Transcriber's Note:

Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has been preserved.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For a complete list, please see the [end of this document].

SOCIALISM AND
DEMOCRACY IN
EUROPE

By

SAMUEL P. ORTH, Ph.D.

Author of "Five American Politicians" "Centralization of
Administration in Ohio," etc.

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1913

Copyright, 1913
by
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Published January, 1913

THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS
RAHWAY, N.J.

PREFACE

It is becoming more and more evident that democracy has served only the first years of its apprenticeship. Political problems have served only to introduce popular government. The economic problems now rushing upon us will bring the real test of democracy.

The workingman has taken an advanced place in the struggle for the democratization of industry. He has done so, first, through the organization of labor unions; secondly, through the development of political parties—labor parties. The blend of politics and economics which he affects is loosely called Socialism. The term is as indefinite in meaning as it is potent in influence. It has spread its unctuous doctrines over every industrial land, and its representatives sit in every important parliament, including our Congress.

Such a movement requires careful consideration from every point of view.

It is the object of this volume to trace briefly the growth of the movement in four leading European countries, and to attempt to determine the relation of economic and political Socialism to democracy—a question of peculiar interest to the friends of the American Republic at this time.

In preparing this volume, the author has made extended visits to the countries studied. He has tried to catch the spirit of the movement by personal contact with the Socialist leaders and their antagonists, and by many interviews with laboring men, the rank and file in every country visited.

Everywhere he was received with the greatest cordiality, and he wishes here to express his appreciation of these many kindnesses.

He wishes especially to acknowledge his obligations to the following gentlemen: Mr. Graham Wallas of the University of London; Mr. W.G. Towler of the London Municipal Society; Mr. John Hobson of London, and Mr. J.S. Middleton, assistant secretary of the Labor Party; to Dr. Robert Herz and Prof. Charles Gide of the University of Paris; Dr. Albert Thomas and M. Adolphe Landry of the Chamber of Deputies; M. Jean Longuet, editor of L'Humanité; to Dr. Franz Oppenheimer of the University of Berlin; Dr. Südekum of the Reichstag; Dr. Hilferding, editor of Vorwärts; Prof. T.H. Norton, American Consul at Chemnitz; M. Camille Huysmans, secretary of the "International," Brussels; as well as to many American friends for providing letters of introduction which opened many useful and congenial doorways.

S.P.O.

January, 1913.

CONTENTS

SOCIALISM AND DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION—WHY DOES SOCIALISM EXIST?[ToC]

The answer to this question will bring us nearer to the core of the social movement than any attempted definition. The French Socialist program begins with the assertion, "Socialism is a question of class." Class distinction is the generator of Socialism.

The ordinary social triptych—upper, middle, and lower classes—will not suffice us in our inquiry. We must distinguish between the functions of the classes. The upper class is a remnant of the feudal days, of the manorial times, when land-holding brought with it social distinction and political prerogative. In this sense we have no upper class in America. The middle class is composed of the business and professional element, and the lower class of the wage-earning element.

There are two words, as yet quite unfamiliar to American readers, which are met with constantly in European works on Socialism and are heard on every hand in political discussions—proletariat and bourgeois. The proletariat are the wage-earning class, the poor, the underlings. The bourgeois[1] are roughly the middle class. The French divide them into petits bourgeois and grands bourgeois. Werner Sombart divides them into lower middle class, the manual laborers who represent the guild system, and bourgeoisie, the representatives of the capitalistic system.[2]

It will thus be seen that these divisions have a historical basis. The upper class reflect the days of feudalism, of governmental prerogative and aristocracy. The middle class are the representatives of the guild and mercantile systems, when hand labor and later business acumen brought power and wealth to the craftsman and adventurer. The lower class are the homologues of the slaves, the serfs, the toilers, whose reward has constantly been measured by the standard of bare existence. Socialism arises consciously out of the efforts of this class to win for itself a share of the powers of the other classes. It is necessary to understand that while this class distinction is historic in origin it is essentially economic in fact. It is not "social"; a middle-class millionaire may be congenial to the social circles of the high-born. It is not political; a workingman may vote with any party he chooses. He may ally himself with the conservative Center as he sometimes does in Germany, or with the Liberal Party as he sometimes does in England, or with either of the old parties as he does in the United States. On the other hand, a bourgeois may be a Socialist and vote with the proletarians. Indeed, many of the Socialist leaders belong to the well-to-do middle class.

This class distinction, then, is economic. It is a distinction of function, the function of the capitalist and the function of the wage-earner. Let us go one step further; it is a distinction in property. The possessor of private wealth can become a capitalist by investing his money in productive enterprise. He then becomes the employer of labor. There are all grades of capitalists, from the master wagon-maker who works by the side of his one or two workmen, to the "captain" of a vast industry that gives employment to thousands of men and turns out a wagon a minute.

The institution of private property is the basis of Socialism because it is the basis of capitalistic production. It places in one man's hands the power of owning raw material, machinery, land, factory, and finished product; and the power of hiring men to operate the machinery, and to convert the raw material into marketable wares. As long as this power was limited to hand industry the proletarian movement was abortive. When the industrial revolution linked the ingenuity of man to the power of nature it so multiplied the potency of the possessor that the proletarian movement by stress of circumstances became a great factor in industrial life.

While the possession either of wealth or family tradition was always the basis of class distinction, the industrial revolution brought with it the enormously multiplied power of capital and the glorification of riches. The proletarians multiplied rapidly in number, and all the evils of sharp class distinction were heightened. In all lands where capitalistic production spread, the two classes grew farther apart, the distinction between possessor and wage-earner increased.

It is not the mere possession of wealth, however, which forms the animus of the Socialist movement. It is probably not even the abuse of this wealth, although this is a large factor in the problem. It is the psychological effect of the capitalist system that is the real enginery of Socialism. It is the class feeling, the consciousness of the workingman that he is contributing muscle and blood and sweat to the perfection of an article whose possession he does not share. This feeling is aroused by the contrasts of life that the worker constantly sees around him. He feels that his own life energy has contributed to the magnificent equipages and the palatial luxuries of his employer. He compares his own lot and that of his family with the lot of the capitalist. This feeling of envy is not blunted by the kaleidoscopic suddenness with which changes of fortune can take place in America to-day. By some stroke of luck or piece of ingenious planning, a receiver of wages to-day may be the giver of wages to-morrow.

Nor does the spread of education and intelligence dull the contrasts. It greatly heightens them. The workman can now begin to analyze the conditions under which he lives. He ponders over the distinctions that are actual and contrasts them with his imagined utopia. To him the differences between employer and employee are not natural. He does not attribute them to any fault or shortcoming or inferiority of his own, nor of his master, but to a flaw in the organization of society. The social order is wrong.

The workingman has become the critic. Here you have the heart of Socialism. Whatever form its outward aspect may take, at heart it is a rebellion against things as they are. And whatever may be the syllogisms of its logic, or the formularies of its philosophy, they all begin with a grievance, that things as they are are wrong; and they all end in a hope for a better society of to-morrow where the inequalities shall somehow be made right.

In his struggle toward a new economic ideal, the proletarian has achieved a class homogeneity and self-consciousness. The individuality that is denied him in industry he has sought and found among his own brethren. In the great factory he loses even his name and becomes number so-and-so. In his union and in his party he asserts his individuality with a grim and impressive stubbornness. The gravitation of common ideals and common protests draws these forgotten particles of industrialism into a massed consciousness that is to-day one of the world's great potencies. The very fact that we call this body of workers "the masses" is significant. We speak of them as a geologist speaks of his "basement complex." We recognize unconsciously that they form the foundation of our economic life.

The class struggle, then, is between two clearly defined and self-conscious elements in modern industrial life that are the natural product of our machine industry. On the one hand is the business man pursuing with fevered energy the profits that are the goal of his activity; on the other hand are the workingmen who, more and more sullen in their discontent, are clamoring louder each year for a greater share of the wealth they believe their toil creates.

There is some reason to believe that this class basis of Socialism is vanishing. In England J. Ramsay MacDonald denies its significance.[3] Revisionists and progressive Socialists, who are throwing aside the Marxian dogmas, are also preaching the universality of the Socialist conception. However, the economic factor based on class functions remains the essence of the social movement.[4]

What are the ideals of Socialism? They are not merely economic or social, they embrace all life. After one has taken the pains to read the more important mass of Socialist literature, books, pamphlets, and some current newspapers and magazines, and has listened to their orators and talked with their leaders, confusion still remains in the mind. The movement is so all-embracing that it has no clearly defined limits. The Socialists are feeling their way from protest into practice. Their heads are in the clouds; of this you are certain as you proceed through their books and listen to their speeches. But are their feet upon the earth?

For a literature of protest against "suffering, misery, and injustice," as Owen calls it, there is a wonderful buoyancy and hope in their words. It is one of the secrets of its power that Socialism is not the energy of despair. It is the demand for the right to live fully, joyfully, and in comfort. The Socialists demand ozone in their air, nutrition in their food, heartiness in their laughter, ease in their homes, and their days must have hours of relaxation.

The awakening aspirations of the proletarian were expressed by one of their own number, William Weitling, a tailor of Magdeburg. He afterwards migrated to America and became one of our first Socialist agitators. His book is called Garantieen der Harmonie und Freiheit (Guaranties of Harmony and Liberty). The book is illogical, full of contradictions, and all of the errors of a child's reasoning. But it remains the workingman's classic philippic, one of the most trenchant recitals of social wrongs, because it blends, with the illogical terminology of sentimentalism, the assurance of hope. "Property," he says, "is the root of all evil." Gold is the symbol of this world of wrongs. "We have become as accustomed to our coppers as the devil to his hell." When the rule of gold shall cease, then "the teardrops which are the tokens of true brotherliness will return to the dry eyes of the selfish, the soul of the evildoer will be filled with noble and virtuous sentiments such as he had never known before, and the impious ones who have hitherto denied God will sing His praise." The humble tailor is assured that the reign of property will be terminated and the age of humanity begin, and he calls to the workingman, "Forward, brethren; with the curse of Mammon on our lips, let us await the hour of our emancipation, when our tears will be transmuted into pearls of dew, our earth transformed into a paradise, and all of mankind united into one happy family."[5] Nor is the closing cry of his book without an element of prophecy. He addresses the "mighty ones of this earth," admonishing them that they may secure the fame of Alexander and Napoleon by the deeds of emancipation which lie in their power. "But if you compel us (the proletarians) to undertake the task alone with our raw material, then it will be accomplished only after weary toil and pain to us and to you."

Let us turn to Robert Owen, who was at an early age the most successful cotton spinner in England. He adapted an old philosophy to a new humanitarianism. He saw that a "gradual increase in the number of our paupers has accompanied our increasing wealth."[6] He began the series of experiments which made his name familiar in England and America and made him known in history as the greatest experimental communist. His experiments have failed. But his hopefulness persists. In his address delivered at the dedication of New Lanark, 1816, he said that he had found plenty of unhappiness and plenty of misery. "But from this day a change must take place; a new era must commence; the human intellect, through the whole extent of the earth, hitherto enveloped by the grossest ignorance and superstition, must begin to be released from its state of darkness; nor shall nourishment henceforth be given to the seeds of disunion and division among men. For the time has come when the means may be prepared to train all the nations of the world in that knowledge which shall impel them not only to love but to be actively kind to each other in the whole of their conduct, without a single exception."

Here is an all-inclusive hopefulness. Its significance is not diminished by the fact that it was spoken of his own peculiar remedy by education and environment.

This faith and hope runs through all their books like a golden song. Excepting Marx, he was the great gloomy one. Even those who condemn modern society with the most scathing adjectives link with their denunciations the most sanguine sentences of hope.

The Christian Socialism of Kingsley is filled with optimism. "Look up, my brother Christians, open your eyes, the hour of a new crusade has struck."[7]

The song of the new crusade was sung by Robert Morris:

"Come, shoulder to shoulder ere the world grows older!
Help lies in naught but thee and me;
Hope is before us, the long years that bore us,
Bore leaders more than men may be.

"Let dead hearts tarry and trade and marry,
And trembling nurse their dreams of mirth,
While we, the living, our lives are giving
To bring the bright new world to birth."

This song of hope is sung to-day by thousands of marching Socialists. Their bitter experiences in parliaments and in strikes, and all the warfare of politics and trade, have not blighted their rosy hope. They are still looking forward to "the bright new world," in which a new social order shall reign.

Linked with this optimism is a certain prophetic tone, an elevation of spirit that lifts some of their books out of the commonplace. The sincerity of these prophets of Socialism contributes this quality more than does their originality of mind.

In their search for happiness the Socialists see a great barrier in their way. The barrier is want, poverty. There are no greater contrasts, mental and temperamental, than between John Stuart Mill, the erudite economist and philosopher, and H.G. Wells, the romancer and sentimental critic of things as they are. Both begin their attacks upon the social order at the same point—the vulnerable spot, poverty. Mill places it first in his category of existing evils. He asks, "What proportion of the population in the most civilized countries of Europe enjoy, in their own person, anything worth naming of the benefits of property?" "Suffice it to say that the condition of numbers in civilized Europe, and even in England and France, is more wretched than that of most tribes of savages who are known to us."[8]

Wells bases his racy criticism in his popular book, New Worlds for Old, on the facts revealed in the reports of various charity organizations in Edinburgh, York, and London. To both the exacting economist and the popular expositor of Socialism, poverty is the glaring fault of our social system. To Wells poverty is an "atrocious failure in statesmanship."[9] To Mill it is "pro tanto a failure of the social arrangement."[10]

These examples are typical. Every school of Socialism finds in poverty the curse, in private property the cause, of human misery, and in a readjusted machinery of social production the hope of human betterment.

All Socialists, learned and unlearned, agree that poverty is the stumbling-block in the pathway to better social conditions. They all agree as to the causes of poverty: first, private capitalistic production; second, competition. It is private capitalistic production that enables the employer to pocket all the profits; it is competition that enables him to buy labor in an open market at the lowest possible price, a price regulated by the necessities of bare existence. To the Socialist, competition is anarchy, an anarchy that leaves "every man free to ruin himself so that he may ruin another."[11]

To do away with private capital and to abolish competition means bringing about a tremendous change in society. All Socialists unhesitatingly and with boldness are ready, even eager, to make such a change. The problem is not insuperable to them.

The three theories that underlie Socialism permit the hope of the possibility of a social regeneration. These theories are, first, that God made the world good, hence all you need to do is to revert to this pristine goodness and the world is reformed. Second, that society is what it is through evolution. If this is true then it is only necessary to control by environment the factors of evolution and the product will be preordained. Third, that even if man is bad and has permitted pernicious institutions like private property to exist, he can remake society by a bold effort, i.e., by revolution, because all social power is vested in man and he can do as he likes. The ruling class can impose its social order upon all. When the Socialist becomes the ruling class his social system will be adopted.

This great change which the Socialist has in mind means the substitution of co-operation for competition and the placing of productive property in the care of the state or of society, instead of letting it remain under the domination of individuals. To abolish private productive capital by making it public, to establish a communistic instead of a competitive society, that is the object.

In the Socialist's new order of society, where poverty will be unknown, there is to be a common bond. This bond is not possession, but work. With glowing exultation all the expositors and exhorters of the proletarian movement dwell upon the blessedness of toil. They glorify man, not through his inheritance of personality, certainly not through his possession of things, but through his achievements of toil.

When all members of society work at useful occupations, then all the necessary things can be done in a few hours. Six or four, or some even say two, hours a day will be sufficient to do all the drudgery and the essential things in a well-organized human beehive. There is to be nothing morose or despondent in this toil. It is all to be done to the melody of good cheer and willingness.

How is this great change to come about, and what is to be the exact organization of society under this regime of work and co-operation? Here unanimity ceases. As a criticism Socialism is unanimous, as a method it is divided, as a reconstructive process it is hopelessly at sea.

At first Socialists were utopians, then they became revolutionists. This was natural. Socialism was born in an air of revolution—the political revolutions of the bourgeois, and the infinitely greater industrial revolution. The tides of change and passion were rocking the foundations of state and industry. The evils in early industrialism were abhorrent. Small children and their mothers were forced into factories, pauperism was thriving, the ugly machine-fed towns were replacing the quaint and cheerful villages, rulers were forgetting their duties in their greed for gain, and the state was persecuting men for their political and economic opinions. Every face was turned against the preachers of the new order, and they naturally thought that the change could be brought about only by violence and revolution. Louis Blanc said "a social revolution ought to be tried:

"Firstly, because the present social system is too full of iniquity, misery, and turpitude to exist much longer.

"Secondly, because there is no one who is not interested, whatever his position, rank, and fortune, in the inauguration of a new social system.

"Thirdly, and lastly, because this revolution, so necessary, is possible, even easy to accomplish peacefully."[12]

These are the naïve words of a young man of thirty-seven, the youngest member of the ill-fated revolutionary government of France in 1848. Not every one thought that the revolution could be peacefully accomplished, and, it must be admitted, few seemed to care.

In their "Communist Manifesto," the most noted of all Socialist broadsides, Marx and Engels know of no peaceful revolution. They close with these virile words: "The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have the world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!"

These words are often quoted even in these placid days of evolution that have replaced the red days of violence. The workingmen of all countries are uniting, as we shall see, not for bloody revolution nor for the violence of passion, but for the promulgation of peace. To-day the silent coercion of multitudes is taking the place of the eruptive methods of the '40's and the '70's.

As to the ultimate form of organized society, there is nothing but confusion to be found in the mass of literature that has grown up around the subject. The earliest writers were cocksure of themselves; the latest ones bridge over the question with wide-arching generalities. I have asked many of their leaders to give me some hint as to what form their Society of To-morrow will take. Every one dodged. "No one can tell. It will be humanitarian and co-operative."

If one could be assured of this!

Finally, all Socialists agree in the instrument of change. It lies at hand as the greatest co-operative achievement of our race, the state. It is the common possession of all, and it is the one power that can lay its hands upon property and compel its obedience. The power of the state is to be the dynamo of change. This state is naturally to be democratic. The people shall hold the reins of power in their own hands.

It must be remembered that every year sees a shifting in the Socialist's attitude. As he has left the sphere of mere fault-finding and of dreaming, and has entered politics, entered the labor war through unions, and the business war through co-operative societies, he has been compelled to adapt himself to the necessities of things as they are.

I have tried briefly to show that Socialism originated as a class movement, a proletarian movement; that the classes, wage-earner and capitalist, are the natural outcome of machine production; that Socialism is one of the natural products of the antagonistic relations that these two classes at present occupy; that Socialism intends to eliminate this antagonism by eliminating the private employer. I have tried to show also that Socialism is a criticism of the present social order placing the blame for the miseries of society upon the shoulders of private property and competition; that it is optimistic in spirit, buoyant in hope; and that its program of reconstruction is confused and immature.

Stripped of its glamour, our society is in a neck-to-neck race for things, for property. Its hideousness has shocked the sensibilities of dreamers and humanitarians. Our machine industry has produced a civilization that is ugly. It is natural that the esthetic and philanthropic members of this society should raise their protest. Ruskin and Anatole France and Maeterlinck and Carlyle and Robert Morris and Emerson and Grierson are read with increasing satisfaction. It is natural that the participants in this death race should utter their cries of alternate despair and hope. Socialism is the cry of the toiler. It is not to be ignored. We in America have no conception of its potency. There are millions of hearts in Europe hanging upon its precepts for the hope that makes life worth the fight.

Their Utopia may be only a rainbow, a mirage in the mists on the horizon. But the energy which it has inspired is a reality. It has organized the largest body of human beings that the world has known. Its international Socialist movement has but one rival for homogeneity and zeal, the Church, whose organization at one time embraced all kingdoms and enlisted the faithful service of princes and paupers.

It is this reality in its political form which I hope to set forth in the following pages. We will try to discover what the Socialist movement is doing in politics, how much of theory has been merged in political practice, what its everyday parliamentary drudgery is, and, if possible, to tell in what direction the movement is tending.

Before we do this it is necessary to state briefly the history of the underlying theories of the movement.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production, and employers of wage-labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage-laborers, who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live."—Frederick Engels, Notes on the Communist Manifesto, 1888.

[2] See Sombart, Socialism and the Social Movement, Introduction, for discussion of the class movement.

[3] The Socialist Movement, p. 147.

[4] The all-embracing character of Socialism was eloquently phrased by Millerand in 1896: "In its large synthesis Socialism embraces every manifestation of life, because nothing human is alien to it, because it alone offers to-day to our hunger for justice and happiness an ideal, purely human and apart from all dogma." See Ensor, Modern Socialism, p. 53.

[5] Garantieen der Harmonie und Freiheit, pp. 57-58, edition of 1845.

[6] Letter I, addressed to David Ricardo.

[7] Tract No. IV.

[8] Socialism, pp. 71-72.

[9] Wells, New Worlds for Old, p. 36.

[10] Mill, Socialism, p. 72.

[11] Louis Blanc, The Right to Labor, p. 63.

[12] Organization of Labor, p. 87, 1847.

CHAPTER II

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIALISM[ToC]

I

Socialism began in France, that yeast-pot of civilization. It began while the Revolution was still filling men's minds with a turbulent optimism that knew no limit to human "progress."

Saint-Simon (Count Henri de) may be considered the founder of French Socialism. He was of noble lineage, born in 1760, and died in 1825. He took very little part in the French Revolution, but was a soldier in our Continental army, and always manifested a keen interest in American affairs. Possessed of an inquiring mind, an ambitious spirit, and a heart full of sympathy for the oppressed, he devoted himself to the study of society for the purpose of elaborating a scheme for universal human betterment.

Before he began his special studies he amassed a modest fortune in land speculation. Not that he loved money, he assures us, but because he wished independence and leisure to do his chosen work. This money was soon lost, through unfortunate experiments and an unfortunate marriage, and the most of his days were spent in penury.

He attracted to himself a number of the most brilliant young men in France, among them De Lesseps who subsequently carried out one of the plans of his master, the Suez Canal; and Auguste Comte, who embodied in his positivism the philosophical teachings of Saint-Simon.

Saint-Simon believed that society needed to be entirely reorganized on a "scientific basis," and that "the whole of society ought to labor for the amelioration of the moral and physical condition of the poorest class. Society ought to organize itself in the manner the most suitable for the attainment of this great end."[1]

The two counteracting motives or spirits in society are the spirit of antagonism and the spirit of association. Hitherto the spirit of antagonism has prevailed, and misery has resulted. Let the spirit of association rule, and the evils will vanish.

Under the rule of antagonism, property has become the possession of the few, poverty and misery the lot of the many. Both property and poverty are inherited, therefore the state should abolish all laws of inheritance, take all property under its dominion, and let society be the sole proprietor of the instruments of labor and of the fund that labor creates.

Through the teachings of Saint-Simon runs a constant stream of religious fervor. In Christianity he found the moral doctrine that gave sanction to his social views. He sought the primitive Christianity, stripped of the dogmas and opinions of the centuries. In his principal work, Nouveau Christianisme (New Christianity), he subjects the teachings of Catholicism and Protestantism to ingenious criticism, and finds in the teachings of Christ the essential moral elements necessary for a society based on the spirit of association.

Saint-Simon was a humanitarian rather than a systematic thinker. His analysis of society is ingenious rather than constructive. His teachings were elaborated by his followers, who organized themselves into a school called the "Sacred College of the Apostles," with Bazard and Enfantin as their leaders. They were accused, in the Chamber of Deputies, of promulgating communism of property and wives. Their defense, dated October, 1830, and issued as a booklet, is the best exposition of their views. They said that: "We demand that land, capital, and all the instruments of labor shall become common property, and be so managed that each one's portion shall correspond to his capacity, and his reward to his labors." "Like the early Christians, we demand that one man should be united to one woman, but we teach that the wife should be the equal of the husband."

On the question of marriage, however, the sect split soon after this defense was written. Enfantin became a defender of free love, and inaugurated a fantastic sacerdotalism which drove Bazard from the "Sacred College."[2]

The second French social philosopher of the Utopian school was François Marie Charles Fourier (1772-1837). He was a bourgeois, son of a draper, and brought as keen an intellect as did his noble fellow-countryman, Saint-Simon, to the analysis of society, and a much more practical experience. In his youth he had been employed in various business enterprises. He recalls, in his works, several experiences which he never forgot. As a lad, he was reproached for telling a prospective customer the truth about some goods in his father's shop. When a young man of twenty-seven he was sent to Marseilles to superintend the destruction of great cargoes of rice that had been held for higher prices, during a period of scarcity of food when thousands of people were suffering from hunger. The rice had spoiled in the waiting. The event made so profound an impression upon his mind that he resolved to devote his life to the betterment of an economic system that allowed such wanton waste.

To his mind the problem of rebuilding society was practical, not metaphysical. But underlying his practical solution was a fantastic cosmogony and psychology. He reduced everything to a mathematical system, and even computed the number of years the world would spin on its axis. He believed that God created a good world, and that man has desecrated it; that the function of the social reformer is to understand the design of the Creator, and call mankind back to this original plan, back to the original impulses and passions, and primitive goodness.

This could be done only under ideal environment. Such an environment he proposed to create in huge caravansaries, which he called phalansteries. Each group, or phalange, was composed of 400 families, or 1,800 persons, living on a large square of land, where they could be self-contained and self-sufficient, like the manors in the feudal days. The phalanstery was built in the middle of the tract, and was merely a glorified apartment house. Every one chose to do the work he liked best. Agriculture and manufacture were to be happily blended, and individual freedom given full sway. Each phalange was designed to be an ideal democracy, electing its officers and governing itself. The principle of freedom was to extend even to marriage and the relation of the sexes.

It was Fourier's belief that one such phalange once established would so impress the world with its superiority that society would be glad to imitate it. Ere long there would be groups of phalanges co-operating with each other, and ultimately the whole world would be brought into one vast federation of phalanges, with their chief center at Constantinople.

The general plan of this apartment-house utopia lent itself to all sorts of fantastic details. It gained adherents among the learned, the eager, and even the rich, and a number of experiments were tried. All of these have failed, I think, excepting only the community at Guise, founded by Jean Godin. Here, however, the fantasies have been eliminated, and the strong controlling force of the founder has made it prosperous. There is no agriculture connected with the Guise establishment.

A number of Fourier colonies, most of them modifications of his phalanstery idea, were started in the United States. Of thirty-four such experiments tried in America all have failed. The most famous of these attempts was Brook Farm.[3]

Robert Owen (1771-1858) was the great English utopian. He was the son of a small trader. Such was his business ability and tenacity of character that at nineteen years of age he was superintendent of a cotton mill that employed 500 hands. His business acumen soon made him rich, his philanthropic impulses led him to study the conditions of the people who worked for him. In 1800 he took charge of the mills at New Lanark. There he had under him as pitiful and miserable a group of workmen as can be imagined. The factory system made wretchedness the common lot of the English workingman of this period. The hours of labor were intolerably long, the homes of the working people unutterably squalid, women and tiny children worked all day under the most unwholesome conditions; vice, drunkenness, and ignorance were everywhere.

Owen began as a practical philanthropist. He improved the sanitary conditions of his mills and town, was the first employer to reasonably shorten the hours of work, founded primary schools, proposed factory legislation, and founded the co-operative movement that has grown to great strength in England. He was one of the powerful men of the island at this period. He had the enthusiastic support of the queen, of many nobles, of clergy and scholars. But in a great public meeting in London he went out of his way to denounce the accepted forms of religion and declare his independence of all creeds, an offense that the English people never forgive.

By this time he had perfected his scheme for social reform. He proposed to establish communities of 1,000 to 1,200 persons on about 1,500 acres of land. They were to live in an enormous building in the form of a square, each family to have its own apartments, but kitchen and dining-room to be in common. Every advantage of work, education, and leisure was planned for the inmates.

A number of Owenite communities were founded in England and America. The one at New Harmony, Ind., was the most pretentious, and in it Owen sank a large portion of his fortune. None of the experiments survived their founder.[4]

The Utopians were all optimists—the source of their optimism was the social philosophy that prevailed from the French Revolution to the middle of the last century. It was the philosophy of an unbounded faith in the goodness of human nature. A good God made a good world, and made man capable of attaining goodness and harmony in all his relations. The evil in the world was contrary to God's plan. It was introduced by the perversity of society. The source of misery is the lack of knowledge. If humankind knew the right way of living, knew the original plan of the Creator, then there would be no misery. You must find this knowledge, this science, and upon it build society. Hence they are all seeking a "scientific state of society," and call their system "scientific." From Rousseau to Hegel, the theory prevailed that evil is collective, good is individual; society is bad, man is pure.

Cabet expresses it clearly. "God is perfection, infinite, all-powerful, is justice and goodness. God is our father, and it follows that all men are brethren and all are equal, as in one all-embracing family." "It is evident that, to the fathers of the Church, Christianity was communism. Communism is nothing other than true Christianity...." "The regnancy of God, through Jesus, is the regnancy of perfection, of omniscience, of justice, of goodness, of paternal love; and, it follows, of fraternity, equality, and liberty; of the unity of community interests, that is of communism (of the general common welfare), in place of the individual."[5]

This edenesque logic was dear to Fourier, who left more profound traces on modern thought than the fantastic Saint-Simonians.[6]

Fourier began with God. "On beholding this mechanism (the world and human society), or even in making an estimate of its properties, it will be comprehended that God has done well all that He has done."[7] Man has only to find "God's design" in order to find the true basis of society; and man's system of industrially parceling out the good things of life among a few favored ones, is the "antipodes of God's design." The finding of this design is the function of "exact science"; man, who has stifled the voice of nature, must now "vindicate the Creator."[8]

Saint-Simon's whole system rests on this principle: "God has said that men ought to act toward each other as brethren." This principle will regulate society, for "in accordance with this principle, which God has given to men for the rule of their conduct, they ought to organize society in the manner the most advantageous to the greatest number."[9]

The social philosophers at the end of the eighteenth century did not believe that this rightness should be brought about by violence. "What I should desire," says Godwin, "is not by violence to change its institutions, but by discussion to change its ideas. I have no concern, if I would study merely the public good, with factions or intrigue; but simply to promulgate the truth, and to wait the tranquil progress of conviction. Let us anxiously refrain from violence."[10]

Owen, who lived a few decades later, came into contact with the theories of the succeeding school of thought. His utopianism remained, however, upon the older basis. He taught that the evils of society were not inherent in the nature of mankind. The natural state of the world and of man was good. But the evils "are all the necessary consequences of ignorance." Therefore, by education and environment he could "accomplish with ease and certainty the Herculean labor of forming a rational character in man, and that, too, chiefly before the child commences the ordinary course of education."[11]

The Utopians are hopefully seeking the universal law which will re-form society. This was a natural view of things fundamental, to be taken by men who had witnessed the political emancipation of the Third Estate and had seen "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" carved over every public portal in France, and the abstract principles of justice debated in parliaments. A feeling of naïve simplicity runs through all their writings. Just as civil liberty, they believed, had come by the application of an abstract principle of natural law, so social and economic freedom would come by the application of one universal abstract principle of human conduct. From this simplicity came a violent reaction, which reached its climax in the anarchy of Proudhon.

II

The Utopian period of Socialism may be said to end, and the revolutionary era to begin, with the year 1830. The French Revolution was a bourgeois uprising. But behind it was the grim and resolute background of the proletarian mass. When the Third Estate achieved its victory, it proceeded to monopolize the governmental powers to the exclusion of its lowly allies. From 1830 to 1850 the ferment of democratic discontent spread over Europe and forced the demands of the workingman into the foreground. The first outbreak occurred in France, in 1831, when the workingmen of Lyons, during a period of distressing financial depression, marched under the banner, "Live working, or die fighting," demanding bread for their families and work for themselves. This second chapter of the development of Socialism begins with a red letter.

Louis Blanc (1813-82), the first philosopher of the new movement, struck out boldly for a democratic organization of the government. This differentiates him from Fourier and Saint-Simon, and links him with the leading Socialist writers of our day. He published his Organisation du Travail (Organization of Labor) in 1839. It immediately gave him an immense popularity with the working classes. It is a brilliant book, as fascinating in its phrases as it is forceful in its denunciation of existing society.

He said that it is vain to talk of improving mankind morally without improving them materially. This improvement would not come from above, from the higher classes. It would come from below, from the working people themselves. Therefore, a prerequisite of social reform was democracy. The proletarian must possess the power of the state in order to emancipate himself from the economic bondage that holds him in its grasp.

This democratic state should then establish national workshops, or associations, which he called "social workshops," the capital to be provided by the state and the state to supervise their operation. He believed that, once established, they would soon become self-supporting and self-governing. The men would choose their own managers, dispose of their own profits, and take care that this beneficent system would spread to all communities.

He was careful to explain that "genius should assert its legitimate empire"—there must be a hierarchy of ability.

Louis Blanc believed in revolution as the method of social advancement. He was himself a leader in the abortive revolution of 1848, the revolt of the people against a weak and careless monarch. As a member of the provisional government, he may be called the first Socialist to hold cabinet honors. And, like his successors in modern cabinets, he accomplished very little towards the bringing in of a new social order. It is true that national workshops were built by the French government at his suggestion; but not according to his plans. His enemies saw to it that they served to bring discredit rather than honor to the system which he had so carefully elaborated.[12]

Louis Blanc did not entirely free himself of the earlier utopian conception that man was created good and innocent. He blames society for allowing the individual to do evil. But he does take a step toward the Marxian materialistic conception when he affirms that man was created with certain endowments of strength and intellect and that these endowments should be spent in the welfare of society. The empire of service, not the "empire of tribute," should be the measure of man's greatness.

The doctrine of revolt was carried to its logical extreme by Proudhon (1809-65). He was the son of a cooper and a peasant maid, and he never forgot that he sprang from the proletariat. He was a precocious lad, was a theologian, philologist, and linguist before he undertook the study of political economy. In 1840 he brought out his notable work, Qu'est-ce que la Propriété? (What Is Property?), a novel question for that day, to which he gave an amazing answer, "Property is theft," ergo "property holders are thieves."

Proudhon was a man with the brain of a savant and the adjectives of a peasant. His startling phrases, however, are merely spotlights thrown on a theory of society which he permeated with a genuine good will. He was puritanic in moral principle, loyal to his friends, and a despiser of cant and formalism. But his love for paradoxes carried him beyond the confines of logic.

Property is theft, he says, because it reaps without sowing and consumes without producing. What right has a capitalist to charge me eight per cent.? None. This eight per cent. does not represent anything of time or labor value put into the article I am buying. It is therefore robbery. Private property, the stronghold of the individualist, is then to be abolished and a universal communism established? By no means. Communism is as unnatural as property. Proudhon had only contempt for the phalanstery and national workshop of his predecessors. They were impossible, artificial, reduced life to a monotonous dead level, and encouraged immorality. Property is wrong because it is the exploitation of the weak by the strong; communism is equally wrong because it is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. To this ingenious juggler of paradoxes this was by no means a dilemma. He resorted to a formula that was later amplified into the most potent argument of Socialism by Marx. Service pays service, one day's work balances another day's work, time-labor is the just measure of value. Hour for hour, day for day, this should be the universal medium of exchange.

Proudhon was really directing his attacks against rent and profit rather than against property. He proposed, as a measure of reform, a national bank where every one could bring the product of his toil and receive a paper in exchange denoting the time value of his article. These slips of paper were to be the medium of exchange capable of purchasing equal time values. This glorified savage barter he even proposed to the Constituent Assembly, of which he was a member, and when it was rejected—only two votes were recorded for it—he tried to establish it upon private foundations. He failed to raise the necessary capital and his plan failed.

Proudhon is the father of modern Anarchy. His exaltation of individualism led him to the suppression of government. Government, he taught, is merely the dominance of one man over another, a form of intolerable oppression. "The highest perfection of society is found in the union of order and anarchy."

For his bitter tirades against property he received the scorn of the bourgeois, for his attacks upon the government he served three years in prison, and some years later he escaped a second term for a similar cause by fleeing to Brussels.

The ultimate outcome of his individualism was equality, which he achieved in economics by his theory of time-labor and in politics by his theory of anarchy.

One cannot escape the conviction that the outcome of all his brilliant rhetorical legerdemain is man in a cage. Not man originally pure and good as the utopians would have him, but man wilful, egoistic, capable of enslaving his fellows, a very different being from the man of mercy and love crushed by the collective injustice of society. Proudhon frees this man from his oppressor and his oppressiveness by creating a condition of equality through the destruction of property and of government. But in destroying property he retains possessions, and in establishing anarchy he maintains order. "Free association, liberty—whose sole function is to maintain equality—in the means of production, and equivalence in exchanges, is the only possible, the only just, the only true form of society."

"The government of man by man (under whatever name it be disguised) is oppression. Society finds its highest perfection in the union of order and anarchy."[13]

Proudhon has had a large influence on modern Socialism. His trenchant invectives against property and society are widely copied. From his utterances on government the Syndicalists of France, Italy, and Spain have drawn their doctrine. The general strike is the child of his paradoxes. He wrote as the motto for his most influential book, What Is Property?, "Destruam et aedificabo" (I will destroy and I will build again). But, while he pointed the way to destruction, he failed to reveal a new and better order.

The way to modern Socialism was paved in Germany. The teaching of Hegel cleared the way for the political unrest that spread over Europe in the '40's. Hegel was the proclaimer of the social revolution. He gave sanction to the tenets of destruction. Everything that exists is worth destroying, may be taken as the primary postulate at which the Young Hegelians arrived. Truth does not exist merely in a collection of institutions or dogmatic axioms that could be memorized like the alphabet; truth is in the process of being, of knowing, it has developed through the toilsome evolution of the race, it is found only in experience. Nothing is sacred merely because it exists. Existing institutions are only the prelude to other and better institutions that are to follow. This was roughly the formula that the radical Hegelians blocked out for themselves when they split from the orthodox conservatives in the '30's.

In 1843 appeared Feuerbach's Wesen des Christentums (Essence of Christianity), putting the seal of materialism upon the precepts of the Young Hegelians.[14] The God of the utopians was destroyed. Things were not created in harmony and beauty and disordered by man. Things as they are, are the result of evolution, of growth; nothing was created as it is, and even "Religion is the dream of the human mind."[15]

Out of this atmosphere of philosophical, religious, and political rebellion sprang the prophet of modern Socialism, Karl Marx,[16] a man whose intellectual endowments place him in the first ranks among Socialists and link his name with other bold intellects of his age who have forced the current of human thought. There have been many books written on Marx, and every phase of his theories has been subjected to academic and popular scrutiny. His treatise, Capital, is the sacerdotal book of Socialists. It displays a mass of learning, a diligence of research, and acumen in the marshaling of ideas, and a completeness of literary expression that insures it a lasting place in the literature of social philosophy. Whatever may be said of the narrow dogmatism, of Marx, of his persistence in making the facts fit his preconceived notions, of his materialistic conception of history, or of the technical flaws in his political economy, he will always be quoted as the founder of modern scientific Socialism and the Socialist historian of the capitalistic régime.

I must content myself with a bare statement of his theories.

The economic basis of Marx is his well-known "Theory of Surplus Value." It was not his theory in the sense that he originated it. Economists like Adam Smith and especially Ricardo, Socialists like the Owenites and the Chartists in England, and Proudhon in France, had enunciated it; and in Germany Rodbertus, a lawyer and scholar of great learning, had elaborated it in his first book, published in 1842. Marx, with German thoroughness, developed this theory in all its ramifications.

All economic goods, he said, have value. They have a physical value, and a value given them by the labor expended on them. Labor is the common factor of economic values. And the common denominator is the time that is consumed by the labor. Labor-time, therefore, is the universal measure of value, the common medium that determines values. But this labor is acquired in the open labor market by the capitalist at the lowest possible price, a price whose utmost limit is the bare cost of living. The reward for his labor is called a wage. This wage does not by any means measure the value of his services. What, then, becomes of the "surplus value," the value over and above wages? The capitalist appropriates it. Indeed, the great aim of the capitalist is to make this surplus value as big as possible. He measures his success by his profits.

"Surplus value," or profit, is, then, a species of robbery; it is ill-gotten gain, withholding from the workman that which by right of toil is his.

How did it come about that society was so organized as to permit this wholesale wrong upon the largest and most defenseless of its classes? It is in answer to this question that Marx makes his most notable contribution to Socialistic theory. With great skill, and displaying a comprehensive knowledge of economic history, especially of English industrial history, he traces the development of modern industrial society. He follows the evolution of capital from the days of medieval paternalism through the period of commercial expansion when the voyages of discovery opened virgin fields of wealth to the trader, into the period of inventions when the industrial revolution changed the conditions of all classes and gave a sudden and princely power to capital, establishing the reign of "capitalistic production."

Always it was the man with capital who could take advantage of every new commercial and industrial opportunity, and the man without capital who was forced to succumb to the stress of new and cruel circumstances. In every stage of development it has been the constant aim of the capitalist to increase his profits and of the workingman to raise his standard of living.

Marx then declares that, in order to have a capitalist society, two classes are necessary: a capitalist and a non-capitalist class; a class that dominates, and one that succumbs. There have always been these two classes. Originally labor was slave, then it was serf, and now it is free. But free labor to-day differs from serf-labor and slave-labor only in that it has a legal right to contract. The economic results are the same as they always have been: the capitalist still appropriates the surplus value.

The method of production, however, is very different in our capitalistic era from the earlier eras. The industrial system herds the workmen into factories. Property and labor is no longer individualistic; it is social, it is corporate. Marx calls it "social production and capitalistic appropriation." Here is the eternal antagonism between the classes, the large class of laborers and the small class of the "appropriators" of their common toil.

These factories, where labor is herded, spring up willy-nilly wherever there is a capitalist who desires to enter business. They flood the markets, not by mutual consent or regulation, but by individual ambitions. Each capitalist is ruled by self-interest; and self-interest impels him to make as many goods as he can and sell them at as big a profit as he can. Result, economic anarchy, called "over-production" or "under-consumption" by the economists. This leads to panics and all their attendant woes—woes that are further heaped upon the proletarian by the fact that he must compete with machinery, which, being more and more perfected, forces him out of the labor market into the street.

These crises have the tendency to concentrate industry in fewer and fewer hands; the weaker capitalist must succumb to the inevitable laws of struggle and survival. The survivors fatten on the corpses of their fallen competitors. Thus the factories grow larger and larger, the number of capitalists fewer and fewer; the number of proletarian dependents multiplies; the middle class is crushed out of existence; the rich become richer and fewer, the poor more numerous and poorer.

In this turmoil of social production, capitalistic appropriation, and anarchic distribution, there is discernible a reshaping of social potencies. The proletarian realizes the power of the state and sees how he may possess himself of that power and thereby gain control of the economic forces and reshape them to fit the needs of a better society. This will mean the appropriation of the means of production and distribution by society. Private capital will vanish; surplus values will belong to the people who created them; the people will be master and servant, capitalist and laborer.

This is the Socialistic stage of society. It will be the result of the natural evolution of human industry. Its immediate coming will be the result of a social revolution. This revolution, this social cataclysm, is written in the nature of things. Man cannot prompt it, he cannot prevent it. He can only study the trend of things and "alleviate the birth-pangs" of the new time.

Of this new time, this society of to-morrow, Marx gives us no glimpse. His function is not to prophesy, but to analyze. He is the natural historian of capital. He described the development of economic society and sought to ascertain its trend. In the first chapter of Capital he says: "Let us imagine an association of free men, working with common means of production, and putting forth, consciously, their individual powers into one social labor power. The product of this association of laborers is a social product. A portion of this product serves in turn as a means of further production. It remains social property. The rest of this product is consumed by the members of the association as a means of living. It must consequently be distributed among them. The nature of this distribution will vary according to the particular nature of the organization of production and the corresponding grade of historical development of the producers."

This is the only mention of the future made by Marx. It is a dim and uncertain ray of light cast upon a vast object.

The formulæ of this epoch-making study may be summarized as follows:

1. Labor gives value to all economic goods. The laboring class is the producing class, but it is deprived of its just share of the products of its labor by the capitalistic class, which appropriates the "surplus value."

2. This is possible because of the capitalistic method of production, wherein private capital controls the processes of production and distribution.

3. This system of private capitalism is the result of a long and laborious process of evolution, hastened precipitately by the industrial revolution.

4. This industrial age is characterized (a) by anarchy in distribution, (b) private production, (c) the gradual disappearance of the middle class, (d) the development of a two-class system—capitalist and producer, (e) the rich growing richer and the poor growing poorer.

5. This will not always continue. The producers are becoming fewer each year. Presently they will become so powerful as to be unendurable. Then society—the people—will appropriate private capital and all production and distribution will be socialized.

It is necessary to keep in mind the leading events in the life of this remarkable man in order to understand the genesis of his theories. Marx was born in Treves in 1818, of Jewish parentage. His mother was of Dutch descent, his father was German. When the lad was six years of age his parents embraced the Christian faith. His father was a lawyer, but his ancestors for over two hundred years had been rabbis. The home was one of culture, where English and French as well as German literature and art were discussed by a circle of learned and congenial friends. Marx studied at the universities of Bonn and Berlin. He took his doctorate in the law to please his father, but followed philosophy by natural bent, intending to become a university professor.

The turmoil of revolution was in the air and in his blood. There was no curbing of his fiery temperament into the routine of scholastic life. In 1842 he joined the staff of the Rhenish Gazette at Cologne, an organ of extreme radicalism. His drastic editorials prompted the police to ask him to leave the country, and he went to Paris, where he met Frederick Engels, who became his firm friend, partner of his views, and sharer of his labors. The Prussian government demanded his removal from Paris, and for a time he settled in Brussels. He returned to Germany to participate in the revolution of 1848, and in 1849 he was driven to London, where, immune from Prussian persecutions, he made his home until his death, in 1883.

In 1842 he married Jennie von Westphalen, a lady of refinement, courage, and loyalty, whose family was prominent in Prussian politics. Her brother was at one time a minister in the Prussian cabinet.

Marx was an exile practically all his life, though he never gave up his German citizenship. He never forgot this fact. He concluded his preface to the first volume of Capital, written in 1873, with a bitter allusion to the "mushroom upstarts of the new, holy Prussian German Empire." He lived a life of heroic fortitude and struggle against want and disease.

From his infancy he had been taught to take a world view, an international view, of human affairs. This gave him an immediate advantage over all other Socialist writers of that day. At Bonn he was caught in the current of heterodoxy that was then sweeping through the universities. This carried him far into the fields of materialism, whose philosophy of history he adopted and applied to the economic development of the race. He received not alone his philosophy from the "Young Hegelians," but his dialectics as well. It gave him a philosophy of evil which, blending with his bitter personal experiences, gave a melancholy bent to his reasoning, and revealed to him the misericordia of class war, the struggle of abject poverty contending with callous capital in a bloody social revolution.

There are four points which gave Marx an immense influence over the Socialistic movement. In the first place, he put the Socialistic movement on a historical basis; he made it inevitable. Think what this means, what hope and spirit it inspires in the bosom of the workingman. But he did more than this: he made the proletarian the instrument of destiny for the emancipation of the race from economic thraldom. This was to be accomplished by class war and social revolution. Marx imparts the zeal of fatalism to his Socialism when he links it to the necessities of nature. By natural law a bourgeoisie developed; by natural law it oppresses the proletarian; by natural law, by the compulsion of inexorable processes, the proletarians alone can attain their freedom. Capitalism becomes its own grave-digger. Liebknecht said in his Erfurt speech (1891): "The capitalistic state of the present begets against its will the state of the future."

In the third place, Marx gave a formula to the Socialist movement. He defined Socialism in one sentence: "The social ownership of the means of production and distribution." This was necessary. From among the vague and incoherent mass of utopian and revolutionary literature he coined the sentence that could be repeated with gusto and the flavor of scientific terminology.

And finally, he refrained from detailing the new society. He laid down no program except war, he pointed to no utopia except co-operation. This offended no one and left Socialists of all schools free to construct their own details.

The Marxian system was no sooner enunciated than it was shown to be fallible as an economic generalization; and the passing of several decades has proved that the tendencies he deemed inevitable are not taking place. The refutation of his theory of value by the Austrian economist, Adolph Menger, is by economists considered complete and final. The materialistic conception of history, which is the soul of his work, lends itself more to the passion of a virile propaganda than to a sober interpretation of the facts. Further, the two practical results that flow from the use of his theory of surplus value and his materialism—namely, the ever-increasing volume of poverty and the ever-decreasing number of capitalists—are not borne out by the facts. The number of capitalists is constantly increasing, in spite of the development of enormous trusts; the middle class is constantly being recruited from the lower class; there is no apparent realization of the two-class system. And finally, the method by revolution is being more and more discarded by Socialists, as they see that intolerable conditions are being more and more alleviated, that "man's inhumanity to man" is a constantly diminishing factor in the bitter struggle for existence.[17]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] New Christianity, p. 38, English edition, 1834.

[2] Saint-Simon's principal writings are: Lettres d'un Habitant de Genève, 1803; L'Organisateur, 1819; Du Système Industriel, 1821; Catéchisme des Industriels, 1823; Nouveau Christianisme, 1825. See A.J. Barth, Saint-Simon and Saint-Simonism, London, 1871; Reybaud, Études sur les Réformateurs Modernes, Paris, 1864; Janet, Saint-Simon et le Saint-Simonisme, Paris, 1878. New Christianity was translated into English by Rev. J.E. Smith, London, 1834.

[3] The best popular exposition of Fourierism is Gatti de Gammont's Fourier et Son Système. His most eminent commentator is Victor Considerant, whose Destinée Sociale is the most complete analysis of Fourier's System.

[4] It is interesting to note that the word "Socialism" first became current in the meetings of Owen's "Association of All Classes of All Nations," organized by him in 1835.

[5] Le Vrai Christianisme, Chap. XVIII, edition of 1846.

[6] An apt selection from the works of Fourier has been made by Prof. Charles Gide, prefaced by an illuminating Introduction on the life and work of Fourier. An English translation by Julia Franklin appeared in London, 1901.

[7] Le Nouveau Monde, Vol. I, p. 26.

[8] Thème de l'Unité Universelle, Vol. II, p. 128.

[9] New Christianity, p. 2, English edition, 1834.

[10] Political Justice, Vol. II, pp. 531, 537.

[11] Third Essay on a New View of Society, pp. 65, 82.

[12] See Émile Thomas, History of the National Workshops.

[13] What Is Property? Collected Works, Vol. I, p. 286.

[14] In 1845 Marx made this note on the work of Feuerbach: "The point of view of the old materialism is bourgeois society; the point of view of the new materialism is human society or the unclassed humanity (vergesellschaftete Menschheit).

"Philosophers have only differently interpreted the world, but the point is to alter the world." See Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der Klassischen Deutschen Philosophie, Stuttgart, 1903.

[15] Essence of Christianity, Preface, p. xiii.

[16] For a concise statement of the development of Marxian Socialism out of the German philosophy of that period, see Frederick Engels, Die Entwickelung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft, Berlin, 1891. It is the third chapter out of his Dühring, Umwälzung.

[17] For a criticism of the teachings of Marx, see Sombart, Socialism and the Social Movement, Chap. IV.

CHAPTER III

THE POLITICAL AWAKENING OF SOCIALISM—THE PERIOD OF REVOLUTION[ToC]

From the point of view of our inquiry the most significant event in the history of Socialism is its entrance into politics. This endows the workingman with a new power and a great power; a power that will bring him farther on his way toward the goal he seeks than any other he possesses. Because the modern state is democratic, and the democratic state bends in the direction of the mass. The revolutions attempted in the middle of the last century are child's play compared with the changes that can be wrought when constitutions and courts, parliaments and administrative systems, become the instruments of a determined, self-possessed, and united political consciousness.

Scarcely half a century elapsed between the French utopians and the time when the proletarians organized actual political parties, and arrayed themselves against the older orders in the struggle for political privilege. In the interval, revolution had its brief hour, and reaction its days of waiting.

The French Revolution was a necessary preliminary to the proletarian movement. It was the most powerful instrument for the propagation of those democratic ideas that were so attractively clothed by Rousseau and so terribly distorted by the revolutionists. While this revolution was a bourgeois movement, not a proletarian uprising, not a revolution in the sense that Marx, for instance, uses the word, it must not be forgotten that the proletarians were in the revolution. The dark and sullen background of that tragedy was the mass of unspeakably poor. They were not machine workers whose abjectness came from factory conditions, like the workmen of England a few decades later. They were proletarians without a class consciousness, but with a class grievance; proletarians in the literal sense of the word, poor, ragged, hungry, wretched.

Such democracy as was achieved by the revolution was bourgeois. The powers of monarchy were transferred from the "privileged" classes to the middle class, who, in turn, became the privileged ones. The day of middle-class government had come. The class that had financed the fleets of adventurers to new and unexploited continents, and had backed the inventions of Arkwright and Hargreaves, were now in power in politics as well as in commerce and industry. A unity of purpose between industry and statecraft was thus achieved; new ideals became dominant. The patriarchal precepts of the feudal manors were forgotten. The people were no longer children of a great household with their king at the head. The king, when he was retained, was shorn of his universal fatherhood, and remained a mere remnant of ermine and velvet, a royal trader in social distinctions.

While the old ideal, the feudal ideal, prevailed, governing was the duty of a class. The newer ideal made governing an incident in the activities of a class whose dominating impulse was the making of profits. These ideals are at polar points; one deals with things, the other with men.

The change in the form of government was wrought while the people were talking about the glittering abstractions of equality, liberty, justice, as if they were commodities to be exchanged in the political markets. The newer form of government marked an advance on the older. It represented a step forward in human political experience. A larger group of citizens was drawn into the widening circle of governmental activities. It was an inevitable step. The discovery of the New World and the invention of machinery were making a new earth—an unattractive earth, but nevertheless a new one. The balance of power was shifting from hereditary privilege to commercial privilege, and nations were fulfilling the law of human nature, that the power of the state reposes in the hands of the dominant class. The dominant class is actuated by its dominant idea. In the aristocratic class it is politics, in the middle class it is trade.

All this inevitably accentuated the proletarian's position in the state. Under the older régime, as historians of our economic development have clearly shown, the antagonisms and grievances were fewer. The trader and the craftsman were overshadowed by the lord and the bishop. Social, political, and economical values were distributed by custom and imposed by heredity, rather than by individual effort or individual capacity. When, therefore, this great change came over society, a change that would have been unthinkable in the days of Charlemagne or of Elizabeth,—a change that virtually destroyed the most powerful of the classes and put human beings onto a basis of competition rather than of birth, and shifted power from tradition to effort, and transferred values from prerogatives to gold,—then the whole class problem changed, and entirely new antagonisms were created.

The first movements of the new proletarians were mob movements. Actuated more by a desire to revenge themselves than to better themselves, they gather in the dark hours of the night and move sullenly upon the factories, to destroy their enemies, the machines. They pillage the buildings and threaten the house of their employer, whom they consider the agent of their undoing. In France and Germany, and especially in England, these infuriated workmen try to undo by violence what has been achieved by invention.

When their first fury is abated and they see new machinery taking the place of that which they have destroyed, and new factories built on the foundations of those they have burned, they see the impotence of their actions. In England a new movement begins. They try to re-enact the Elizabethan statute of laborers, to bring back the days of handicrafts, of journeyman and apprentice. They soon learned that the old era had vanished, never to return. The workingman possessed neither the power nor the ingenuity to bring it back. He turned, next, to possess himself of the machinery of the state.

Political conditions paved the way. France, after her orgy, had fallen back into absolutism. Germany and Austria had remained feudal in the most distasteful sense of the word; the nobility retained their ancient privileges and forsook their ancient duties. The landlord class even retained jurisdiction over their tenants. The old industry had been destroyed by Napoleon's campaigns; the new machine industry did not establish itself until after the enactment of protective tariffs and the creation "Zollverein," in 1818. This cemented the bourgeois interests. Manufacturers, traders, and bankers achieved a homogeneity of interest and ambition which was antagonistic to the spirit of the junker and the feudalist. The new bourgeoisie wanted laws favorable to trade expansion. They needed the law-making machinery to achieve this. By 1840 the upper middle class had become feverish for political power. They imbibed the doctrines of the literature of that period which preached a constitutional republicanism. Hegel gave the weighty sanction of philosophy to the overthrow of absolute monarchy.

The great mass of the people were, of course, workingmen, small traders, and shopkeepers, and the rural peasantry. The small trader was dependent upon the favors of the ruling class on the one hand, and of the banker and manufacturer on the other hand. When the interests of these two clashed he was alarmed, for he could neither remain neutral nor take sides. The peasants were abject subjects, little better than serfs. The laboring men, as we shall see presently, were achieving a mass consciousness.

In Germany Frederick William, the Romantic, was face to face with revolution. This was not an economic revolution. It was a political revolution. It was joined by the communists and the Socialists. Marx himself, was a leader in the revolt, and one of its most faithful chroniclers. In 1844 the weavers of Silesia rose in revolt. There was rioting and bloodshed. This was followed by bread riots in various parts of Germany. In 1848 the whole country was in the turmoil of revolution, a revolution led by the upper middle class, but prompted and fired by the zeal of the proletarians, who, in some of the cities, notably Berlin, became the leading factor in the uprising. Marx says: "There was then no separate Republican party in Germany. People were either constitutional monarchists or more or less clearly defined Socialists or communists."[1]

In Austria conditions were even more reactionary than in Germany. Metternich, the powerful representative of the ancient order of things, had a haughty contempt for the demands of the constitutional party. With the hauteur of absolutism he not only retained political power in the feudal class, but suppressed literature, censored learning, and rigorously superintended religion. A greater power than caste and tradition was slowly eating its way into this country, which had attempted to isolate itself from the rest of the world. This was the power of machine industry. It brought with it, as in every other country, a new class, the manufacturers, who, as soon as their business began to expand, sought favorable laws. This led them into political activity, which, in turn, brought friction with the feudalists. Both sides took to the field. The revolution broke in Vienna, March 13, 1848, seventeen days after the revolutionists had driven Louis Philippe out of Paris, and five days before the Prussian king delivered himself into the hands of a Berlin mob.

It was in France that the revolution assumed its most virulent character. In Paris the revolution was "carried on between the mass of the working people on the one hand and all the other classes of the Parisian population, supported by the army, on the other."[2] This Parisian proletarian uprising was the red signal of warning to Germany and Austria. The bourgeois were now as anxious to rid themselves of the Socialist contingent as they had been eager for its support when they began their struggle for political power. Compromises between feudalists and commercialists were effected, and a sort of constitutionalism became the basis of the reconstructed governments.

Of these revolutions Marx says: "In all cases the real fighting body of the insurgents, that body which first took up arms and gave battle to the troops, consisted of the working classes of the towns. A portion of the poorer country population, laborers and petty farmers, generally joined them after the outbreak of the conflict."[3]

They were not merely bourgeois uprisings. The Parisian revolution was virtually a proletarian rebellion. Here "the proletariat, because it dictated the Republic to the provisional government, and through the provisional government to the whole of France, stepped at once forth as an independent, self-contained party; and it at once arrayed the entire bourgeoisie of France against itself.... Marche, a workingman, dictated a decree wherein the newly formed provincial government pledged itself to secure the position of the workingman through work, to do away with bourgeois labor, etc. And as they seemed to forget this promise, a few days later 200,000 workingmen marched upon the Hôtel de Ville with the battle-cry, 'Organization of labor! Create a ministry of labor!' and after a prolonged debate the provisional government named a permanent special commission for the purpose of finding the means for bettering the conditions of the working classes."[4]

It is evident that Marx considered the revolutions of 1848-50 as a compound of proletarian and bourgeois uprisings against feudal remnants in government. He is not always clear in his own mind as to the direction of these movements. But we now know that the direction was toward democracy.

The French, or Parisian, uprising was more "advanced" than the other Continental attempts. The Parisians had piled barricades before; they were experienced in the bloody business.

They tried again in 1871. This time the workingmen ruled Paris for two months. It was a bloody, turbulent period. Marx characterized it as "the glorious workingman's revolution of the 18th of March," and the Commune "as a lever for uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule." Its acts of violence he extolled, its burning of public buildings was a "self-holocaust." This "workingman's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society."[5]

So the attempt to possess the state by revolution has been tried by the proletarian. The revolutions were all abortive. The Socialists say they were ill-timed. Writing in 1895, Frederick Engels, the companion of Marx, could see these uprisings in a different perspective. He acknowledged the mistake made by the Socialists in believing that they could by violence somehow become the deciding factor in the government, and therefore in the economic arrangement of society. "History has shown us our error," he says. "Time has made it clear that the status of economic development on the Continent was far from ripe for the setting aside of the capitalistic régime."[6]

These revolutions were not merely bourgeois, as is so often affirmed. There was everywhere a large element of Socialistic unrest. They were revolutions begun in the fever heat of youth—"Young Germany," "Young Austria," "Young Italy," were moved by "Young Hegelians" and "Young Communists." They embraced bourgeois tradesmen and proletarian workingmen, who, in their new-found delirium, thought that with "the overthrow of the reactionary governments, the kingdom of heaven would be realized on earth."[7] "They had no idea," continues Kautsky, who speaks on these questions with authority, "that the overthrow of these governments would not be the end, but the beginning of revolutions; that the newly won bourgeois freedom would be the battleground for the great class war between proletarian and bourgeois; that liberty did not bring social freedom, but social warfare."

This is to-day the orthodox Socialist view. It believes that these revolutions taught the proletarians the folly of ill-timed violence; revealed to them their friends and their enemies; and, above all, gave them a class consciousness.

Let us turn, for a moment, to a proletarian movement of a somewhat different type, the Chartist movement in England. The flame of revolution that enveloped Europe crossed the Channel to England and Ireland. But here revolution took a different course. In Ireland it was the brilliant O'Connell's agitation against the Act of Union; in England it was the workingman's protest against his exclusion from the Reform Act of 1832, an act that itself had been born amidst the throes of mob violence and incipient revolution.

The Chartist movement was promulgated by the "Workingmen's Association." It was a workingman's protest. Its organizers were carpenters, its orators were tailors and blacksmiths and weavers, surprising themselves and their audiences with their new-found eloquence, and its writers were cotton spinners. The Reform Bill had been a bitter disappointment to them. It gave the right of suffrage to the middle class, but withheld it from the working class. A few radical members of Parliament met with representatives of the workingmen and drafted a bill. O'Connell, as he handed the measure to the secretary of the association, said: "There is your charter"—and the "People's Charter" it was called. Its "six points" were: Manhood suffrage, annual Parliaments, election by ballot, abolition of property qualifications for election of members to Parliament, payment of members of Parliament, and equitably devised electoral districts. These are all political demands, all democratic. But economic conditions pressed them to the foreground. The "Bread Tax" was as much an issue as the ballot. They demanded the ballot so that they might remove the tax. "Misery and discontent were its strongest inspirations," says McCarthy.[8]

Carlyle saw the inwardness of the movement. "All along for the last five and twenty years it was curious to note how the internal discontent of England struggled to find vent for itself through any orifice; the poor patient, all sick from center to surface, complains now of this member, now of that: corn laws, currency laws, free trade, protection, want of free trade: the poor patient, tossing from side to side seeking a sound side to lie on, finds none."

One of its own crude and forceful orators said on Kersall Moor to 200,000 turbulent workingmen of Manchester: "Chartism, my friends, is no mere political movement, where the main point is your getting the ballot. Chartism is a knife and fork question. The charter means a good house, good food and drink, prosperity, and short working hours."[9]

The protest of this discontent became the nearest approach to a revolution England had encountered since Charles I. Monster meetings, for the first time called "mass meetings," were held in every county, and evenings, after working hours, enormous parades were organized, each participant carrying a torch, hence they were called "torchlight parades." These two spectacular features were soon adopted by American campaigners. A wild and desperate feeling seized the masses. "You see yonder factory with its towering chimney," cried one of its orators. "Every brick in that factory is cemented with the blood of women and children." And again: "If the rights of the poor are trampled under foot, then down with the throne, down with aristocracy, down with the bishops, down with the clergy, burn the churches, down with all rank, all title, and all dignity."[10]

In their great petition to Parliament, signed by several million people, the agitators said: "The Reform Act has effected a transfer of power from one domineering faction to another and left the people as helpless as before." "We demand universal suffrage. The suffrage, to be exempt from the corruption of the wealthy and the violence of the powerful, must be secret." The whole movement had all the aspects of a modern, violent general strike. Its papers, The Poor Man's Guardian, The Destructive, and others, were full of tirades against wealth and privilege. When the agitation became an uprising in Wales, there was a conflict between the Chartists and the police in which a number were killed and wounded. In the industrial centers, soldiers were present at the meetings, and the outcry against the use of the military was the same that is heard to-day. A number of the leaders were tried for sedition, and the courts became the objects of abuse as they are to-day. It was a labor war for political privilege; a class war for economic advantages.

SUMMARY OF THE PERIOD OF REVOLUTION

These revolutions were political in that they were a protest against existing governmental forms. The revolutionary proletarian was found in all of them. He not only stood under the standard of Daniel Manin in Venice, when that patriot again proclaimed a republic in the ancient city, and shared with Mazzini his triumph in Rome, and fought with Kossuth for the liberty of Hungary; but he formed also the body of the revolutionary forces in Germany, Austria, and France.

In all the Continental countries the uprisings were directed against the arrogance and oppression of monarchism, and against the recrudescence of feudalistic ideals. In France Louis Philippe had attempted the part of a petty despot. He restricted the ballot to the propertied class, balanced his power on too narrow a base, and it became top-heavy.

While the workingmen of Germany and Austria were taking up arms under command of the middle class against the feudal remnants, the workingmen of France were sacking their capital because of an attempted revival of monarchic privilege, and the workmen of England were marching and counter-marching in monster torchlight parades in protest against middle-class domination.

The panorama of Europe in these years of turmoil and blood thus exhibits every degree of revolt against governmental power, from the absolutism of Prussian Junkerdom and the oppression of the Hungarians by foreign tyranny, to the dominance of the aristocratic and middle-class alliance in Great Britain.

The bread-and-butter question was not wanting in any of these political uprisings. The unity of life makes their separation a myth. One is interwoven with the other. The social struggle is political, the political struggle is social.

Socialism is not merely an economic movement. It seeks to-day, and always has sought, the power of the state. The government is the only available instrument for effecting the change—the revolution—the Socialists preach, the transfer of productive enterprise from private to public ownership. "Political power our means, social happiness our end," was a Chartist motto. That is the duality of Socialism to-day.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Marx, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in 1848.

[2] Marx, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, p. 70.

[3] Op. cit., pp. 123-124.

[4] Marx, Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich, pp. 26-28.

[5] See the third address issued by the International Workingmen's Association on the Franco-Prussian war, 1870-71.

The Italian Socialists in Milan, June, 1871, closed a rhetorical address to the Parisian Communards as follows: "To despotism they responded, We are free.

"To the cannon and chassepots of the leagued reactionists they offered their bared breasts.

"They fell, but fell like heroes.

"To-day the reaction calls them bandits, places them under the ban of the human race.

"Shall we permit it? No!

"Workingmen! At the time when our brothers in Paris are vanquished, hunted like fallow deer, are falling by hundreds under the blows of their murderers, let us say to them: Come to us, we are here; our houses are open to you. We will protect you, until the day of revenge, a day not far distant.

"Workingmen! the principles of the Commune of Paris are ours: we accept the responsibility of its acts. Long live the Social Republic!"

See Ed. Villetard, History of the International, p. 342. This sentiment was also expressed in London and other centers.

[6] Introduction to Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich, p. 8.

[7] Kautsky, Leben Friedrich Engels, p. 14, Berlin, 1895.

[8] The Epoch of Reform, p. 190.

[9] Engels, Condition of the Working Classes in 1844, p. 230. Engels, who came to England at this time and was employed in Manchester in his father's business, and was therefore in the heart of the movement, says that Chartism was, after the Anti-Corn Law League had been formed, "purely a workingman's cause." It was "the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie." "The demands hitherto made by him (the laborer), the ten-hours' bill, protection of the worker against the capitalist, good wages, a guaranteed position, repeal of the new poor law—all of these things belong to Chartism quite as essentially as the 'Six Points.'"—Supra cit., pp. 229, 234, 235.

[10] R.G. Grummage, History of the Chartist Movement, 1837-54, p. 59, Newcastle, 1894.

CHAPTER IV

THE POLITICAL AWAKENING OF SOCIALISM—THE INTERNATIONAL[ToC]

With 1848 vanished, more or less rapidly, the revolutions of the old school. "The street fight and barricade, which up to 1848 was decisive, now grew antiquated," says Engels.[1] A new species of plotting and propaganda began. The exiled agitators and revolutionists met, naturally, in their cities of refuge for the discussion of their common grievances. They complained that "the proletarian has no fatherland," and internationalism became their patriotism.

In Paris a few of the ostracized Socialists, in 1836, founded "The League of the Just," a communistic secret society.[2] The group were compelled to leave Paris because they were implicated in a riot, and when some of them met in London they invited other refugees to join them. Among them was Marx, and his presence soon bore fruit. Their motto, "All men are brethren," was singularly paradoxical when contrasted with their methods of sinister conspiracy. Marx, with his superior intellect, at once began to reshape their ideas, a reorganization was effected called "The Communist League," and Marx and Engels were delegated to write a statement of principles for the League. That statement, written in 1847, they called "The Communist Manifesto."

The "Manifesto" is the most influential of all Socialist documents. It is at once a firebrand and a formulary. Its formulæ are the well-known Marxian principles; its energy is the youthful vigor and zeal of ardent revolutionists. Nearly all the generalizations of Capital are found in the "Manifesto." This is important, for it gave the sanction of a social theory to the Socialist movement. Hitherto there had been only utopian generalizations and keen denunciations of the existing order. It was of the greatest importance that early in the development of the movement it was given an economic theory expressed in such lucid terms, with the gusto of youth, and in the terminology of science, that it remains to-day the best synopsis of Marx's "Scientific Socialism."

As a piece of campaign literature it is unexcelled. Combined with its clearness of statement, its economic reasoning, its terrific arraignment of modern industrial society, there is a lofty zeal and power that placed it in the front rank of propagandist literature.

Engels, the surviving partner of the Marxian movement, wrote in the preface of the edition of 1888:

"The 'Manifesto' being our joint production, I consider myself bound to say that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to Marx." That proposition embraced the materialistic theory of social evolution, that "the whole history of mankind has been a history of class struggles ... in which nowadays a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed classes—the proletariat—cannot attain their emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling classes—the bourgeoisie—without at the same time and once for all emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions, and class struggles."

This liberation was, of course, to be accomplished by revolution. The "Manifesto" closes with these spirited and oft-quoted words:

"The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be obtained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling class tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains, they have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite."

This was the language and the spirit of the times. The "Manifesto" was published only a few days before the February revolution of 1848. For a moment the ruling class did tremble; but the ill-timed uprisings were promptly suppressed and the days of reaction set in.

Soon the workingmen of different countries were busy with the stupendous development of industry which followed in the wake of the wars and revolutions that had harassed the Continent for over fifty years. The revival of industry brought a renewal of international trade. This was followed by a wider exchange of views and greater international intimacy. In 1862 the first International Exposition was held.

Before we proceed with the development of the "Old International," as it is now called, let us notice three points about the "Manifesto." First, it was not called the "Socialist Manifesto," although adopted by Socialists the world over. Engels, in his preface of 1888, tells us why. "When it was written we could not have called it a Socialist Manifesto. By Socialist, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand, the adherents of the various Utopian systems; Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances; in both cases men outside the working-class movement, and looking rather to the 'educated' classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of a total social change, that portion then called itself communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of communism; still it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working class to produce the utopian communism in France of Cabet, and in Germany of Weitling. This Socialism was, in 1847, a middle-class movement; communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, 'respectable'; communism was the very opposite."

It would be interesting to know how Engels would define Socialism to-day.

Second, it is important for us to know that the "Manifesto" recognized the necessity of using the government as the instrument for achieving the new society. "The immediate aim of the communists," it recites, "is the conquest of political power by the proletariat"; to "labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries."

The governmental organization of the communists' state was to be democratic.

Thirdly, a provisional program of such a politico-socio-democratic party is suggested in the "Manifesto." Its principal points are:

"1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

"2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

"3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

"4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

"5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

"6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

"7. Extension of factories and the instruments of production owned by the state: the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally, in accordance with a common plan.

"8. Equal liability of all labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

"9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition between town and country, by a more equable distribution of population over the country.

"10. Free education for all children in public schools, combination of education with industrial production," etc.

Though the "Manifesto" was written in 1848, neither Marx, who lived until 1882, nor Engels, who died in 1895, made any alteration in it, on the ground that it had become "a historical document which we have no longer any right to alter."[3]

"However much the state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in this manifesto are, on the whole, as correct to-day as ever."[4]