages; to the Russian nihilists it meant the downfall of the Czar and of all central political authority, and leaving the socialistic communal organization of their country to manage itself without interference from above; to some of the French members (as appeared at the Lausanne Congress in 1867) it meant the nationalization of credit and all land except that held by peasant proprietors, a class which it was necessary to maintain as a counterpoise to the State; while, to the German socialists, it meant the abolition of wages, the nationalization of land and the instruments of production, the assumption by the State of a supreme direction of all trade, commerce, finance, and agriculture, and the distribution by the State of land, tools, and materials to guilds and productive associations as the actual industrial executive. There were thus very different elements in the composition of the International, but a modus vivendi was found for some years by nursing an ultimate ideal, which was desirable, and meanwhile practically working for a proximate and much narrower ideal, which was more immediately feasible or necessary. The association could thus hold that nothing could benefit the working class but an abolition of wages, and could yet, as it sometimes did, help and encourage strikes which wanted only to raise wages. At its Congress in Brussels in 1868 it declared that a strike was not a means of completely emancipating the labourers, but was often a necessity in the present situation of labour and capital. Most of the other practical measures to which the association addressed itself—the eight hours normal day of labour, gratuitous education, gratuitous justice, universal suffrage, abolition of standing armies, abolition of indirect taxes, prohibition of children's labour, State credit for productive associations—contemplated modifications of the existing system of things, but always contemplated them as aids to and instalments of the coming transformation of that system. The consciousness was constantly preserved that a revolution was impending, and that, as Lassalle said, it was bound to come and could not be checked, whether it approached by sober advances from concession to concession, or flew, with streaming hair and shod with steel, right into the central stronghold.

This was very much the keynote struck by Marx in his inaugural address. That address was simply a review of the situation since 1848, and an encouragement of his forces to a renewal of the combat. Wealth had enormously increased in the interval; colonies had been opened, new inventions discovered, free trade introduced; but misery was not a whit the less; class contrasts were even deeper marked, property was more than ever in the hands of the few; in England the number of landowners had diminished eleven per cent. in the preceding ten years; and if this rate were to continue, the country would be rapidly ripe for revolution. While the old order of things was thus hastening to its doom, the new order of things had made some advances. The Ten Hours Act was "not merely a great practical result, but was the victory of a principle. For the first time the political economy of the bourgeoisie had been in clear broad day put in subjection to the political economy of the working class." Then, again, the experiment of co-operation had now been sufficiently tried to show that it was possible to carry on industry without the intervention of an employing class, and had spread abroad the hope that wage labour was, like slavery and feudal servitude, only a transitory and subordinate form, which was destined to be superseded by associated labour. The International had for its aim to promote this associated labour; only it sought to do so, not piecemeal and sporadically, but systematically, on a national scale, and by State means. And for this end the labouring class must first acquire political power, so as to obtain possession of the means of production; and to acquire political power, they must unite.

The International, though, as we have seen, possessing no real solidarity in its composition, held together till the outbreak of the Franco-German war, and of the revolution of the Paris Commune. It was, of course, strongly opposed to the war, as it was to all war; and strongly in favour of the revolution, as it was of all revolution. Its precise complicity in the work of the Commune is not easy to determine, but there can be no doubt that its importance has been greatly exaggerated, both by the fears of his enemies and the vanity of its members. Some of the latter were certainly among those who sat in the Hôtel de Ville, but none of them were leading minds there; and, as for the Association itself, it never had a real membership, or ramifications, of any formidable extent. For example, the English trades unions were in connection with it, and their members might be, in a sense, counted among its members, but it is certain they never recognised it as an authority over them, and they probably subscribed to it mainly as to a useful auxiliary in a strike. The leaders of the International, however, were, undoubtedly, heart and soul with the Commune, and approved probably both of its aims and methods, and Marx, at the Congress of the International, at the Hague, in 1872, drew, from its failure the lesson, that "revolution must be solidary" in order to succeed. A revolution in one capital of Europe must be supported by simultaneous revolutions in the rest. But, while there is little ground for the common belief that the International had any important influence in creating the insurrection of the Commune, it is certain that the insurrection of the Commune killed the International. The English members dropped off from it and never returned, and at its first Congress after the revolution (the Hague, 1872), the Association itself was rent by a fatal schism arising from differences of opinion on a question as to the government of the society of the future, which would probably not have become a subject of such keen present interest at the time but for the Paris Commune. The question concerned the maintenance or abolition of the State, of the supreme central political authority, and the discussion brought to light that the socialists of the International were divided into two distinct and irreconcilable camps—the Centralist Democratic Socialists, headed by Marx, and the Anarchist Socialists, headed by Michael Bakunin, the Russian revolutionist. The Marxists insisted that the socialist régime of collective property and systematic co-operative production could not possibly be introduced, maintained, or regulated, except by means of an omnipotent and centralized political authority—call it the State, call it the collectivity, call it what you like—which should have the final disposal of everything. The Bakunists held that this was just bringing back the old tyranny and slavery in a more excessive and intolerable form. They took up the tradition of Proudhon, who said that "the true form of the State is anarchy," meaning by anarchy, of course, not positive disorder, but the absence of any supreme ruler, whether king or convention. They would have property possessed and industry pursued on a communistic principle by groups or associations of workmen, but these groups must form themselves freely and voluntarily, without any social or political compulsion. The Marxists declared that this was simply a retention of the system of free competition in an aggravated form, that it would only lead to confusion worse confounded, and that the Bakunists, even in trying to abolish the evils of laissez-faire, were still foolishly supposing that the world could go of itself. This division of opinion—really a broader one than that which parts socialist from orthodox economist—rent the already enfeebled International into two separate organizations, which languished for a year or two and passed away. And so, with high thoughts of spreading a reign of fraternity over the earth, the International Working Men's Association perished, because, being only human, it could not maintain fraternity in its own narrow borders. This is a history that repeats itself again and again in socialist movements. As W. Marr said in the remark quoted above, revolutionists will only unite on a negation; the moment they begin to ask what they will put in its place they differ and dispute and come to nought. Apprehend them, close their meetings, banish their leaders, and you but knit them by common suffering to common resistance. You supply them with a negation of engrossing interest, you preoccupy their minds with a negative programme which keeps them united, and so you prevent them from raising the fatal question—What next? which they never discuss without breaking up into rival sects and factions, fraternal often in nothing but their hatred. "It is the shades that hate one another, not the colours." Such disruptions and secessions may—as they did in Germany—by emulation increase for a time the efficiency of the organization as a propagandist agency, but they certainly diminish its danger as a possible instrument of insurrection. A socialist organization seems always to contain two elements of internal disintegration. One is the prevalence of a singular and almost pathetic mistrust of their leaders, and of one another. The law of suspects is always in force among themselves. At meetings of the German Socialists, Liebknecht denounces Schweitzer as an agent of the Prussian Government, Schweitzer accuses Liebknecht of being an Austrian spy, and the frequent hints at bribery, and open charges of treason against the labourers' cause, disclose to us now duller and now more acute phases of that unhappy state of mutual suspicion, in which the one supreme, superhuman virtue, worthy to be worshipped, if haply it could anywhere be discovered, is the virtue men honoured even in Robespierre—the incorruptible. The other source of disintegration is the tendency to intestine divisions on points of doctrine. A reconstruction of society is necessarily a most extensive programme, and allows room for the utmost variety of opinion and plan. The longer it is discussed, the more certainly do differences arise, and the movement becomes a strife of schools in no way formidable to the government. All this only furnishes another reason for the conclusion that in dealing with socialist agitations, a government's safest as well as justest policy is, as much as may be, to leave them alone. Their danger lies in the cloudiness of their ideas, and that can only be dispersed in the free breezes of popular discussion. The sword is an idle method of reasoning with an idea; an idea will eventually yield to nothing but argument. Repression, too, is absolutely impossible with modern facilities of inter-communication, and can at best but drive the offensive elements for a time into subterranean channels, where they gather like a dangerous choke-damp that may occasion at any moment a serious explosion.

After the fall of the International, Marx took no further part in public movements, but occupied his time in completing his work Das Capital, under frequent interruption from ill-health, and he died in Paris in the spring of 1883, leaving that work still unfinished.

The Das Capital of Marx may be said to be the sacred book of contemporary socialism, and though, like other sacred books, it is probably a sealed one to the body of the faithful, for it is extremely stiff reading, it is the great source from which socialist agitators draw their inspiration and arguments. Apart from the representative authority with which it is thus invested, it must be at once acknowledged to be an able, learned, and important work, founded on diligent research, evincing careful elaboration of materials, much acuteness of logical analysis, and so much solicitude for precision that a special terminology has been invented to secure it. The author's taste for logical distinctions, however, as he has actually applied it, serves rather to darken than to elucidate his exposition. He overloads with analysis secondary points of his argument which are clear enough without it, and he assumes without analysis primary positions which it is most essential for him to make plain. His style and method carries us back to the ecclesiastical schoolmen. His superabounding love of scholastic formalities is unmodern; and one may be permitted to hope that the odium more than theological with which he speaks of opponents has become unmodern too.

Marx's argument takes the form of an inquiry into the origin and social effects of capital; understanding the word capital, however, in a peculiar sense. Capital, according to the elementary teaching of political economy, always means the portion of wealth which is saved from immediate consumption to be devoted to productive uses, and it matters not whether it is so saved and devoted by the labourer who is to use it, or by some other person who lends it to the labourer at interest or employs the labourer to work with it at a fixed rate of wages. A fisherman's boat is capital as much as a Cunard Company's steamer, although the boat is owned by the person who sails it and the steamer by persons who may never have seen it. The fisherman is labourer and capitalist in one, but in the case of the steamer the capital is supplied by one set of people and the labour undertaken by another. Now Marx speaks of capital only after this division of functions has taken place. It is, he says, not a logical but a historical category. In former times men all wrought for the supply of their own wants, the seed and stock they received was saved and owned by themselves, capital was an instrument in the hands of labour. But in modern times, especially since the rise of foreign commerce in the 16th century, this situation has been gradually reversed. Industry is now conducted by speculators, who advance the stock and pay the labourer's wages, in order to make gain out of the excess of the product over the advances, and labour is a mere instrument in the hands of capital. The capitalist is one who, without being personally a producer, advances money to producers to provide them with materials and tools, in the hope of getting a larger sum of money in return, and capital is the money so advanced. With this representation of capital as money, so long as it is but a popular form of speech, no fault need be found, but Marx soon after falls into a common fallacy and positively identifies capital with money, declaring them to be only the same thing circulating in a different way. Money as money, he says, being a mere medium of exchange, is a middle term between two commodities which it helps to barter, and the order of circulation is C—M—C, i.e. commodity is converted into money and money is reconverted into commodity. On the other hand, money as capital stands at the two extremes, and commodity is a middle term, a medium of converting one sum of money into another and greater; the order of circulation being expressed as M—C—M. Of course capital, like other wealth, may be expressed in terms of money, but to identify capital with money in this way is only to introduce confusion, and the real confusion is none the less pernicious that it presents itself under an affectation of mathematical precision.

Capital, then, as Marx understands it, may be said to be independent wealth employed or its own increase, and in "societies in which the capitalistic method of production prevails" all wealth bears distinctively this character. In more primitive days, wealth was a store of means of life produced and preserved for the supply of the producer's future wants, but now it "appears as a huge collection of wares," made for other people's wants, made for sale in the market, made for its own increase. What Marx wants to discover is how all this independent wealth has come to accumulate in hands that do not produce it, and in particular from whence comes the increase expected from its use, because it is this increase that enables it to accumulate. What he endeavours to show is that this increase of value cannot take place anywhere except in the process of production, that in that process it cannot come from the dead materials, but only from the living creative power of labour that works upon them, and that it is accordingly virtually stolen from the labourers who made it by the superior economic force of the owners of the dead materials, without which indeed it could not be made, but whose service is entitled to a much more limited reward.

No increase of value, he contends, can occur in the process of exchange, for an exchange is a mere transposition of things of equal value. In one sense both parties in the transaction are gainers, for each gets a thing he wants for a thing he does not want. The usefulness of the two commodities is thus increased by the exchange, but their value is not. An exchange simply means that each party gives to the other equal value for equal value, and even if it were possible for one of them to make a gain in value to-day—to get a more valuable thing for a less valuable thing—still, as all the world is buyer and seller in turn, they would lose to-morrow as buyers what they gained to-day as sellers, and the old level of value would be restored. No increase whatever would be effected. There is indeed a class of people whom he describes as always buying and never selling—the unproducing class who live on their money, and who, he says, receive by legal titles or by force wealth made by producers without giving anything in exchange for it. And it may be supposed that perhaps value is created by selling things to this class of persons, or by selling things to them above their true value, but that is not so; you would have brought no new value into the world by such a transaction, and even if you got more for your goods than their worth, you would only be cheating back from these rich people part of the money that they had previously received for nothing. Another supposition remains. Perhaps new value is created in the process of exchange when one dealer takes advantage of another—when Peter, say, contrives to induce Paul to take £40 worth of wine for £50 worth of iron. But in this case there has been no increase of value; the value has merely changed hands; Peter has £10 more than he had before, and Paul £10 less. The commodities have between them after the transaction, as they had before it, a total value of £90, and that total cannot be increased by a mere change of possessor.

Having thus established to his satisfaction that commerce, being only a series of exchanges, cannot produce any increase of value, or what he terms surplus value, Marx says that that only makes the problem of the origin of surplus value more enigmatical than ever. For we are thus left in presence of an apparent contradiction: surplus value cannot spring up in the circulation of commodities because circulation is nothing but an exchange of equivalents; and yet surplus value cannot spring up anywhere except in circulation, because the class of persons who receive it and live by it do not produce. Here, then, is a riddle, and Marx sets himself to rede it. True, he says, value is not created directly in the market, but a commodity is purchased in the market which has the remarkable property of creating value. That commodity is the human powers of labour. The very use of these powers, their consumption, their expenditure, is the creation of value. But marvellous as they are, their possessor is obliged to sell them, because while they are yielding their product he must meanwhile live, and he sells a day's use of them for a day's means of living. They create in a day far more than the value of the wages for which they are bought. This excess is surplus value, and is the secret and fountainhead of all accumulations of capital. Powers which can create six shillings worth in a day may be procured in the market for three shillings, because three shillings will pay for their necessary maintenance. Surplus value is the difference between the value of the labourer's necessary maintenance and the value of the labourer's production, and it is in the present system entirely appropriated by the dealer who advances him his wages.

Marx thus bases his argument on two principles which he borrows from current economic writers, without, however, observing the limitations under which those writers taught them, and introducing besides important modifications of his own. The one principle is that value comes from labour, or as economists stated their law, that the natural value of commodities is determined by the cost of their production. The second is only a special application of the first; that the natural wages of labour are determined by the cost of its production, and that the cost of the production of labour is the cost of the labourer's subsistence. The fault he finds with the present system is accordingly this, that while labour creates all value it is paid only by its stated living, no matter how much value it creates; and he then goes over the phenomena of modern industrial life to show how each arrangement is invented so as to extract more and more value out of the labourer by prolonging his hours of work or enhancing its speed without giving him any advantage whatever from the increase of value so obtained. We shall get a fair view of Marx's argument, therefore, if we follow it through the successive heads: 1st, Value; 2nd, Wages; 3rd, Normal day of labour; 4th, Machinery; 5th, Piecework; 6th, Relative over-population.

1st. Value. Marx holds that all capital—all industrial advances except wages—is absolutely unproductive of value, and therefore not entitled to the acknowledgment known as interest. The original value of all such capital—the purchase price of the materials, together with a certain allowance made for tear and wear of machinery—is carried forward into the value of the product, and preserved in it, and even that could not be done except by labour. The old value is preserved by labour, and all new value is conferred by it, and therefore interest is a consideration entirely out of the question. It is obvious to object that labour by itself is as unproductive as capital by itself, but Marx would reply that while labour and capital are equally indispensable to produce new commodities, it is labour alone that produces new value, for value is only so much labour preserved, it is merely a register of so many hours of work. His whole argument thus turns upon his doctrine of the nature of value, and that doctrine must therefore be closely attended to.

What, then, is value? Marx considers that most errors on this subject have arisen from confusing value with utility on the one hand or with price on the other, and he regards his discrimination of value from these two ideas as his most important contribution to political economy. He takes his start from the distinction current since the days of Adam Smith between value in use and value in exchange, and of course agrees with Smith in making the value of a commodity in exchange to be independent of its value in use. Water had great value in use and none in exchange, and diamonds had great value in exchange and little in use. Value in use is therefore not value strictly so called, it is utility; but strictly speaking value in exchange, according to Marx, is not value either, but only the form under which in our state of society value manifests itself. There was no exchange in primitive society when every family produced things to supply its own wants, and there would be no exchange in a communism, for in an exchange the transacting parties stand to one another equally as private proprietors of the goods they barter. And where there was no exchange there could of course be no exchange value. No doubt there was value for all that in primitive times, and there would be value under a communism, though it would manifest itself in a different form. But as we live in an exchanging society, where everything is made for the purpose of being exchanged, it is in exchange alone that we have any experience of value, and it is only from an examination of the phenomena of exchange that we can learn its nature.

What, then, is value in exchange? It is the ratio in which one kind of useful commodity exchanges against another kind of useful commodity. This ratio, says Marx, does not in the least depend on the usefulness of the respective commodities, or their capacity of gratifying any particular want. For, first, that is a matter of quality, whereas value is a ratio between quantities; and second, two different kinds of utility cannot be compared, for they have no common measure; but value, being a ratio, implies comparison, and comparison implies a common measure. A fiddle charms the musical taste, a loaf satisfies hunger, but who can calculate how much musical gratification is equivalent to so much satisfaction of hunger. The loaf and the fiddle may be compared in value, but not by means of their several uses. Third, there are many commodities which are useful and yet have no value in exchange: air, for example, water, and, he adds, virgin soil. In seeking what in the exchange the value depends on, we must therefore leave the utility of the commodities exchanged entirely out of account; and if we do so, there is only one other attribute they all possess in common, and it must be on that attribute that their value rests. That attribute is that they are all products of labour. While we looked to the utility of commodities, they were infinite in their variety, but now they are all reduced to one sober characteristic they are so many different quantities of the same material, labour. Diversity vanishes; there are no longer tables and chairs and houses, there is only this much and that much and the next amount of preserved human labour. And this labour itself is not discriminated. It is not joiner work, mason work, or weaver work; it is merely human labour in the abstract, incorporated, absorbed, congealed in exchangeable commodities. In an exchange commodities are quantities of labour jelly, and they exchange in the ratio of the amount of labour they have taken in.

Value, then, is quantity of abstract labour, and now what is quantity of labour? How is it to be ascertained? Labour is the exertion or use of man's natural powers of labour, and the quantity of labour is measured by the duration of the exertion. Quantity of labour is thus reduced to time of labour, and is measured by hours and days and weeks. Marx accordingly defines value to be an immanent relation of a commodity to time of labour, and the secret of exchange is that "a day's labour of given length always turns out a product of the same value." Value is thus something inherent in commodities before they are brought to market, and is independent of the circumstances of the market.

Marx has no sooner reduced value to the single uniform element of time of labour, and excluded from its constitution all considerations of utility and the state of the market, than he reintroduces those considerations under a disguised form. In the first place, if a day's labour of given length always produces the same value, it is obvious to ask whether then an indolent and unskilful tailor who takes a week to make a coat has produced as much value as the more expert hand who turns out six in this time, or, with the help of a machine, perhaps twenty? Marx answers, Certainly not, for the time of labour which determines value is not the time actually taken, but the time required in existing social conditions to produce that particular kind of commodity—the time taken by labour of average efficiency, using the means which the age affords—in short, what he calls the socially necessary time of labour. Value is an immanent relation to socially necessary time of labour. Marx's standard is thus, after all, not one of quantity of labour pure and simple; it takes into account, besides, the average productive power of labour in different branches of industry. "The value of a commodity," says he, "changes directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productive power, of the labour which realizes itself in that commodity." Before we know the value of a commodity we must therefore know not only the quantity of labour that has gone into it, but the productive power of that labour. We gather the quantity from the duration of exertion, but how is average productive power to be ascertained? By simply ascertaining the total product of all the labour engaged in a particular trade, and then striking the average for each labourer. Diamonds occur rarely in the crust of the earth, and therefore many seekers spend days and weeks without finding one. Hits and misses must be taken together; the productive power of the diamond seeker is low; or, in other words, the time of labour socially necessary to procure a diamond is high, and its value corresponds. In a good year the same labour will produce twice as much wheat as in a bad; its productive power is greater; the time socially necessary to produce wheat is less, and the price of the bushel falls. The value of a commodity is therefore influenced by its comparative abundance, whether that be due to nature, or to machinery, or to personal skill.

But, in the next place, if value is simply so much labour, it would seem to follow, on the one hand, that nothing could have value which cost no labour, and, on the other, that nothing could be devoid of value which cost labour. Marx's method of dealing with these two objections deserves close attention, because it is here that the fundamental fallacy of his argument is brought most clearly out. He answers the first of them by drawing a distinction between value and price, which he and his followers count of the highest consequence. Things which cost no labour may have a price, but they have no value, and, as we have seen, he mentions among such things conscience and virgin soil. No labour has touched those things; they have no immanent relation to socially necessary time of labour; they have not, and cannot have, any value, as Marx understands value. But then, he says, they command a price. Virgin soil is actually sold in the market; it may procure things that have value though it has none itself. Now, this distinction between value and price has no bearing on the matter at all, for the simple reason that, as Marx himself admits, price is only a particular form of value. Price, he says, is "the money form of value"; it is value expressed in money; it is the exchange value of a commodity for money. To say that uncultivated land may have a price but not a value is, on Marx's own showing, to say that it has an exchange value which can be definitely measured in money, and has yet no value. But he has started from the phenomena of exchange; he has told us that exchange value is the only form in which we experience value now; and he thus arrives at a theory of value which will not explain the facts. If he argued that a thing had value, but no exchange value, his position might be false, but he says that a thing may have exchange value but no value, and so his position is contradictory. Moreover, he describes money accurately enough as a measure of value, and says that it could not serve this function except it were itself valuable, i.e., unless it possessed the quality that makes all objects commensurable, the quality of being a product of labour. Yet here we find him admitting that virgin soil, which, ex hypothesi, does not possess that quality, and ought therefore to be incommensurable with anything that possesses it, is yet measured with money every day. Such are some of the absurdities to which Marx is reduced by refusing to admit that utility can confer value independently of labour.

Let us see now how he deals with the other objection. If labour is just value-forming substance, and if value is just preserved labour, then nothing which has cost labour should be destitute of value. But Marx frankly admits that there are such things which have yet got no value; and they have no value, he explains, because they have no utility. "Nothing can have value without being useful. If it is useless, the work contained in it is useless, and therefore has no value." He goes further; he says that a thing may be both useful and the product of labour and yet have no value. "He who by the produce of his labour satisfies wants of his own produces utility but not value. To produce a ware, i.e., a thing which has not merely value in use, but value in exchange, he must produce something which is not only useful to himself, but useful to others," i.e., socially useful. A product of labour which is useless to the producer and everybody else has no value of any sort; a product of labour which, while useful to the producer, is useless to any one else, has no exchange value. It satisfies no want of others. This would seem to cover the case of over-production, when commodities lose their value for a time because nobody wants them. Lassalle explained this depreciation of value by saying that the time of labour socially necessary to produce the articles in question had diminished. Marx explains it by saying that the labour is less socially useful or not socially useful at all. And why is the labour not socially useful? Simply because the product is not so. The social utility or inutility of the labour is a mere inference from the social utility or inutility of the product, and it is therefore the latter consideration that influences value. Marx tries in vain to exclude the influence of that consideration, or to explain it as a mere subsidiary qualification of labour. Labour and social utility both enter equally into the constitution of value, and Marx's radical error lies in defining value in terms of labour only, ignoring utility.

For what, after all, is value? Is Marx's definition of it in the least correct? No. Value is not an inherent relation (whatever that may mean) of a commodity to labour; it is essentially a social estimate of the relative importance of commodities to the society that forms the estimate. It is not an immanent property of an object at all; it is a social opinion expressed upon an object in comparison with others. This social opinion is at present collected in an informal but effective way, through a certain subtle tact acquired in the market, by dealers representing groups of customers on the one hand, and manufacturers representing groups of producers on the other; and it may be said to be pronounced in the verdict of exchange, i.e., according to Mill's definition of value, in the quantity of one commodity given in exchange for a given quantity of another. Now, on what does this social estimate of the relative importance of commodities turn? In other words, by what is value and difference in value determined? Value is constituted in every object by its possession of two characteristics: 1st, that it is socially useful; 2nd, that it costs some labour or trouble to procure it. No commodity lacks value which possesses both of these characteristics; and no commodity has value which lacks either of them. Now there are two kinds of commodities. Some may be produced to an indefinite amount by means of labour, and since all who desire them can obtain them at any time for the labour they cost, their social desirableness, their social utility, has no influence on their value, which, therefore, always stands in the ratio of their cost of production alone. Other classes of commodities cannot be in this way indefinitely multiplied by labour; their quantity is strictly limited by natural or other causes; those who desire them cannot get them for the mere labour of producing them; and the value of commodities of this sort will consequently always stand in excess of their relative cost of production, and will be really determined by their relative social utility. In fact, so far from the labour required for their production being any guide to their value, it is their value that will determine the amount of labour which will be ventured in their production. A single word may be added in explanation of the conception of social utility. Of course a commodity which is of no use to any one but its owner has no economic value, unless it happens to get lost, and, in any case, it is of no consequence in the present question. The social utility of a commodity is its capacity to satisfy the wants of others than the possessor, and it turns on two considerations: 1st, the importance of the want the commodity satisfies, and, 2nd, the number of persons who share the want. All commodities which derive a value from their rarity or their special excellence belong to this latter class, and the vice of Marx's theory of value is simply this, that he takes a law which is true of the first class of commodities only to be true of all classes of them.

2. Wages. Having concluded by the vicious argument now explained that all value is the creation of the personal labour of the workman—is but the registered duration of exertion of his labouring powers—Marx next proceeds to show that, as things at present exist, the value of these labouring powers themselves is fixed not by what they create but by what is necessary to create or at least renovate them. The rate of wages, economists have taught, is determined by the cost of the production of labouring powers, and that is identical with the cost of maintaining the labourer in working vigour. Marx accepts the usual explanations of the elasticity of this standard of cost of subsistence. It includes, of course, the maintenance of the labourer's family as well as his own, because he will die some day, and the permanent reproduction of powers of labour requires the birth of fresh hands to succeed him. It must also cover the expenses of training and apprenticeship, and Marx would probably agree to add, though he does not actually do so, a superannuation allowance for old age. It contains, too, a variable historical element, differs with climate and country, and is, in fact, just the customary standard of living among free labourers of the time and place. The value of a commodity is the time of labour required to deliver it in normal goodness, and to preserve the powers of labour in normal goodness a definite quantity of provisions and comforts is necessary according to time, country, and customs. The part of the labouring day required to produce this definite quantity of provisions and comforts for the use of the day may be called the necessary time of labour—the time during which the workman produces what is necessary for keeping him in existence—and the value created in this season may be called necessary value. But the workman's physical powers may hold on labouring longer than this, and the rest of his working day may accordingly be called surplus time of labour, and the value created in it surplus value. This surplus value may be created or increased in two ways: either by reducing or cheapening the labourer's subsistence, i.e., by shortening the term of necessary labour; or by prolonging the length of the working day, i.e., by increasing the term of surplus labour. There are limits indeed within which this kind of action must stop. The quantity of means of life cannot be reduced below the minimum that is physically indispensable to sustain the labourer for the day, and the term of labour cannot be stretched beyond the labourer's capacity of physical endurance. But within these limits may be played an important rôle, and the secret of surplus value lies in the simple plan of giving the labourer as little as he is able to live on, and working him as long as he is able to stand. A labourer works 12 hours a day because he cannot work longer and work permanently and well, and he gets three shillings a day of wages, because three shillings will buy him the necessities he requires. In six hours' labour he will create three shillings' worth of value, and he works the other six hours for nothing, creating three shillings' worth of surplus value for the master who advances him his wages. It is from these causes that we come on the present system of things to the singular result that powers of labour which create six shillings a day are themselves worth only three shillings a day. This absurd conclusion, says Marx, could never have held ground for an hour, had it not been hid and disguised by the practice of paying wages in money. This makes it seem as if the labourer were paid for the whole day when he is only paid for the half. Under the old system of feudal servitude there were no such disguises. The labourer wrought for his master one day, and for himself the other five, and there was no make-believe as if he were working for himself all the time. But the wages system gives to surplus labour that is really unpaid the false appearance of being paid. That is the mystery of iniquity of the whole system, the source of all prevailing legal conceptions of the relation of employer and employed, and of all the illusions about industrial freedom. The wages system is the lever of the labourer's exploitation, because it enables the capitalist to appropriate the entire surplus value created by the labourer—i.e., the value he creates over and above what is necessary to recruit his labouring powers withal.

Now surplus value, as we have seen, is of two kinds, absolute and relative. Absolute surplus value is got by lengthening the term of surplus labour; relative surplus value by shortening the term of necessary labour, which is chiefly done by inventions that cheapen the necessaries of life. The consideration of the first of these points leads Marx into a discussion of the normal length of the day of labour; and the consideration of the second into a discussion of the effects of inventions and machinery on the condition of the working classes. We shall follow him on these points in their order.

3. Normal day of labour. There is a normal length of the day of labour, and it ought to be ascertained and fixed by law. Some bounds are set to it by nature. There is a minimum length, for example, beneath which it cannot fall; that minimal limit is the time required to create an equivalent to the labourer's living; but as under the capitalistic system the capitalist has also to be supported out of it, it can never be actually shortened to this minimum. There is also a maximum length above which it cannot rise, and this upper limit is fixed by two sorts of considerations, one physical, the other moral. 1st. Physical limits. These are set by the physical endurance of the labourer. The day of labour cannot be protracted beyond the term within which the labourer can go on from day to day in normal working condition to the end of his normal labouring career. This is always looked to with respect to a horse. He cannot be wrought more than eight hours a day regularly without injury. 2nd. Moral limits. The labourer needs time (which the horse does not, or he would perhaps get it) for political, intellectual, and social wants, according to the degree required by society at the time. Between the maximum and minimum limit there is, however, considerable play-room, and therefore we find labouring days prevailing of very different length, 8 hours, 10, 12, 14, 16, and even 18 hours. There is no principle in the existing industrial economy which fixes the length of the day; it must be fixed by law on a sound view of the requirements of the case. Marx pitches upon 8 hours as the best limit, because it affords a security for the permanent physical efficiency of the labourer, and gives him leisure for satisfying those intellectual and social wants which are becoming every day more largely imperative. He makes no use of the reason often urged for the 8 hours day, that the increased intelligence it would tend to cultivate in the working class would in many ways conduce to such an increase of production as would justify the shorter term of work. But he is very strong for the necessity of having it fixed by law, and points out that even then employers will need to be carefully watched or they will find ways and means of extending the day in spite of the law. When the day was fixed in England at 10 hours in some branches of industry, some masters gained an extra quarter or half-hour by taking five minutes off each meal time, and the profit made in these five minutes was often very considerable. He mentions a manufacturer who said to him, "If you allow me ten minutes extra time every day, you put £1,000 a year into my pocket," and he says that is a good demonstration of the origin of surplus value, for how much of this £1,000 would be given to the man whose extra ten minutes' labour had made it? Marx enters very fully into the history of English factory legislation, acknowledges the great benefit it has conferred both upon the labouring class and the manufacturers, and says that since the Act of 1850 the cotton industry has become the model industry of the country. As might be expected, he thinks the gradual course taken by English legislation on the subject much inferior, as a matter of principle, to the more revolutionary method taken by France in 1848, when a twelve hours Act was introduced simultaneously as a matter of principle for every trade in the whole country; but he admits that the results were more permanent in England.

4. Effects of machinery, and the growth of fixed capital on the working classes. The whole progress of industrial improvements is a history of fresh creations of relative surplus value, and always for the benefit of the capitalist who advances the money. Everything that economizes labour or that adds positively to its productivity, contracts the labourer's own part of the working day and prolongs the master's. Division and subdivision of labour, combination, co-operation, organization, inventions, machinery, are all "on the one hand elements of historical progress and development in the economic civilization of society, but on the other are all means of civilized and refined exploitation of the labourer." They not only increase social wealth at his expense, but in many cases they do him positive injury. These improvements have cost capitalists nothing, though capitalists derive the whole advantage from them. Subdivision, combination, organization, are simply natural resources of social labour, and natural resources of any kind are not produced by the capitalist. Inventions, again, are the work of science, and science costs the capitalist nothing. Labour, association, science—these are the sources of the increase; capital is nowhere, yet it sits and seizes the whole. Machinery, of course, is capital, but then Marx will not admit that it creates any value, and contends that it merely transfers to the product the value it loses by tear and wear in the process of production. The general effect of industrial improvements, according to Marx, is—1st, to reduce wages; 2nd, to prolong the day of labour; 3rd, to overwork one-half of the working class; 4th, to throw the rest out of employ; and, 5th, to concentrate the whole surplus return in the hands of a few capitalists who make their gains by exploiting the labourers, and increase them by exploiting one another. This last point we need not further explain, and the third and fourth we shall unfold under the separate heads of Piecework and Relative Over-population. The remaining two I shall take up now, and state Marx's views about a little more fully.

(a). Industrial improvements tend to reduce wages. They do so, says Marx, through first mutilating the labourer intellectually and corporeally. As a result of subdivision of labour, workmen are rapidly becoming mere one-sided specialists. Headwork is being separated more and more from handwork in the labourer's occupation, and this differentiation of function leads to a hierarchy of wages which affords great opportunity for exploiting the labourer. Muscular power is more easily dispensed with than formerly, and so the cheaper labour of women and children is largely superseding the dearer labour of men. If this goes on much further, the manufacturer will get the labour of a whole family for the wages he used to pay to its head alone, and the labourer will be converted into a slave-dealer who sells his wife and children instead of his own labour. That this kind of slavery will find no sort of resistance from either master or labourer, is to Marx's mind placed beyond doubt by the fact that though the labour of children under 13 years of age is restricted in English factories, advertisements appear in public prints for "children that can pass for 13."

(b). Industrial improvements tend to lengthen the day of labour. Machinery can go on for ever, and it is the interest of the capitalist to make it do so. He finds, moreover, a ready and specious pretext in the greater lightness of the work as compared with hand labour, for keeping the labourer employed beyond the normal limits of human endurance. Capitalists always complain that long hours are a necessity in consequence of the increasing extent of fixed capital which cannot otherwise be made to pay. But this is a mistake on their part, says Marx. For, according to the factory inspector's reports, shortening the day of labour to 10 hours has increased production and not diminished it, and the explanation is that the men can work harder while they are at it, if the duration of their labour is shortened. Shortening the day of labour has not only increased production, but actually increased wages. Mr. Redgrave, in his Report for 1860, says that during the period 1839-1859 wages rose in the branches of industry that adopted the ten hours' principle, and fell in trades where men wrought 14 and 15 hours a day. Small wages and long hours are always found to go together, because the same causes which enable the employer to reduce wages enable him to lengthen the labouring day.

5. Piecework. Industrial improvements tend, Marx maintains, to overwork, to undue intensification of labour, for machinery can go at almost any rate all day and all night, and labourers are compelled by various expedients to work up to it. Among these expedients none is more strongly condemned by Marx than piecework, as encouraging over-exertion and overtime. He says that though known so early as the 14th century, piecework only came into vogue with the large system of production, to which he thinks it the most suitable form of payment. He states (though this is not quite accurate) that it is the only form of payment in use in workshops that are under the factory acts, because in these workshops the day of labour cannot be lengthened, and the capitalist has no other way open to him of exploiting the labourer but by increasing the intensity of the labour. He ridicules the idea of a writer who thought "the system of piecework marked an epoch in the history of the working man, because it stood halfway between the position of a mere wage labourer depending on the will of the capitalist and the position of the co-operative artisan who in the not distant future promises to combine the artisan and the capitalist in his own person." Better far, he holds, for the labourer to stick to day's wages, for he can be much more easily and extensively exploited by the piece system. He contends that experience has proved this in trades like the compositors and ship carpenters, in which both systems of payment are in operation side by side, and he cites from the factory inspectors' reports of 1860 the case of a factory employing 400 hands, 200 paid by the piece and 200 by the day. The piece hands had an interest in working overtime, and the day hands were obliged to follow suit without receiving a farthing extra for the additional hour or half-hour. This might be stopped by further legislation, but then Marx holds that the system of piece payment is so prone to abuse that when one door of exploitation shuts another only opens, and legislation will always remain ineffectual. Every peculiarity of the system furnishes opportunity either for reducing wages or increasing work. On the piece system the worth of labour is determined by the worth of the work it does, and unless the work possess average excellence the stipulated price is withheld. There is thus always a specious pretext ready to the employer's hand for making deductions from wages on the ground that the work done did not come up to the stipulated standard. Then again, it furnishes the employer with a definite measure for the intensity of labour. He judges from the results of piecework how much time it generally takes to produce a particular piece, and labourers who do not possess the average productivity are turned off on the ground that they are unable to do a minimum day's work. Even those who are kept on get lower average wages than they would on the day system. The superior workman earns indeed better pay working by the piece, but the general body do not. The superior workman can afford to take a smaller price per piece than the others, because he turns out a greater number of pieces in the same time, and the employer fixes, from the case of the superior workman, a standard of payment which is injurious to the rest. In the end a change from day's wages to piece wages will thus be found to have merely resulted in the average labourer working harder for the same money. Marx, however, admits that when a definite scale of prices has been in long use and has become fixed as a custom, there are so many difficulties to its reduction that employers are obliged, when they seek to reduce it, to resort to violent methods of transforming it into time wages again. He gives an example of this from the strike of the Coventry ribbon-weavers in 1860, in resistance to a transformation of this kind.

These are only some of the evils Marx lays at the door of piecework; he has many more charges. From rendering the superintendence of labour unnecessary, it leads to abuses like the sub-contracts known in this country as "the sweating system," or what is a variety of the same, to contracts of the employer with his manager, whereby the latter becomes responsible for the whole work, and employs and pays the men. From making it the pecuniary interest of the labourer to work overtime, piecework induces him to overstrain his powers, and both to transgress the legal or normal limits of the day of labour, and to raise or exceed the normal degree of the intensity of labour. Marx, quoting from Dunning, says that it was customary in the engineering trade in London for employers to engage a foreman of exceptional physical powers, and pay him an extra salary per quarter to keep the men up to his own pace; an expedient which, he adds, is actually recommended to farmers by Morton in his "Agricultural Encyclopædia." He attributes to piecework, especially in its operation on women and children, the degeneration of the labouring class in the potteries, which is shown in the Report of the Commission on the Employment of Children. But while Marx thus objects to piecework because it leads to overwork, he objects to it also because it leads to underwork. It enables employers to engage more hands than they require, when they entertain perhaps only an imaginary expectation of work, for they know they run no risk, since paying by the piece they pay only for what is done. The men are thus imperfectly employed and insufficiently paid.

6. Relative Over-population. One of the worst features of modern industrial development is the vast number of labourers whom it constantly leaves out of employ. This Marx calls relative over-population. Of absolute over-population he has no fear. He is not a Malthusian. He holds that there is no population law applicable to all countries and times alike. Social organisms differ from one another as do animals and plants; they have different laws and conditions. Every country and age has its own law of population. A constant and increasing over-population is a characteristic of the present age; it is a necessary consequence of the existing method of carrying on industry; but it is nothing in the nature of an absolute over-growth; it is only, to Marx's thinking, a relative superfluity. There is plenty of work for all, more than plenty. If those who have employment were not allowed to be overwrought, and if work were to-morrow to be limited to its due amount for every one according to age and sex, the existing working population would be quite insufficient to carry on the national production to its present extent. Even in England, where the technical means of saving labour are enormous, this could not be done except by converting most of our present "unproductive" labourers into productive. There is therefore, Marx conceives, no reason why any one should be out of work; but at present, what with the introduction of new machinery, the industrial cycles, the commercial crises, the changes of fashion, the transitions of every kind, we have always, besides the industrial army in actual service, a vast industrial reserve who are either entirely out of employment or very inadequately employed. This relative over-population is an inevitable consequence of the capitalistic management of industry, which first compels one-half of the labouring community to do the work of all, and then makes use of the redundancy of labour so created to compel the working half to take less pay. Low wages spring from the excessive competition among labourers caused by this relative over-population. "Rises and falls in the rate of wages are universally regulated by extensions and contractions in the industrial reserve army which correspond with changes in the industrial cycle. They are not determined by changes in the absolute number of the labouring population, but through changes in the relative distribution of the working class into active army and reserve army—through increase or decrease in the relative numbers of the surplus population—through the degree in which it is at one time absorbed and at another dismissed." The fluctuations in the rate of wages are thus traced to expansions or contractions of capital, and not to variation in the state of population. Marx ridicules the theory of these fluctuations given by political economists, that high wages lead to their own fall by encouraging marriages, and so in the end increasing the supply of labour, and that low wages lead to their own rise by discouraging marriages and reducing the supply of labour. That, says Marx, is very fine, but before high wages could have produced a redundant population (which would take eighteen years to grow up), wages would, with modern industrial cycles, have been up, down, and up again through ordinary fluctuations of trade.

Relative over-population is of three kinds: current, latent, and stagnant. Current over-population is what comes from incidental causes, the ordinary changes that take place in the every-day course of industry. A trade is slack this season and brisk the next, has perhaps its own seasons, like house-painting in spring, posting in summer. Or one trade may from temporary reasons be busy, while others are depressed. In the last half year of 1860 there were 90,000 labourers in London out of employment, and yet the factory inspectors report that at that very time much machinery was standing idle for want of hands. This comes from the labourer being mutilated—that is, specialized—under modern subdivision of labour, and fit for only a single narrow craft. Another current cause of over-population is that under the stress of modern labour the workman is old before his years, and while still in middle life becomes unfit for full work, and passes into the reserve. Marx says this is the real reason for the prevalence of early marriages among the working class. They are generally condemned for being improvident, but they are really resorted to from considerations of providence, for working men foresee that they will be prematurely disabled for work, and desire, when that day comes, to have grown-up children about them who shall be able to support them. Other current causes are new inventions and new fashions, which always throw numbers out of work. Latent over-population is what springs from causes whose operation is long and slow. The best example of it is the case of the agricultural labourers. They are being gradually superseded by machinery, and as they lose work in the country they gather to the towns to swell the reserve army there. A great part of the farm servants are always in this process of transition, a few here, and a few there, and a few everywhere. The constancy of this flow indicates a latent over-population in the rural districts, and that is the cause of the low wages of agricultural labourers. By stagnant over-population Marx means that which is shown in certain branches of industry, where none of the workmen are thrown back entirely into the reserve, but none get full regular employment.

CHAPTER V. THE FEDERALISM OF CARL MARLO.

Marlo and Rodbertus are sometimes spoken of as the precursors of German socialism. This, however, is a mistake. The socialism which now exists appeared in Germany among the Young Hegelians forty years ago, before the writings of either of these economists were published, and their writings have had very little influence on the present movement. Rodbertus, it is true, communicated a decided impulse to Lassalle, both by his published letter to Von Kirchmann in 1853, and by personal correspondence subsequently. He was a landed proprietor of strongly liberal opinions, who was appointed Minister of Agriculture in Prussia in 1848, but after a brief period of office retired to his estates, and devoted himself to economic and historical study. He took a very decided view of the defects of the existing industrial system, and held in particular that, in accordance with Ricardo's law of necessary wages, the labourer's income could never rise permanently above the level of supplying him with a bare subsistence, and consequently that, while his labour was always increasing in productivity, through mechanical inventions and other means, the share which he obtained of the product was always decreasing. What was required was simply to get this tendency counteracted, and to devise arrangements by which the labourer's share in the product might increase proportionally with the product itself, for otherwise the whole working population would be left behind by the general advancement of society. The remedy, he conceives, must lie in the line of a fresh contraction of the sphere of private property. That sphere had been again and again contracted in the interests of personal development, and it must be so once more. And the contraction that was now necessary was to leave nothing whatever in the nature of private property except income. This proposal is substantially identical with the scheme of the socialists; it is just the nationalization of all permanent stock; but then he holds that it could not be satisfactorily carried out in less than five hundred years. Rodbertus's writings have never been widely known, but they attracted some attention among the German working class, and he was invited, along with Lassalle and Lothar Bucher, to address the Working Men's Congress in Leipzig in 1863. He promised to come and speak on the law of necessary wages, but the Congress was never held in consequence of the action of Lassalle in precipitating his own movement, and from that movement Rodbertus held entirely aloof. He agreed with Lassalle's complaints against the present order of things, but he disapproved of his plan of reform. He did not think the scheme of founding productive associations on State credit either feasible or desirable, and he would still retain the system of wages, though with certain improvements introduced by law. He thought, moreover, that Lassalle erred gravely in making the socialists a political party, and that they should have remained a purely economic one. Besides, he looked on it as mere folly to expect, with Lassalle, the accomplishment in thirty years of changes which, as we have seen, he believed five centuries little enough time to evolve.

Rodbertus may thus be said to have had some relations with the present movement, but Marlo stands completely apart from it: and his large and important work, "Untersuchungen über die Organization der Arbeit, oder System der Weltökonomie," published at Kassel in 1850-5—though original, learned, and lucid—remained so absolutely unknown that none of the lexicons mention his name, and even an economist like Schaeffle—who was the first to draw public attention to it, and has evidently been considerably influenced by it himself—had never read it till he was writing his own work on socialism (1870). But though Marlo cannot be said to have contributed in any respect to the present socialistic movement, his work deserves attentive consideration as a plea for fundamental social reform, advanced by a detached and independent thinker, who has given years of patient study to the phenomena of modern economic life, and holds them to indicate the presence of a deep-seated and widespread social disease. Carl Marlo is the nom de plume of a German professor of chemistry named Winkelblech, and he gives us in the preface to his second volume a touching account of how he came to apply himself to social questions. In 1843 he made a tour of investigation through Northern Europe in connection with a technological work he was engaged in writing, and visited among other places the blue factory of Modum, in Norway, where he remained some days, charmed with the scenery, which he thought equal to that of the finest valleys of the Alps. One morning he went up to a neighbouring height, whence he could see the whole valley, and was calmly enjoying the view when a German artisan came to ask him to undertake some commission to friends in the fatherland. They engaged in conversation. The artisan went over his experiences, and repeated all the privations he and his fellows had to endure. His tale of sorrow, so alien apparently to the ravishing beauty around, made a profound impression on Winkelblech, and altered the purpose and work of his life. "What is the reason," he asked himself, "that the paradise before my eyes conceals so much misery? Is nature the source of all this suffering, or is it man that is to blame for it? I had before, like so many men of science, looked, while in workshops, only on the forges and the machinery, not on the men—on the products of human industry, and not on the producers, and I was quite a stranger to this great empire of misery that lies at the foundation of our boasted civilization. The touching words of the artisan made me feel the nullity of my scientific work and life in its whole extent, and from that moment I resolved to make the sufferings of our race, with their causes and remedies, the subject of my studies." He pursued these studies with the greatest industry for several years, and found the extent of men's sufferings to be greatly beyond his expectation. Poverty prevailed everywhere—among labourers and among employers, too—with peoples of the highest industrial development, and with peoples of the lowest—in luxurious cities, and in the huts of villagers—in the rich plains of Lombardy, no less than the sterile wilds of Scandinavia. He arrived at the conclusion that the causes of all this lay not in nature, but in the fact that human institutions rested on false economic foundations, and he held the only possible remedy to consist in improving these institutions. He became convinced that technical perfection of production, however great, would never be able to extinguish poverty or lead to the diffusion of general comfort, and that civilization was now come to a stage in its development at which further progress depended entirely on the advancement of political economy. Political economy was, therefore, for our time the most important of all sciences, and Winkelblech now determined to give himself thoroughly to its study. Hitherto he had not done so. "During the progress of my investigations," he says, "the doctrines of economists, as well as the theories of socialists, remained almost unknown to me except in name, for I intentionally abstained from seeking any knowledge of either, in order that I might keep myself as free as possible from extraneous influences. It was only after I arrived at the results described that I set myself to a study of economic literature, and came to perceive that the substance of my thoughts, though many of them were not new, and stood in need of correction, departed completely from the accepted principles of the science." He reached the conclusion that there prevailed everywhere the symptoms of a universal social disease, and that political economy was the only physician that could cure it; but that the prevailing system of economy was quite incompetent for that task, and that a new system was urgently and indispensably required. To set forth such a system is the aim of his book. He derides Proudhon's idea of social reforms coming of themselves without design, and argues strongly that no reform worthy the name can ever be expected except as the fruit of economic researches. He agrees with the Socialists in so far as they seek to devise a new economic system, but he thinks they make a defective diagnosis of the disease, and propose an utterly inadequate remedy. He counts them entirely mistaken in attributing all existing evils to the unequal distribution of wealth, a deficiency of production being, in his opinion, a much more important source of misery than any error of distribution. In fact, his fundamental objection to the existing distribution is that it is not the distribution which conduces to the highest production, or to the most fruitful use of the natural resources at the command of society. He differs from the German socialists in always looking at the question from the standpoint of society in general, rather than from that of the proletariat alone, and he maintains that a new organization of labour is even more necessary for the interest of the capitalists than for that of the labourers, because he believes the present system will infallibly lead, unless amended, to the overthrow of the capitalist class, and the introduction of communism. His point of view is moreover purely economic and scientific, entirely free from all partizan admixture, and while he declares himself to be a zealous member of the republican party, he says that he purposely abstains from intervention in politics because he regards the political question as one of very minor rank, and holds that, with sound social arrangements, people could live more happily under the Russian autocracy than, with unsound ones, they could do under the French republic. The organization of labour is, in his opinion, something quite independent of the form of the State, and its final aim ought to be to produce the amount of wealth necessary to diffuse universal comfort among the whole population without robbing the middle classes. These characteristics sufficiently separate him from the socialist democrats of the present day.

His book was published gradually in parts, sometimes after long intervals, between 1848 and 1856, and it was finally interrupted by his death in 1865. A second edition appeared in 1885, containing some additions from his manuscripts, but the work remains incomplete. It was to have consisted of three parts; 1st, a historical part, containing an exposition and estimate of the various economic systems; 2nd, an elementary or doctrinal part, containing an exposition of the principles of economic science; and, 3rd, a practical part, explaining his plan for the organization of labour. The first two parts are all we possess; the third, and most important, never appeared, which must be regretted by all who recognise the evidences of original power and singular candour that the other parts present.

Marlo's account of the social problem is that it arises from the fact that our present industrial organization is not in correspondence with the idea of right which is recognised by the public opinion of the time. That idea of right is the Christian one, which takes its stand on the dignity of manhood, and declares that all men, simply because they are men, have equal rights to the greatest possible happiness. Up till the French Revolution, the idea of right that prevailed was the heathen one, which might be called the divine right of the stronger. The weak might be made a slave without wrong. He might be treated as a thing and not as a person or an equal, who had the same right with his master or his feudal superior to the greatest possible enjoyment. Nature belonged to the conqueror, and his dominion was transmitted by privilege. Inequality of right was therefore the characteristic of this period; Marlo calls it monopolism. But at the French Revolution the Christian idea of right rose to its due ascendancy over opinion, and the sentiments of love and justice began to assume a control over public arrangements. Do as you would be done by, became a rule for politics as well as for private life, and the weak were supported against the strong. Equality of right was the mark of the new period; Marlo calls it panpolism. This idea could not be realized before the present day, because it had never before taken possession of the public mind, but it has done this now so thoroughly that it cannot be expected to rest till it has realized itself in every direction in all the practical applications of which it is susceptible. The final arbiter of institutions is always the conception of right prevailing at the time; contemporary industrial arrangements are out of harmony with the contemporary conception of right; and stability cannot be looked for until this disturbance is completely adjusted.

Now the first attempts that society made to effect this adjustment were not unnaturally attended with imperfection. In the warmth of their recoil from the evils of monopolism, men ran into extreme and distorted embodiments of the opposite principle, and they ran contrary ways. These contrary ways are Liberalism and Communism. Liberalism fixed its attention mainly on the artificial restrictions, the privileges, the services, the legal bonds by which monopoly and inequality were kept up, and it thought a perfect state of society would be brought about if only every chain were snapped and every fetter stripped away. It conceived the road to the greatest possible happiness for every man was the greatest possible freedom; it idolized the principle of abstract liberty, and it fancied if evil did not disappear, it was always because something still remained that needed emancipation. Communism, on the other hand, kept its eyes on the inequalities of monopolistic society; imagined the true road to the greatest possible happiness was the greatest possible equality; that all ills would vanish as soon as things were levelled enough; in short, it idolized the principle of abstract equality. Modern Liberalism and modern Communism are therefore of equal birth; they have the same historical origin in the triumph of the principle of equality of right in 1789; they are only different modes of attempting to reduce that principle to practice; and Liberalism happens to be the more widely disseminated of the two, not because it represents that principle better, but merely because being more purely negative than the other, it was easier of introduction, and so got the start of Communism in the struggle of existence. According to Marlo, they are both equally bad representatives of the principle, and their chief good lies in their mutual criticism, by means of which they prepare the way for the true system, the system of Federalism, which will be presently explained. The history of revolution, he says, begins in the victory of Liberalism and Communism together over Monopolism; it proceeds by the conflict of the victors with one another, and it ends in the final triumph of Federalism over both.

Marlo next criticises the two systems of Liberalism and Communism with considerable acuteness. Both the one and the other are utopias; they are absorbed in realizing an abstract principle, and they, as a matter of fact, produce exactly the opposite of what they aim at. Communism seeks to reach the greatest possible happiness by introducing first the greatest possible equality. But what is equality? Is it equality when each man gets a coat of the same size, or is it not rather when each man gets a coat that fits him? Some communists would accept the former alternative. They would measure off the same length to the dwarf and the giant, to the ploughman and the judge, to the family of three and the family of thirteen. But this would be clearly not equality, but only inequality of a more vicious and vexatious kind. Most communists, however, prefer the second alternative, and assign to every man according to his needs, to every man the coat that fits him. But then we must first have the cloth, and that is only got by labour, and every labourer ought if possible to produce his own coat. The motive to labour, however, is weakened on the communistic system; and if those who work less are to be treated exactly like those who work more, then that would be no abolition of monopoly, but merely the invention of a new monopoly, the monopoly of indolence and incapacity. The skilful and industrious would be exploited by the stupid and lazy. Besides, production would for the same reason, insufficient inducement to labour, be diminished, progress would be stopped, and therefore the average of human happiness would decline. Communism thus conducts to the opposite of everything it seeks. It seeks equality, it ends in inequality; it seeks the abolition of monopoly, it creates a new monopoly; it seeks to increase happiness, it actually diminishes it. It is a pure utopia, and why? Because it misunderstands its own principle. Equality does not mean giving equal things to every man; it means merely affording the greatest possible playroom for the development of every personality, and that is exactly the principle of freedom. The greatest possible equality and the greatest possible freedom can only be realized together; they must spring out of the same conditions, and a system of right which shall adjust these conditions is just what is now wanted.

Liberalism is a failure from like causes. It seeks to realize happiness by freedom; it realizes neither. For it mistakes the nature of freedom, as the Communists mistake the nature of equality. It takes freedom to be the power of doing what one likes, instead of being the power of doing what is right. Its whole bent is to exempt as much as possible of life from authoritative restraint, and to give as much scope as exigencies will allow to the play of individuality. It is based on no positive conception of right whatever, and looks on the State as an alien whose interference is something exceptional, only justified on occasional grounds of public necessity or general utility. It fails to see that there are really no affairs in a community which are out of relation to the general wellbeing, and destitute of political significance. Nothing demonstrates the error of this better than the effects of the Liberal régime itself. For half a century the industrial concerns of the people have been treated as matters of purely private interest, and this policy has resulted in a political as well as economical revolution. Industrial freedom, which has produced capitalism in the economic field, has resulted in political life in the ascendancy of a new class, a plutocracy, "the worst masters," said De Tocqueville, "the world has yet seen, though their reign will be short." The change which was effected by the legislation of the Revolution was not a development of a fourth estate, as is sometimes said; it was really nothing more than the creation of a money aristocracy, and the putting of them in the place of the old hereditary nobility. The system of industrial right that happens to prevail, therefore, so far from being, as Liberals fancy, outside the sphere of political interest, is in truth the very element on which the distribution of political power, in the last analysis, depends. Nothing is more political than the social question. Liberals think slight of that question, but it is, says Marlo, the real question of the day, and it is neither more nor less than the question of the existence or abolition of Liberalism, the question of the maintenance or subversion of the principle of industrial freedom, the question of the ascendancy or overthrow of a money aristocracy. The fight of our age is a fight against a plutocracy bred of Liberalism. It is not, as some represent it, a struggle of labourers against employers; it is a joint struggle of labourers and lower bourgeoisie against the higher bourgeoisie, a struggle of those who work and produce against those who luxuriate idly on the fruits of others' labour. As compared with this question, constitutional questions are of very minor importance, for no matter whether the State be monarchy or republic, if the system of industrial right that prevails in it be the system of industrial freedom, the real power of the country will be in the hands of the capitalist class. He who fails to see this, says Marlo, fails to understand the spirit of his time. It is always the national idea of right that governs both in social and political relations, and as long as the national idea of right is that of Liberalism, we shall continue to have capitalism and a plutocracy. It is the mind that builds the body up, and it is only when a new system of right has taken as complete possession of the national consciousness as Liberalism did in 1789, that the present social conflict will cease and a better order of things come in.

From want of such a system of right—from want even of seeing the necessity for it, Liberalism has defeated its own purpose. It sought to abolish monopoly; it has only substituted for the old monopoly of birth the more grievous monopoly of wealth. It sought to establish freedom; it has only established plutocratic tyranny. It has erred because it took for freedom an abstraction of its own and tried to realize that, just as Communism erred by taking for equality an abstraction of its own and trying to realize that. The most perfect state of freedom is not reached when every man has the power of doing what he likes, any more than the most perfect state of equality is reached when every man has equal things with every other; but the greatest possible freedom is attained in a condition of society where every man has the greatest possible play-room for the development of his personality, and the greatest possible equality is attained in exactly the same state of things. Real freedom and real equality are in fact identical. Every right contains from the first a social element as well as an individual element, and it cannot be realized in the actual world without observing a due adjustment between these two elements. Such an adjustment can only be discovered by a critical examination of the economic constitution of society, and must then be expressed in a distinct system of industrial right, which imposes on individual action its just limits. True liberty is liberty within these limits; and the true right of property is a right of property under the same conditions. The fundamental fault of Liberalism, the cause of its failure, is simply that it goes to work without a sound theory of right, or rather perhaps without any clear theory at all, and merely aims at letting every one do as he likes, with the understanding that the State can always be called in to correct accidents and excesses.

This defect is what Federalism claims to supply. It claims to be the only theory that abandons abstractions and keeps closely to the nature of things, and therefore to be the only theory that is able to realize even approximately the Christian principle of equality of right. The name furnishes no very precise clue to the conclusion it designates, and it has no reference to the federative form of State, for which Marlo expressly disavows having any partiality. He has chosen the word merely to indicate the fact that society is an organic confederation of many different kinds of associations—families, churches, academies, mercantile companies, and so on; that association is not only a natural form, but the natural form in which man's activity tends to be carried on; and that in any sound system of industrial right this must be recognised by an extension of the collective form of property and the co-operative form of production. Communism, says Marlo, is mechanical, Liberalism is atomistic, but Federalism is organic. When he distinguishes his theory from communism, it must be remembered that it is from the communism which he has criticised, and which he would prefer to denominate Equalism; it is from the communism of Baboeuf, which would out of hand give every man according to his needs, and would consequently, through impairing the motives to industry, leave those needs themselves in the long run less satisfactorily provided for than they are now. But his system is nearly identical with the communism of the Young Hegelians of his own time—that is, with the German socialism of the present day—although he arrived at it in entire independence of their agitations, and builds it on deductions peculiar to himself. Like them, he asks for the compulsory transformation of land and the instruments of production from private property into collective property; like them, he asks for this on grounds of social justice, as the necessary mechanism for giving effect to positive rights that are set aside under the present system; and he says himself, "If you ask the question, how is the democratic social republic related to Federalism, the most suitable answer is, as the riddle to its solution."

He starts from the position that all men have equally the right to property. Not merely in the sense, which is commonly acknowledged, that they have the right to property if they have the opportunity of acquiring it; but in the further significance, that they have a right to the opportunity. They are in fact born proprietors—de jure at least, and they are so for two reasons. First, God has made them persons, and not things, and they have, therefore, all equally a natural right to their amplest personal development. If society interferes with this liberty of personal development—if it suffers any of its members to become the slaves of others, for example—it robs them of original rights which belong to them by the mere fact of their manhood. But, secondly, property, resources of some sort, being indispensable means of personal development, God, who has imposed the end, has supplied the means. He has given nature, the earth and the lower creation, into the dominion of man, not of this or that man, or class of men, but of mankind, and consequently every man has, equally with every other, a right to participate in the dominion of nature, a right to use its bounty to the extent required for his personal development. No appropriation of nature can be just which excludes this possibility and robs any man of this natural right. It is, therefore, wrong to allow to any single person, or to any limited number of persons, an absolute dominion over natural resources in which everybody else has, by nature, a right to some extent to share. He who should have complete and exclusive lordship over all nature, would be lord and master of all his fellow-men, and in a period after natural agents are all appropriated the system of complete and absolute property leaves the new-comers at the mercy of those who are already in possession. They can only work if the latter give them the productive instruments; they can only reap from their work so much of its fruits as the latter are pleased to leave with them; and they must perish altogether unless the latter employ them. They are slaves, they are beggars; and yet they came into the world with the rights of a proprietor, of which they can never be divested. Nature laid covers for them as well as for the rest, and a system of property is essentially unjust which ousts them from their seat at her table. The common theory of property starts from the premiss, that all men have the right to property, and draws the conclusion, that, therefore, some men have the right to monopolize it. As usually understood, the proprietary right is as much a right of robbery as a right of property, and Proudhon would have been quite correct in describing property as theft, if no better system of property could be devised than the present.

But such a system can be devised; one under which the right of new-comers may be respected without disturbing those of possessors. This can only be done by putting entirely aside the complete and absolute form of property which is in so much favour with Liberalism, and by making the right of property in any actual possession a strictly limited and circumscribed right from the first—the right not to an arbitrary control over a thing, but to a just control over it. So long as property is always thought of as an arbitrary and absolute dominion over a thing, the proprietary right cannot possibly be explained in a way that does not make it a right given to some to rob others. Why not, therefore, define property from the beginning as subject to limitations, and contrive a new form or system of it, in which these limitations shall for ever receive due recognition, and no man be thereafter denied the opportunity of acquiring as much of the bounty of nature as is necessary for him to carry out his personal development?

That is Marlo's task, and it would have been an easy one, if all goods, if everything that satisfies a human want, had been supplied directly by nature, as air is supplied, without the need of industry to procure it or the power of industry to multiply it. Then the problem would be solved very simply as the earlier communists desired to solve it. Every member of society would be entitled to partake of nature's supplies, as he now does of air, in the measure of his need, and when those supplies ran exhausted, just as when the air became vitiated, society would be entitled, nay obliged, to suppress further propagation. But the question is far from being so simple. Nature only yields her bounties to us after labour; they are only converted into means of life by labour; and they are capable of being vastly multiplied by labour. This element of labour changes the situation of things considerably, and must be allowed a leading rôle in determining a just right and system of property. The only case where a proprietary right can be recognised which is unmodified by this consideration, is the case of those who are unable to labour. They fall back on their original right to a share in the bounty of nature in the measure that their personal development requires; in other words, according to their needs. Their share does not lie waste, though they are unable to work it themselves, and their share belongs to them immediately because they are persons, and not because they may afterwards become labourers. Marlo recognises, therefore, antecedently to labour the right to existence, and this right he proposes to realize for the weak and disabled by means of a compulsory system of national insurance.

The other natural proprietary rights are consequent in one way or another upon labour. First, there is the right to labour. If every man has a right to a share in the dominion of nature, then every man who is able to labour has a right to obtain the natural resources that are necessary to give him employment according to capacity and trade. No private appropriation of these resources can divest him of his title to get access to them, and if he cannot find work himself, the State is bound to provide it for him in public workshops. Second, every man has a right to the most profitable possible application of labour to natural resources. He has an interest in seeing the common stock put to the best account, and he is wronged in this interest when waste is permitted, when inferior methods are resorted to, or when the distribution of work and materials is ill arranged. Now the best arrangement is when each man is equipped according to the measure and quality of his powers. Nature will be then best worked, and man's personal development will then be best furthered. If such an arrangement cannot be effected on the system of property now in vogue, while it may be under another, it is every man's right to have the former system supplanted by the latter. The most economical form of property is the most just. Third, the next right is a right to an almost unlimited control over the fruits of one's own labour. Not over the means of labour; these can only be justly or economically held by a circumscribed control; but over the fruits of labour. These ought to be retained as exclusive property, for the simple reason that the natural resources will be so turned to the best account. On any other system of payment the motive to labour is impaired, and the amount of its produce diminished. Distribution by need defeats its own end; the very needs of the community would be less amply satisfied after it than before it. Distribution according to work is the sound economic principle, and therefore the just one. Marlo here leaves room for the play of the hereditary principle and of competition to some extent, and he allows the free choice of occupation on similar grounds. Men will work best in lines their own tastes and powers lead them to. Everything is determined by economic utility, and economic utility is supposed to be at its height when the natural resources of a country are distributed among its inhabitants according to the requirements of their labouring powers.

This condition of things can only be realized, first, if population is regulated; second, if unproductive labour is suppressed; and third, if the means of labour are made common property. The necessity for regulating population comes, of course, from the limitation of the natural resources at society's command. In any community there is a certain normal limit of population—the limit at which all the natural resources are distributed among all the inhabitants according to their powers—and the community will learn when this limit is reached from the number of workmen who are unable to obtain private employment, and are obliged to seek work from the State. Then it can regulate population by various expedients. It may require the possession of a certain amount of fortune as a preliminary condition to marriage, and raise this amount according to necessity. It may encourage emigration. It may forbid marriages under a fixed age, and to prevent illegitimacy, it might give natural children the same rights as legitimate ones. But Marlo trusts most to the strong preventive check that would be supplied by the power imparted to working men under the Federal régime of improving their position.

The same necessity that makes it legitimate, and, indeed, imperative to regulate population, makes it legitimate and imperative also to suppress what Marlo calls unproductive acquisition, i.e., the acquisition by persons who are able to work of any other property than they earn as the fruit of their work; and to suppress likewise all waste of the means of life and enjoyment, such, for example, as is involved in the maintenance of unnecessary horses, dogs, or other animals that only eat up the products of the soil. The obligation to labour and the curtailment of luxury would come into exercise before the restrictions on population, and be more and more rigorously enforced as the normal limit of population was approximated.

But the most important and the most necessary innovation is the conversion of land and the instruments of production into the form of collective property. The form in which property should be held ought to be strictly determined by considerations of economic utility. From such considerations the Liberals themselves have introduced important changes into the system of property; they have abolished fiefs, hereditary tenancies, entail, servitudes, church and village lands, all the peculiarities of monopolistic society, because, as they said, they wished to substitute a good form of property for a bad; and they at least have no right, Marlo thinks, to turn round now on Communists or Federalists for proposing to supersede this good form of property by a better. They have themselves transformed property by law, and they have transformed it on grounds of economic advantage; they have owned that the economic superiority of a particular form of property imposes a public obligation for its compulsory introduction. They asserted the competency of the State against the monopolists, and they cannot now deny it against the socialists. If the private form of property is best, then let the State maintain it; but if the collective form is best, then the State is bound, even on the principles of Liberals themselves, to introduce it. The question can only be determined by experience of the comparative economic utility of the two. Without offering any detailed proof of his proposition from experience Marlo then affirms that the most advantageous form of property is reached when the instruments of production are the collective property of associations, and the instruments of enjoyment (except wells, bridges, and the like) are the property of individuals. Each man's house would still be his castle; his house and the fulness thereof would still belong to him; but outside of it he could acquire no individual possessions. Of land and the means of labour, he should be joint-proprietor with others, or rather joint-tenant with them under the Crown. Industrial property would be held in common by the associations that worked it, and these associations would be organized by authority with distinct charters of powers and functions.

Marlo thus arrives at the same practical scheme as Marx, though by a slightly different road. Marx builds his claim on Ricardo's theory of value and Ricardo's law of necessary wages. Marlo builds his on man's natural right, as a sharer in the dominion of nature, to the most advantageous exercise of that dominion.

CHAPTER VI. THE SOCIALISTS OF THE CHAIR.